THE OFF-WHITE HIGHLANDS
Sta,—Mr. T. R. M. Creighton began his article en- titled 'The Off-White Highlands' with the allegation that 'right-wing Europeans of Group Captain Briggs's United Party (and this means most of the farmers) condemn it utterly [the Kenya Government's Ses- sional Paper on the White Highlands).' Does he not know that the chairman of the United Party, Mr. A. T. Culwick, has publicly declared that 'a great many of us are perfectly prepared to see the principle of Africans farming in the Highlands'?
Spectator readers ought not to be misled on points of essential fact—or by such tendentious innuendoes as Mr. Creighton's reference to 'Kenyatta's supposed but not very definite complicity in Mau Mau.' It was because of his very definite complicity in Mau Mau that Kenyatta was sentenced to imprisonment, and it was for that reason that the court recommended that, when the sentence had been served, the Gover- nor should consider restricting his future movements.
Your correspondent is perfectly entitled to criticise proposals or actions with which he disagrees, but not, I submit, to misrepresent the plain facts.
Perhaps I should add that I have for years argued that the criterion for ownership and occupation of land in the White Highlands ought to be changed from that of race to that of good husbandry. Several years ago the removal of racial barriers was strongly recommended by the Royal Commission on Land and Population in East Africa, but the settler politi- cians who agreed with that point of view unfor- tunately lacked the courage and persistence by which they might have won the support of the majority of the White farming community. Many of the Euro- pean landowners arc liberal-minded, forward-looking men, and some have expressed their willingness to
set an example by leasing land to Africans as soon as that becomes legally possible. Anyone with real knowledge of Kenya should he aware of these matters; yet Mr. Creighton implies that no European may be willing to sell or rent land in the Highlands to a non-European.
Another point which should be made clear to your readers is that the White Paper would have been introduced months ago if the African elected mem- bers of the Legislature had not then been engaged in boycotting that body. That compelled the Govern- ment to delay, for the African extremists would otherwise have claimed that the proposals were the fruit of their obduracy. To anyone who may feel that the Government should have acted years earlier, I would recall that it was then dealing with the Mau Mau (Kikuyu) rebellion, which started in 1952 and is still not officially ended.--Yotirs faithfully, F. S. JOEI.SON Editor, East Africa and Rhodesia .66 Great Russell Street, WC I
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