The Africans (31 page)

Given all he has had to endure from the beginning of slavery to the end of colonialism, the African displays a racial tolerance that is nothing short of amazing. He holds no apparent grudge against the
European as an individual, and it is rare indeed for any white person to experience even the slightest indignity because of his color. There are virtually no urban areas in Africa that are off-limits to whites as are, say, parts of Harlem in New York or Roxbury in Boston. There are no hostile stares, surly responses or epithets like “whitey” or “honky.” In the Ivory Coast, the white population is five times greater than it was at independence in 1960. In Kenya, 5,000 former British citizens have taken out Kenyan citizenship. In Mozambique and Angola, white citizens of those countries hold high-ranking positions in government. The African has forgiven, if not forgotten. He fought and negotiated for his independence for no greater reason than to end the pain of prejudice. Having won, he proved himself far more magnanimous than his colonial masters had ever been. He may have harbored animosities toward the Asians, but if you were white, it was your personality, not your pigmentation, that counted.

Kenya provides an illuminating illustration of the changing relationship between black and white in Africa. For it was in Kenya during the 1953–1956 Mau Mau “emergency” that Africa first took its independence struggle to the battlefield. It was in Kenya that an old man named Jomo Kenyatta emerged from the colonial prisons to preach a message of racial harmony to those whites who would “turn and become Africans in your hearts.” And it is in Kenya, particularly in the highlands north of Nairobi where the war was fought, that Africans, both black and white, have set down their guns, buried the past and now farm side by side. They have reached an accommodation with one another that is based on neither love nor hate. Rather, its foundation is the simple recognition that times have changed. But no matter how deep their roots in the land, the whites can never again be anything more than guests.

The highlands are a two hours’ drive from Nairobi. Just outside the capital, the four-lane road headed north thins to two lanes; the city horizon, dominated by the Hilton Hotel and the Kenyatta Conference Center, fades in one’s rear-view mirror and the world again belongs to rural Africa. The red earth turns brown, and the plains start to roll and dip like a rough sea. The road climbs higher and crosses the equator. Trailer trucks hauling Kenyan beer and rickety buses packed with passengers and loaded down with bicycles, produce and mattresses careen around blind corners and down steep hills at a frightening clip. The streams, alive with trout, tumble off snow-capped Mount Kenya, and the dark pine forests hide large
herds of elephant and occasionally the rare, moose-sized antelope, the bongo. Harvested coffee beans dry by the tonload on acre after acre of elevated screen frames. Little farming plots are carved into and up the slopes of every hill. Roadside vendors hawk sheepskins and straw baskets to tourists dashing by in safari mini-vans painted in zebra stripes. It is a beautiful land, reminiscent of New Hampshire. The air has a bite of mountain chill, and everything feels clean and fresh and gentle.

The Europeans did not penetrate the Kenyan highlands until the 1890s. It was the home of the Masai, the graceful nomadic warriors, and their battles with the Kikuyus and other intruders were sufficient to discourage the entry of slave traders, missionaries or settlers. But as the railway from Mombasa on the coast pushed through Nairobi and west toward Uganda, the isolation was broken. The Masai were driven south and the Europeans soon became masters of the highlands (and of the Africans who remained), farming land that had not been cultivated before and enduring hardships that belied the image of colonialists living in splendor.

In those days, the valleys and ridges reaching to the foothills of Mount Kenya were known as the “white highlands.” They were a white preserve in a black land. Today the region is called merely “the highlands” and fewer than a hundred white settler families remain. The white-owned farms are being bought by African cooperatives and subdivided into five- and six-acre plots for subsistence farming. As far as the eye can see, the once empty glades are bursting with little mud homes whose tin roofs glisten like mirrors in the noontime sun. Near the village of Mwega there is a fork in the road, and if you bear to the left, you leave the pavement behind and bounce over a dirt track for a mile or two until you pass through a wooden gate. On a grassy knoll just beyond the gate is the Aberdare Country Club. There are two men there—one black, one white—who symbolize all that has happened to Kenya.

One of the most fearful of the Mau Mau commanders, a man who helped change the balance of power in the highlands, was Frederick Ndirangu. He was a general at the age of twenty-nine and for nearly four years he lived in the Aberdare Forest with his men, burrowing into the earth by day to protect himself from British bombing raids and leading attacks by night against white homesteads and African villages whose people had refused to support the Mau Mau.

Ndirangu, a big man with graying hair and a viselike handshake,
works at the Aberdare Country Club, a one-time settler home that is now an inn catering mostly to tourists and white expatriates living in Kenya. The fight, he says, was worth fighting. He has land today, and two of his sons are electricians in Nairobi. His other seven children are all in school. He says “sir” to no one. Once the vanquished, he is at last the victor.

“We have a tradition in our Kikuyu culture,” Ndirangu said as a waiter served us tea on the club’s lawn. “If you quarrel, you can never be friends until you fight. But once you fight, all the hatred is finished.

“Before the Mau Mau, there were no good Europeans. They abused us and they never gave us a chance to advance our intelligence. Today things are different. This is our country now, not theirs, and the relationship is pretty good. I remember the past, but I do not carry it with me.”

Sam Weller was a young British army captain when the Mau Mau terrorist attacks began, and he and his men spent many months in the Aberdare Forest trying to track down and capture or kill General Ndirangu. “I had the old boy in my sights a couple of times,” chuckled Weller, who manages the Aberdare Country Club and employs Ndirangu as his driver. “But he always managed to slip away … Really, though, unless a visitor like yourself brings it up, you don’t hear anyone, black or white, talk about the Mau Mau anymore up here. It was so long ago.

“Why has it been forgotten? Well, partly I think, because the African isn’t capable of the depth of emotion that the European has. He doesn’t love his women or hate his enemies with the same intensity. You look at a good solid white hatred and it can last for generations. Africans don’t hate that way.”

After the war Weller became a farmer, then a professional hunter and guide, and when convinced that the European, of his generation at least, did have a future in Africa, a Kenyan citizen. He lives alone in a comfortable one-bedroom bungalow, up the hill from the country club. He offered me a brandy. Logs crackled in his fireplace, and his two Labrador retrievers, Mark and Rebecca, stretched out at his feet. The living room was full of fishing tackle and there were books everywhere, on African butterflies, African flowers, African animals, African history.

In the corner an ancient shortwave radio, as big as a dishwasher, was tuned in to 1542 kilohertz, a custom followed in almost every expatriate’s house at this hour, for the eight o’clock news: “This is
London, BBC World Service … The British governor is leaving London for Rhodesia …”

Weller raised his eyebrows, shrugged and said nothing. Another white bastion had crumbled. It was clear that white-run Rhodesia was about to become black-run Zimbabwe. The vestiges of white privilege had slipped away almost everywhere, and as Weller knew, places like the Kenyan highlands were now an anachronism on a continent obsessed with outdistancing the past.

The early settlers who preceded Weller to Kenya were not gentlemen farmers. They were hard men, independent, self-sufficient, an African version of the early American settlers who trekked West and took the Indians’ land. They traveled in wagons pulled by oxen, made soap from rhinoceros fat and often went weeks at a time without seeing another European. Their attitude toward the African was at best paternal, at worst brutish, and right up to the dawn of independence, they apparently never gave the slightest thought to the possibility that one day someone else might farm their land.

For those willing to work, the highlands were indeed an adventurous attraction. Just before World War I a poster circulated in England advertising for new settlers and listing these enticements: passage from England cost $80 and wages for farm helpers in Kenya were $14 a month “until the customs of the country have been learned.”

“The soil is fertile,” the poster announced, “the pasturage rich, the water abundant. Ostrich feathers sent to Port Elizabeth realize remarkable prices, locally cured bacon sells readily and is highly remunerative … The healthiness of the highlands as a home for white men, women and children has been proved beyond all doubt.”

It was said in those days that the British army officers who wanted to settle in Africa came to Kenya and the enlisted men went to Rhodesia. One of the bluebloods who staked his claim in Kenya was Sam Weller’s father, an accomplished artist, poet and violinist. He arrived in 1925, after a career as a builder of railways in India, to establish a vocational training school for Africans.

In his book,
Kenya Without Prejudice
, Henry Owen Weller wrote in 1931:

One morning, twenty-two years after that book was published, a white farmer in the highlands awoke to find two hundred of his cattle mutilated, their eyes gouged out, their legs severed. A few weeks later, twenty-one Kikuyus loyal to the colonial government were massacred. It was March 26, 1953, and the Mau Mau uprising had begun.

“We knew the forests—that was our great advantage,” General Ndirangu recalled. “But the European was a better soldier. If an African soldier got a hold of you, he would kill you. A white soldier would arrest you and take you to court to be tried. There was more justice under the Europeans.”

The Mau Mau were almost exclusively Kikuyu, the dominant Kenyan tribe. They took secret ritual oaths of loyalty, operated in small guerrilla bands throughout the highlands, and were not content to merely kill their victims. The whites surrounded their homesteads with flares and booby traps, started carrying side arms and drew their drapes each evening at dusk. They sealed off the second-floor living quarters with iron barriers, still used and known in Kenya today as Mau Mau gates, and dismissed their Kikuyu servants because suddenly no one knew who the enemy was. “If you made it through soup, you figured you were safe for another day,” one settler remarked, referring to the Mau Mau’s habit of attacking at dinnertime.

More than 20,000 Kikuyus were placed in detention camps, where the British tried to “re-educate” them politically. But the Mau Mau raids continued, more often directed against uncooperative
Africans than white farmers, and by the time the British managed to subdue the Kikuyu in 1956, the death toll stood at 11,500 Mau Mau guerrillas and African civilians, 2,000 African troops fighting for the British, 58 members of the British security forces and 37 British settlers. It was, though, too late for military victories. The war hardened the attitude of some whites. “This is our country,” they would say. “Without us, there’d be only savages here.” But any sensible man, European or African, knew that a new reality was at hand. The day of white supremacy was ending and the possibility of sharing power had passed. The 43,000 whites in Kenya were outnumbered 190 to 1: the voice of the majority was growing louder.

In Nairobi three European-led political groups emerged: the Federal Independence Party, which wanted to partition the country between blacks and whites; the Coalition, which advocated the protection of European rights; and the multiracial New Kenya Group, headed by the colonial minister of agriculture, Michael Blundell, which supported a transfer of power to a democratically elected African government. Blundell estimates his party had the support of only 30 percent of the expatriates when the Lancaster Conference opened in England in 1960 to decide the future of the Kenyan colony.

Blundell returned to Nairobi from one of the Lancaster negotiating sessions to find an angry crowd of whites waiting for him at the airport. They pelted him with rotten eggs and ripe epithets. Security officers hurried him through the terminal. Near his car a man rushed forward and tossed a small brown package at him. Blundell started to dive, thinking it was a bomb. The parcel burst open at his feet and out rolled thirty silver coins.

“Traitor,” shouted the white man, “you sold us out!”

“I was spat upon and ostracized,” said Blundell, who is now Sir Michael, in his seventies, and a Kenyan citizen. “For two or three years, my wife and I couldn’t even go into our club. It was really rather unpleasant.

“Some people have never forgiven me. But, you know, it’s a funny thing—most of the people who hated what I stood for the most will now admit, especially over a drink or two, that I was right, that there is a place in Africa for the European who has African interests at heart.”