(5 of 5)
The mass movements of Kikuyu have naturally worsened a confusion that was already chronic. One official orders a thousand Kukes to be at a railroad siding at dawn for shipment in trucks to the reserves; but another official delivers only sufficient trucks for 300 people. The farmers who have been told to deliver the Kukes at the railroad siding are then left to dispose of the 700 overflow as best they can. Nobody so far has seriously faced up to the position that will soon exist, when there are more Kikuyu in the reserves than the reserves can possibly feed; one district commissioner openly prophesies famine in his area this year.
Flame Trees & Fear
Kenya looks beautiful this week. The Nandi flame trees are ablaze with crimson against the clear blue sky, and in the sky glisten the snowy crests of Mount Kenya and Kilimanjaro. The giraffes gracefully nod their tall necks on the plains. Even the Aberdares, if you do not know what they shelter, could be called beautifully peaceful.
But it is really a land of murder and muddle. And there is little likelihood that either murder or muddle will halt soon. The sullen masses of evicted blacks in the overrun reserves; the white farmers and their wives besieged in their farmhouses with revolvers next to the dinner plates; the bearded commandos stumbling through forests after the elusive Mau Mau; the brittle Mayfair-in-suburbia life of spuriously gay Nairobi ; the purple-faced ex-colonels in the very, very particular Rift Valley Club— none of them seeming to know what to do. Not even the Mau Mau themselves seem to know what they really want—except to kill and disembowel as many whites, chiefs, head men, and non-Mau Mau Kikuyu as possible.
Nobody can guess how long it may drag on, how far Mau Mauism may spread, how infectious its example might prove to be. What thoughts pass through the minds of Samburu, Turkana, Wakamba or Masai tribesmen as they watch the white man harried by the hitherto despised and pacific Kikuyu? What thoughts down in Central Africa, where the British plan a political federation opposed by the natives, or in Uganda or the Belgian Congo? In South Africa, the Negro-hating Boers use the Mau Mau's terror to win support for even more brutal suppression of the nonwhites. Kenya, the Land of the Shining Mountain, has become a smoldering ember in Africa. And the surrounding brush vast, white-run, black-populated, miles of it, is tinder-dry.