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For all their studied nonchalance, white Kenyans love their land—for its rolling green pastures, fat with cattle, for its deep forests and smoke-blue mountains, garlanded with the tea and coffee plantations that earn the colony's living. On the whole, they treat their blacks better than most white settlers in Africa. The tragedy of the whites is their failure to understand that the black Kikuyu tribesmen, who tend their crops, wash their dishes, nurse their babies and dig their graves when they die, are also equally fanatic land-lovers. The whites blandly reason: "If we're kind to the Kukes [short for Kikuyus], what more can they want? They've only been down from the trees for 50 years ..." One helpful farmer lined up his Kukes and told them to speak to me freely. The farmer is a good bwana, they said, but that isn't the point. The land was always ours; now we are hired laborers who can never earn enough to buy a farm. We are caught in a trap.
The worst trap of all is the crowded Kikuyu reserve, north of Nairobi. Scores of thousands of Kukes live there; and in the fertile areas, population density reaches 600 per sq. mi. Every scrap of arable land is terraced to the hilltops, yet only one Kuke family in ten has enough land to feed itself. The white holdings vary from a few acres (for poultry) to several square miles (for cattle ranching).
Military action may or may not stamp out Mau Mau terror; only reform can get at the deep roots of black unrest. Big and bluff British Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton toured the colony last week to see what can be done. From the Kenya African Union (KAU), the only political body in Kenya that claims to represent Africans, he got a list of Kikuyu demands: 1) more land; 2) higher wages and better education; 3) votes for all Negroes who pass literacy and property tests. KAU also sought the release of its leader Jomo Kenyatta.
In London, the Tory government has set up a royal commission to investigate the Kenya trouble by early 1953. A major difficulty will be the white Kenyans, who now fear to concede anything lest they lose everything.