The Off-White Highlands
By T. R. M. CREIGHTON TEiE angry reactions to the Kenya Government's I Sessional Paper on the White Highlands are ironical in view of how little the proposals really entail. Many individual members of Mr. Blun- dell's middle-of-the-road New Kenya Group are bitterly opposed to the idea of allowing non- Europeans to farm there, although the Group officially supports it. Right-wing Europeans of Group Captain Briggs's United Party (and this means most of the farmers) condemn it utterly. The relatively conformist Africans who follow Mr. Arap_Moi and the outspoken radicals behind Mr. Tom Mboya are united for the first time in months in agreeing that it will not help Africans at all, and is not worth having—that its actual effect will be to close the benefits of the Highlands to them in perpetuity. A government with the courage and vision to lay hands on the Whiteness of the White Highlands has alienated the majority of Europeans; but the gloves it wears are so thick that its manipulations are ineffective and do not satisfy Africans.
The White Highlands are sixteen thousand square miles (ten million acres) of the most fertile land in Kenya—a compact self-contained triangle to the north-west of Nairobi. They hold 4,000 European farms whose average size is over 2,000 acres. Population density is forty to the square mile (all_ races), in contrast to the Kikuyu Reserve to the east, or the Jaluo westwards, where it is between 300 and 450, and where the average size of an African holding is an acre or two. By custom which, since the beginning of the century, has acquired the force of unbreakable law, land in the Highlands has been reserved exclusively for Europeans. The result is that 24 per cent, of the arable land of Kenya is occupied by less than 1 per cent. of the population, and that all European.
All that the Government is now proposing is to allow Asians or Africans to occupy land in the Highlands provided they have the capital, experi- ence and ability to farm according to the lavish standards prevailing there; and to neutralise the European-dominated Highlands Board by estab- lishing advisory boards about the occupation of land which express Asian and African as well as European opinion. There is no question of open- ing up the Highlands to African peasant farming; and if the proposals become law, it is extremely doubtful whether even a handful of non-White farmers will be established in the White High- lands ten years from now. Few Africans have access to the necessary capital, or have had the Opportunity to learn about this type of farming; and Asians have little inclination towards the standard pattern of mixed farming—though a few might take up tea or coffee estates.
The proposals envisage no land reform, no change in land tenure. They simply say that an African or Asian whose husbandry and means pass the stringent scrutiny of the land boards may occupy a farm in the White Highlands if someone will sell or let him one. Nothing compels any European to do so; and if none will, he is unlikely to get in. (There is some unallocated Crown land held by the Government, but no longer very much,) All that is asked of white Kenya farmers is that they should conceive of the possibility of having a black or brown neighbour on the next farm instead of a white one. Unfortunately the Whiteness of the White Highlands has acquired so much of the irrational fetishistic significance of a security symbol to an insecure minority (they are outnumbered by 140 to 1) that this has been hysterically described by European leaders as 'a complete betrayal of the European community,' as 'forced integration of the races,' and 'anti-White discrimination'; and there have been calls for a general election, an appeal to the Privy Council and the resignation of the Minister concerned.
What is necessary in Kenya is a radical scheme of land reapportionment in the Highlands which will contract the large-scale farming industry from its present wasteful extensiveness into the reasonable limits of modern intensive agriculture. The occupants should be the best farmers, regard- less of race. If they were making the maximum contribution to the economy, and proved all to be European, I should raise no objection and I don't believe Mr. Mboya would either. But the millions of acres that would be released should be devoted to African peasant farming, to reliev- ing overcrowding in the reserves and absorbing the numerous unemployed or land-hungry Afri- cans. Land consolidation alone can never solve this problem; only more land will do so.
What is needed is thousands more African holdings of four or five acres. The African small- holder in the reserves is acknowledged to be pro- ducing the best coffee crops in Kenya today, pro rata more profitably than the big European farmer. He is the man who needs advancement from the collapse of the Whiteness of the White Highlands and access to other types of farming. If the Government is prepared to affront the Euro- peans as much as it has already, can it not go a little farther and really help the Africans? At present it has the worst of both worlds.
It emerges from last week's alleged 'rioting' in Nairobi looking faintly ridiculous. This was a very good-humoured affair on the African side, much closer to Trafalgar Square than to the Lan i mas- sacre; and the Government's precautions—a magistrate reading the Riot Act from an electrified armoured vehicle and steel-helmeted police in baton charges—seem alarmist and exaggerated. The Times correspondent reported that shoppers walked the streets unperturbed while the 'riot' was in progress and the police ultimately arrested a few Africans merely for alleged obstruction.
What happened was that 4,000 Africans, well organised and controlled, proceeded to the Legis- lature to dernand the release of Jomo Kenyatta- the wisdom and justice of whose continued arbitrary detention after he has served his sentence are deeply questionable. But it would be the grossest error to see this, because of Kenyatta's supposed but not very definite complicity in Mau Mau, as approbation of Mau Mau or as heralding a resurgence of secret and sinister violence. The enormous majority of Africans, including Kikuyu, detest the thought of it, having suffered much more under it than Europeans. Many do regard Kenyatta as a national hero and, rightly or wrongly, believe that his only part in Mau Mau was to try and control its excesses.
Mr. Tom Mboya's object in staging this demon- stration was less concerned with Kenyatta than with using the occasion to tell a new Colonial Secretary and a new Governor that Kenya Afri- cans have now developed peaceful, controlled, sophisticated but resolute means of pressing their unanswerable case for constitutional advance. The forces behind Mau Mau were not behind it; those of awakened political consciousness and good sense were. The only thing that could resur- rect Mau Mau and the evil barbarity that went with it would be for the Government to meet the • situation with jumpy repressiveness and to refuse t.) meet the African claim for advancement with responsive understanding.
Re ember, reMembci Ilic Ih if Novellther. .
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