KENYA: Panga War

• Share

Sir Evelyn Baring, Governor of Kenya, pulled on his medal-hung tunic with the silver & gold epaulettes, buckled on his ivory-handled sword, and patted his plumed cocked hat into place. Then he climbed into his big black Humber and drove into Nairobi to open, in the name of the Queen, the 56-man Legislative Council (42 Europeans, 6 Africans, 6 Indians, 2 Arabs) that serves as Kenya's parliament.

On the front of the governor's car waved his official flag: two crossed pangas (broad-bladed African knives used to chop bananas). The pangas seemed symbolic last week, for Kenya Colony, the brightest jewel in Britain's East African Empire, is bleeding badly in a panga war.

Striking from the great morose forests of the Aberdare Range, Mau Mau terrorists last week hacked an elderly Briton to pieces as he sat in his evening tub. A quick chop of the pangas and all his fingers were gone. In the port of Mombasa, supposedly awed by the guns of a British cruiser, a British marine was stabbed.

British counteraction was swift and drastic. Thousands of Kikuyu tribesmen fled in terror to the mountains as troop carriers and armored cars rumbled through the native reserves kicking up clouds of red dust. Kenya cops tracked down "suspects" with bloodhounds, arrested thousands of Kikuyu who got in the way. The government started closing down the native schools operated by Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta, the uncrowned king of the Kikuyu, whom the

British exiled (TIME, Nov. 3) because they suspect that he is 1) a Communist, 2) the brains behind the Mau Mau.

Arriving in Kenya last week to make a big-game movie, U.S. Cinemactor Clark Gable boldly announced that he wasn't going to worry about Mau Mau terrorism. But Kenya's 30,000 whites, who have been around a little longer, are frankly worried. They are slowly beginning to realize that the Kenya of the movies, of pink gins and polo and unchallenged white supremacy, is gone for good.

From Nairobi last week, TIME Correspondent Alexander Campbell cabled:

KENYA'S white farmers, many of them impoverished aristocrats and others ex-Indian army colonels and majors, live in lonely gimcrack farmsteads dotted about the exclusive White Highlands.They drink expensive wines and dine off good china, yet few have telephones; farmhouses are miles apart and roads are dreadful. The whites employ half a million Negroes, and could not do without them. The whites insist they don't have a color bar, only a culture bar: a civilized man of any color is welcome. To most of Kenya's 100,000 Indians and 5,500,000 Negroes, the effect is about the same.

Now, suddenly, the whites are compelled to patrol their farms by night and carry guns whenever they step outside. Fear is wearing them down. "We never get any sleep," said a monocled German who fled to Kenya from the Nazis. "I hoped to settle here after a stormy life, but now I think the white man's number is up."