A new season has come to Kenya Crown Colony, bringing all its beauties and a change in the weather. But the climate has not changed—the climate of hatred and fear, of murder and vengeance. Cabled TIME Correspondent Alexander Campbell:
IN Nairobi's New Stanley Hotel, where His Excellency the Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, occasionally dines to the accompaniment of a brassy military band, a London correspondent growled: "If I opened my shirt and showed you my breastbone, you would see it was black and blue from settlers making their points." The settlers have been remarkably successful in estranging their journalistic kith & kin from Britain, and others besides. They lie in wait for them, pounce and start jabbing their forefingers into them before they have had time to sign a hotel register. The points the settlers want to drive home, in loud and often hysterical voices, are mainly three: 1) the Kukes (their name for the big Kikuyu tribe which has spawned the Mau Mau terror fraternity) have only been "50 years down from the trees"; 2) the outside world loves the Kukes and hates the white settlers; 3) most visiting newspapermen are "bloody Bolshies."
Nairobi, the colony's capital, has not really been touched much by the war the white settlers are waging against the Mau Mau terror. You can still walk through the main thoroughfares after midnight alone. Nairobi remains comparatively safe, like a near frontier U.S. town of the 1880s, with Gary Cooper for U.S. marshal. But up-country is another part of the world.
Up in the Aberdares
You drive through the thickly populated Kikuyu reserve, where shaven-headed Kikuyu women stagger under headloads that would shatter the spines of pack mules, and the closely clustered thatched mud huts look like shaggy beehives. Then you come to the edge of the escarpment, and the Rift Valley lies below you like a giant frying pan. Over to the right, the Aberdare range begins to loom, blue and smoky, and that's where the Mau Mau gangs lurk, and strike from. There are no east-west roads across the Aberdares. You have to go round them. And that's where the sprawling white farms are scattered, round the Aberdares and between the Aberdare range and Mount Kenya. When the Mau Mau gangs took to the thick, tangled forests and chilly upper misted slopes, they put the white farmers on a vast perimeter—and on the defensive. The Mau Mau gangs strike and vanish, and the white & black soldiers and police and farmers-on-commando go blundering after them. A commando leader said: "We were doing a little maneuver with some Lancashire Fusiliers. The Fusiliers passed us a tree trunk's breadth away. There were 20 of us, and they never saw us. If we had been Mau Mau!" He made a crude gesture with a calloused hand across his throat.
Thomson's Falls has gone completely Wild West. In the bar of Barry's Hotel, men in checked shirts sat on high stools with gun butts sticking out of black leather holsters. Bearded commando riders shouldered their way in with Sten guns slung on their backs. The flames of a big log fire (it gets cold up here at night) flickered on reckless, sun-wrinkled faces. A pretty woman threw open her white fur coat; round her slim waist was a leather cartridge belt and a bolstered Smith & Wesson.