KENYA: White Man Hangs

Precisely at 8 o’clock one night last week, the slight, heavily shackled form of 28-year-old English Engineer Peter Poole dropped through the hangman’s trap door in Nairobi Prison. For the first time in Kenya’s history, a white man was executed for killing an African.

Condemned to die eight months ago for shooting his African houseboy (who had stoned Poole’s dogs), Poole became a near martyr in the eyes of many white Kenyans who recalled his services against the Mau Mau, and worried over what would happen to his aging parents and his two young children. In Nairobi, Poole’s parents circulated petitions for clemency, addressed to British Governor Sir Patrick Renison, and collected more than 25,000 signatures, including many from Africans and Asians. Even African Nationalist Tom Mboya, though he would not sign himself, agreed not to influence his fellow Africans against signing. In London, Laborite M.P. Fenner Brockway appealed to Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod to reprieve Poole on the grounds that his execution would damage already tense relations between whites and blacks in Kenya.

But neither Macleod nor Renison could find any legal grounds for intervening. Last week, as a warder solemnly posted announcement of the execution on the gate of Nairobi Prison, an African in the keyed-up crowd gathered outside cried: “Justice has been done; Macleod is with us!” Turning away in cold anger, a white settler muttered: “Now you’ve had your pound of flesh.” Commented the London Spector:”It is a savage irony that future generations in Kenya will be able to point to 1960 as the year when the equality of the races was finally demonstrated, not by the granting of rights to Africans to farm on the White Highlands, or to become members of white clubs, but by the proposition that all men, regardless of color, are equal on the end of a rope.”