The Africans (32 page)

As the Lancaster Conference progressed, the exodus of whites
from Kenya increased. Most of the Afrikaners who had come north from South Africa after the Boer War and thousands of British settlers hurried off to Rhodesia, South Africa and Australia. There they became known as the “Whenwe Tribe,” because there was much talk of the good old days and every sentence seemed to begin with “When we were in Kenya …”

The British government agreed at the conference to provide the new Kenyan government—independence was scheduled for December 1963—with $100 million in loans and grants to buy out European farmers whose three million acres in the highlands had been reserved exclusively for whites. Payment would be in pounds sterling, not Kenyan shillings. To encourage the continued presence of whites—and thus ensure a smooth transition and much-needed expertise in agriculture and government—Britain privately said that it would, if requested, restore the British citizenship of those who became Kenyans. There were no special guarantees for the whites in the new constitution, and elections were to be conducted on a one-man, one-vote basis.

On the evening of August 12, 1963, four months before independence, several hundred European farmers and their wives packed the Nakuru town hall, a few miles from the Aberdare Country Club, to hear what they thought would surely be their marching orders. Nakuru has just one wide street, with a row of shops and general stores on each side. By the time the meeting started, a funeral-like stillness had fallen over the town; everyone, it seemed, was either in the wooden hall or gathered around it, straining to hear what was going on inside.

Jomo Kenyatta, the spiritual leader of the Mau Maus whom the British had imprisoned at hard labor for seven years, walked to the stage. He was seventy years old and he leaned on his walking stick. He talked quietly, his voice slowly gathering strength.

“We want you to stay and to farm well in this country,” he told the settlers. “This is the policy of this government … What the government needs is experience, and I don’t care where it comes from. I will take it with both hands.

“Continue to farm your land well, and you will get all the encouragement and protection of the government. The only thing we will not tolerate is wasted land.

“Kenya is large enough, and its potential is great. We can all work together harmoniously to make this country great, and to show
other countries in the world that different racial groups can live and work together.”

The whites stirred uneasily, looking at one another to make sure they heard the old man correctly. Then they stood and cheered.

Most of the whites have left the highlands since then, reluctantly but more or less voluntarily. The pressure for land is great in over-populated Kenya and the huge white-owned ranches are being bought by the cooperatives, the land is being fenced and the whites have moved closer to Nairobi or Mombasa or gone back home to England. The hundred or so white settler families who remain—representing one of the largest white farming communities in black Africa—speak little today of their future, hoping only that they, if not their children, will be able to stay on the land that was turned green and productive through the sweat of their forefathers. If they can’t, it will not be because the African subjected them to the same discrimination that they inflicted on the African. It will be because land is the most sacred possession in Africa—land rights was the original issue in the Mau Mau war—and if the government is to maintain the support of its people, every rural African must eventually have his plot.

I have always found it strange—not unsettling, just unusual—to land on a grassy runway in the highlands and be greeted by a cluster of barefooted, blond-haired white farm children who were as African in their understanding of life as the blackest child of Africa. It seemed a flashback to another era. But the highlands are full of scenes frozen in time, and in the autumn of 1979, 300 white Kenyans gathered at Charlie Stone-Wigg’s 45,000-acre Gianni Ranch for the marriage of his daughter to Frederick Brendan, son of another old-time settler family. The little town of Nyeri, a few miles from the Aberdare Country Club, had seen many such weddings in the past but would not see many more.

Two small-boy ushers, one wearing a kilt and both with clean, slicked-down blond hair, stood by the stack of wedding programs. The European soloist sang “The Holy City” and the European vicar called upon the congregation to ask for Jesus’ help in time of need. The new Mrs. Brendan wore a homemade white dress and a lace shawl and she blushed as she walked down the aisle with her husband. The bride and groom both were born in Kenya and, given their choice, they both one day would be buried in Kenya.

In the drizzle after the ceremony, the guests crowded onto the verandah
of the Stone-Wiggs’ home. This was the last of the settler community, second- and third-generation white African farmers, and everyone knew everyone else—the Nyeri crowd greeting the people from Naivasha and Nanyuki, the Kitale families joking with their friends from Nakuru and Gil Gil and Naro Moru. Their faces were tanned from the African sun and their hands were callused and their laughter could be heard a long way off.

An old Kikuyu woman wandered up the road. She was barefoot and stoop-shouldered beneath the load of firewood on her back and her tattered dress was hardly more than a rag. She stood on the lawn for a few minutes, unnoticed, a black face in a sea of white. Then, losing interest, she moved on toward her village several miles away.

Three months after the wedding the Stone-Wiggs left Gianni Ranch, which soon would be divided into as many as ten thousand subsistence plots. The red oat grass that Stone-Wigg had nurtured so skillfully for his merino sheep and boran cattle would disappear, and the region’s delicate ecological balance would be threatened.

The division of Kenya’s large export-producing ranches for pint-sized subsistence farms, each supporting fifteen or twenty people, is a worrisome omen for a land with no mineral wealth and the world’s highest birth rate. With the division comes a decline in agricultural production and a diminishing tax base for the government. (In 1975 Kenya was self-sufficient in wheat; in 1980 it had to import half of the 280,000 tons of grain needed to feed its people.) The government in Nairobi says that the subdividing must stop, that the white farmer must continue to produce if Kenya is to prosper.

But the pressure for land makes the destruction of the big farms inevitable. In the same way, the pressure for housing eventually will result in the destruction of the white-owned urban estates. And the pressure for jobs will lead to fewer and fewer white-held positions. Almost all white Kenyans now send their children to school in Europe, preparing them for a life very different from the one they have grown up with.

As one of the settler farmers told me, “I don’t want my kids to learn to love Africa too much.”

I
T’S
HARD
TO
BELIEVE
NOW
, but only a few years ago Luanda was known as the Rio de Janeiro of Africa. And Angola was a place of prosperity and abundance. Ask a Portuguese what life was like in that colony on the South Atlantic coast and he will smile, close his eyes and blow a kiss.

Angola, he’ll say, was a much better place to live than Lisbon. Savor it for just a day and you would know that Thomas Wolfe was only half right: it wasn’t that you
couldn’t
go home again; it was that you
didn’t want
to go home again. There were weekends on the beach, eating fresh lobster and prawns; chic shops stuffed with gourmet foods and the latest European fashions; luxury high-rise apartments overlooking the bay, summer homes at Lobito—an African version of Florida’s West Palm Beach; and, almost right up to the end, not the slightest hassle with the “natives.” And then there was Luanda.

Luanda, the capital, was built on hills that rose gently from the bay. The sidewalks were paved with mosaic tile, and the streets were wide and lined with trees. There were parks everywhere, neatly clipped and ablaze with flowers, and throughout the city there were 170 restaurants and night clubs, open from dusk to dawn. The skyline, stretching from the twenty-five-story President Hotel to the seventeenth-century Dutch fort a few miles away, was like nothing else in Africa. There was, in fact, no more striking urban view—and no more pleasing life style—on the entire continent.

One of the best things, as far as the Portuguese were concerned, was that you didn’t have to be rich or even literate to enjoy the fruits of this good life. You only had to be white. For with a resident population of 500,000 Portuguese, Angola was the “whitest” colony in all Africa. Like Portugal’s other African colonies—Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sāo Tomé and Príncipe—it was the exclusive domain of white men who thought they would stay forever. Even menial jobs such as driving a taxi, cutting hair, tending bar, were held by the Portuguese. About the only jobs available to the 7 million black Angolans were as servants, janitors or plantation workers. At independence in 1975, after five centuries of Portuguese domination, 98 percent of the Angolans were illiterate and scarcely more than a handful had any technical skills, much less a university education.

Independence coincided with the collapse of the Portuguese overseas empire, which left in its wake a cluster of revolutionary, and often Marxist, independent states stretching across Africa. The whites became fearful, expecting the Africans to turn on them with vengeance. And in a panic of settler hysteria, they fled to Europe or South Africa in the largest white migration Africa had ever known. They brought with them everything they could carry or ship. More than twenty thousand cars were put on vessels; hundreds of others were totaled in drunken games of “chicken” on the streets of Luanda so that none would be left for the Angolans. The fishing fleet sailed off to Lisbon or down to Walvis Bay in Namibia. Telephones were ripped from the walls, typewriters were packed, plantations abandoned, mansions shuttered. Doctors walked out of the hospitals and professors emptied their desks at the university. In the course of a single week, 95 percent of the employees of the Bank of Angola departed, leaving junior clerks and janitors to run it. By the time the exodus ended, Angola had been stripped bare: all that remained were 25,000 whites and the carcass of a nation. “I’m not proud of what we did, but we didn’t leave voluntarily, you know,” a Portuguese exporter told me.