Kenya: Last-Chance Conference

In London's splendid Lancaster House,* where constitutional conferences compete with a baroque painting of Venus and the Graces, sat three graces from Africa, attired in tribal costumes of lion and monkey skins. Together with 62 other delegates from Kenya and ten British officials, the chiefs were attending what was already billed as "the last-chance" conference. Its aim: to prepare the way for Kenya's independence.

Of more than a dozen countries on three continents that have won independence from Britain since World War II, none has seemed so ill-prepared for nationhood as Kenya....

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