Converts to the Mau Mau cause were forced to take an oath whose intention, however bestial, was to prevent betrayal and ensure the loyalty of those forced to join. The Kenyan Government discovered that 90 per cent of the Kikuyu had taken the oath, at least up to the third grade; higher grades of the oath moved into bestiality. The Government wrote a press release quoting the oathing ceremony: ‘place a piece of meat in the anus of an old woman, prick human eyes with a thorn, bite a human brain, drink menstrual blood, eat the brain of a dead European, drink the urine of a menstruating woman’. It went on: ‘place an erect penis into a living sheep’s vagina seven times (without ejaculating); take a dead goat’s penis and insert into a prostitute’s vagina (the prostitute will be lying down for the purpose) seven times; force a dog to insert its penis into a prostitute seven times after which the initiate licks the dog’s penis also.’ If a traitor was killed, his blood, liver and heart would be used in a future oathing ceremony. Not all ceremonies used ritual cannibalism, but it was known that some did.
The brutality made Greene sympathetic to the European settlers, although sometimes their treatment of black Kenyans was singularly crude. In his first Sunday Times article he quoted a view held in London that political leaders like Kenyatta or Kimathi should not be excluded from political power. But he recognised that from London ‘you could not see the group of burnt huts, the charred corpse of a woman, the body robbed of its entrails, the child cut in two halves across the waist, the officer found still living by the roadside with his lower jaw sliced off … a hand and foot severed … For here was the political power of Kimathi, the power of the panga [razor-edged choppers – something like a billhook].’11
Greene wrote the first Sunday Times article while staying at the ‘Mau-Mau-ridden Fort Hall Reserve’. He was fifteen miles from the scene of the Lari massacre, ‘where 150 wives and children of the Kikuyu Home Guard were hacked to death’. These were not whites but blacks employed by the Kenyan Government. The Times headline ran: ‘MAU MAU MASSACRE OF LOYAL KIKUYU 150 men, women and children dead.’
The Mau Mau waited until most of the men had left on duty as Home Guard and then at 9.30 in bright moonlight they made their attack: ‘One group fastened the doors of huts … another group, carrying torches, set fire to the grass roofs, and a third armed with pangas, swords, and hatchets, struck down men, women and children as they made desperate attempts to escape from the burning huts. All were terribly mutilated, and some … died in the flames … Vultures and storks wheeled all day over the scene of the massacre.’12
Greene went to the trial of those accused of the massacre. ‘Some argued’, he wrote, ‘that as the Mau Mau had declared war on their own tribesmen, their own tribesmen might be allowed to try them, and certainly it could be argued that it would be better for a wild African justice to prevail than for British justice to alter the strict requirements of evidence. There are occasions when Pilate’s gesture might well be imitated.’13
He also wrote: ‘It would be easier to draw Kimathi as a heroic figure if we could put out of our minds those bestial ceremonies with the living sheep and the dead goat and the naked woman, or the pictures of mutilated bodies, the white farmer lying hacked wide open in his bath, and the little Ruck boy cut to pieces on his bed beside the toy railway track. Heroes should behave like heroes.’14
The Ruck massacre had taken place six months previously: a father, mother and young boy had been quickly wiped out, betrayed to the Mau Mau by a trusted servant who only a few days earlier had carried the child tenderly back to his mother after he had fallen from his pony. It was this aspect that plagued the white settlers. Prior to the Mau Mau they had trusted their servants. Greene summed up their feelings:
When the revolt came, it was to the English colonist like a revolt of the domestic staff. The Kikuyu were not savage, they made good clerks and stewards. It was as though Jeeves had taken to the jungle. Even worse, Jeeves had been seen crawling through an arch to drink on his knees from a banana-trough of blood; Jeeves had transfixed a sheep’s eye with seven kie-apple thorns; Jeeves had had sexual connection with a goat: Jeeves had sworn, however unwillingly, to kill Bertie Wooster ‘or this oath will kill me and all my seed will die’.15
‘It was unreasonable to expect people to talk reasonably,’ because, said Greene, ‘there was too much bewilderment and too much fear.’
In part he was sympathetic to the settlers because he was sympathetic to one woman in particular whom he had met and liked immediately – Maria Newall. He had heard of her long before he met her. A courageous woman, she lived alone running a farm without European assistance on the edge of the Mau-Mau-ridden forest. Greene spent a few nights with her and, as his diary entries show, he was disturbed:
12 September 1953: Drove to Nakuru. Herd of about 60 giraffe. Met Maria Newall at club. Had lunch there & then drove to her house via that of a woman whose husband had committed suicide. Liked M.N. immediately. A civilised human being of great courage living alone on the edge of forest, running 500 acre farm without another European & without a guard … Slept badly, conscious that if attacked could do little to [save her] … M[aria] trousers & scarf looked very lovely. Must have been v. beautiful 15 years ago. During war ran her own ambulance unit. Torpedoed on way to Middle East.
Sunday 13 September 1953: Drove up to farm to inspect new Kikuyu labour. Didn’t like look of one old man & one young one who had slipped into party without knowledge of head man. Paper showed he had been bound over for membership of a proscribed society. Decided to take him over to police station where he could be taken … to collect his papers & be looked over … In the evening police reported they had let youth go. M[aria] rather upset. Told me story of her life over dreary supper. Divorce [Maria Newall was a strong Catholic]. Remarriage outside church. Husband swindled by Lord Carlyle. Suicide. Her love affair with Walter Monckton with whom after 12 years still in love. His semi-impotence. Pathological jealousy … Suddenly without warning departure with Biddy[?] Carlyle whom he married …
Greene spoke with deep regard of Mrs Newall, who he said was a legend in Kenya: ‘She was a standing reproach to frightened settlers dreaming of a safe retreat to England.’16 Greene learned to judge acquaintances he made in the Kikuyu area by their attitude towards her:
She offended the frightened, she offended also the hysterical (who clamoured for the internment of the whole Kikuyu tribe), and she offended the inefficient … Not only has Mrs Newall designed and built her own house with native labour – civilised house in a land where such houses are few … not only with the dreaded Kikuyu labour was she running alone her 2000 head of cattle and her pyrethrum, she was capable of arresting an oath-taker singlehanded and driving him at midnight to the nearest police post twenty miles away … Her life can be more easily imagined by an American with his historic memory of the early settlers than it can be by the average Englishman at home. Substitute for the Mau Mau the Red Indian, for the panga the tomahawk and the situation is not very different: sleep behind locked windows with a shotgun beside the bed …17
Greene remembered her sitting in the evening by her fire, among the books and pictures, in a room from which you could swear you heard the drone of London traffic, but outside only the forest and the mountains, a dog on the watch and the servants locked out, and in her lap a loaded revolver because this night may be the night.18 A letter she wrote to Greene gives some idea of her character and her spunky response to danger. The youth who was released by the police had taken on the task for the Mau Mau of killing Maria Newall: ‘That boy has been arrested again for not paying Tax. The oath administered [and his] task was to GET me & Edwin my head man.’ He then escaped and one of her Kikuyu came up to her and said: ‘He didn’t get you yet.’ She lost her headman and had to take on another, whom she felt afraid of. She related her conversation with him to Greene:
I have a kikuyu who rejoices in the name of Stephen – a christian of the … type 3 wives & 11 children, a bible under his arm over his treac
herous heart for I have just been told he is mau mau – as well as being a police informer – he was indeed rewarded with a shop site in Elburgar for his help & ‘loyalty’. I have however decided to keep him as it is far better than someone I think I can trust. I had to call him up & tell him if he put a foot wrong he was for 10 years H[ard] Labour. It was terrifying to see any human quail before an old woman – I added that if I found him breaking the curfew I should have no hesitation in shooting him – the interview then over I wouldn’t like to say who was the more shaken!!!19
*
Greene did not travel in a hired car as he had hoped, instead he was taken up-country by young officers. He was seeking trouble as always: going to the Fort Hall area; to Kapenguria where the mass trial over the Lari massacre was taking place; to Father McGill, whose mission had been attacked, and on into Mau Mau country – ‘Up to H[ome] G[uard] camp. Terrible road. Rain. Cold. Back to Kojima. Nearly plunged over ravine.’20 This brief entry was more of an aide-mémoire for the writer. Greene later expanded on the whole episode:
This young officer with whom I was travelling was in a landrover or jeep in the Aberdares, the mountains in Kenya. We turned corners very narrow, more paths than roads and just ahead of us with its back turned a rhinoceros. They go for a jeep like a ton of butter. He stopped quickly and whispered to me can you get up that bank and there was a bank about as high as this room, and I said no. And on the other side was a steep drop of a few hundred feet. So he said keep quiet and we waited. And the rhinoceros moved its head sideways a bit and then ambled on. And we gave it a good twenty minutes start before we went on again.21
In his diary he notes: ‘Tense moment when we came on rhino. Watching it move its head uneasily. Nervy drive back. More fear of Rhinos than Mau Mau.’22
Another who drove him into the Mau Mau area in Fort Hall was a young officer named Candler whom Greene liked very much: ‘Drank in police post. Eventually C[andler] turned up. Nervy night in his unprotected house with two former prisoners & two ex-Mau Mau bodyguards … Lunch with Candler. Attractive young wife.’23 On 24 March 1954 he wrote: ‘Poor Candler’s been killed by the Mau Mau … in a typically horrid way. He had a very sweet wife.’24
In interview Greene described his expedition with Candler in his hushed voice: he would bite off the ends of his sentences when disturbed. Candler had a bodyguard of ex-Mau Mau men and was going to disarm a Home Guard up at the top of a mountain. Why they should assist the Mau Mau was unclear, but perhaps they meant to flush the Mau Mau from their hideout, providing them with a clear way down the mountain to steal and thereby open them up to attacks by British soldiers. The young officer refused ever to sleep inside a police station so they spent the night in an empty house outside town:
the Mau-Mau (ex-Mau-Mau) kept guard all night and we talked. We’d had quite a lot to drink. He’d got a gun: I hadn’t. But I had no belief in his guard and I thought this time they’ll come in and get the opportunity to cut our throats. They didn’t. We went up and made a speech to the Homeguard and took away all their guns. And coming back it was very steep, wet road of clay and the car skidded and the front wheels began to go over, and there was about a thousand foot drop below. And it stopped. I didn’t say anything – he just had time to say, ‘We’ve had it.’25
Greene wrote about this incident to Catherine: ‘The D.O. said quite calmly, “Now we’ve had it”, and we mounted the bank and the front wheels went over a ravine.’ And as when Greene had recorded an earlier narrow escape in Vietnam (when his jeep was stopped before it went over a mine), so now he experienced a similar feeling: ‘It was the nearest I’ve ever come to my desire.’26
Candler was killed about six months later. Greene mentioned that Candler had been ambushed by the Mau Mau: ‘His bodyguard stood by him. One went off to get help and when help came his guards were dead and his head had been cut off.’ The pressure and anguish which Greene experienced are clear in his first article about Kenya, ‘Photo of trunk from which the head has been severed remains long in the memory’.27
The battle of the Mau Mau was not concluded when Greene left Kenya. His final remarks about the outcome were still relevant:
For good or ill the future of the Kikuyu seems to depend on Christianity – either they will be won by the Christianity of the priest in the execution pit or by the strange religion … where they are taught that there was a white God and a white Bible and every text had a secret meaning which the African was not expected to notice: ‘Eyes have you and see not’ – this meant, the teachers said, that you did not see what these white people and their white God intended for you and your children, and the black God lay in hiding like Mau Mau in the bamboo forest.28
Despite everything, Greene liked the Kikuyu: ‘A young Kikuyu guide yesterday asked me if I had a gun. I said no. He said, “You trust in the goodness of God.”’ And it was Father McGill at the Mission of the Annunciation whose mission had been burnt down (ten schools had been destroyed by the time Greene arrived in Kenya) who told him that the Mau Mau ‘die like angels’:
When so many hundred times you have had to descend into the pit below the gallows to give the last rites to the broken-necked carrion lying there, each body becomes the body of an individual. You are in a different world from the courtroom at Githenguri …29
It was the same priest who would spend the last night with condemned prisoners: ‘They ask unanswerable questions. They say to me: “Didn’t God make a land for each people to live in, black and white, and didn’t he put the sea between so that we shouldn’t interfere with each other?”’30
33
No Man Is Neutral
He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
– CHARLES PÉGUY
IN THE 1950S Greene seemed to have taken on the role of unofficial ombudsman – investigating complaints about what he saw as unjust official acts. He used his fame to protect the vulnerable and fight for the underdog. He had an incorrigible sympathy for the outcast.
But if you seek the role of a David, Goliaths will appear. Not only did Greene attack America, he attacked other countries and individuals as well. In France he attacked his own church and the highest prelate of the land. On 3 August 1954 the French novelist Colette died. The first French woman to be honoured with a state funeral, she was denied a religious funeral at the Eglise Saint-Roch. Cardinal Feltin, Archbishop of Paris, refused on the grounds that Colette had been twice divorced. Greene was among the mourners who came to pay their last respects: ‘On Saturday I had a seat in the Goncourt Tribune for the funeral of Colette: a big cenotaph covered with flags in the middle of the Palais Royale, a platoon and a band of the Garde Républicaine, ovations and outside in the streets masses of people and police.’ He was moved to write an open letter to the archbishop. Old poor women came up to him and complained ‘of the archbishop of Paris and his interdict’.1 His letter appeared on the front page of Le Figaro littéraire on 7 August 1954:
Those of us who loved Colette and her books gathered today to honour her in a ceremony that must have seemed strangely curtailed to Catholics present. We are used to pray for our dead. In our faith the dead are never abandoned. It is the right of every person baptised a Catholic to be accompanied to the tomb by a priest. This right cannot be lost … due to some crime or misdemeanour, because no human being is capable of judging another or of deciding where his faults begin or his merits end.2
Admitting that everyone knew the reason why the archbishop had refused Colette the presence of a priest, Greene asked why two civil marriages were so unforgivable, for as he pointed out ‘some of our saints provide worse examples’. Of course the difference was that the future saints repented, Colette had not: ‘But to repent means to rethink one’s life, and no one can say what passes through a mind trained in habits of lucidity when it is confronted with the imminent fact of death.’ Greene accused the archbishop of making his condemnation on insufficient evidence: ‘for you
were not with her then, nor were any of your ministers’. He charged that the impression had been given that the ‘Church pursues the fault beyond the grave’. Finally, Greene rounded on the archbishop: ‘Your Eminence, through such a strict interpretation of the rule, seems to deny the hope of that final intervention of grace upon which surely Your Eminence and each one of us will depend at the last hour.’
Many Catholics wrote to Greene objecting to his stance, though many did not. His friend Evelyn Waugh, so much more conservative in his approach to the Church, strenuously objected to it in a letter to Nancy Mitford: ‘Graham Greene’s letter was fatuous and impertinent. He was tipsy when he wrote it at luncheon with some frogs & left it to them to translate & despatch. He is dead to shame in these matters.’3 When Mark Amory, the editor of Waugh’s letters, approached Greene about this letter, Greene answered: ‘I was not tipsy with alcohol when I wrote the letter but tipsy with rage.’4
*
On 9 October 1954 French Foreign Legion buglers in Hanoi blew a sad refrain as the tricolour was lowered, and the defeated French slipped away. The French had lost Vietnam on the battlefield at Dien Bien Phu and they were given eighty days to pack up and leave. The following day 30,000 Vietminh soldiers came marching into the city to celebrate and 80,000 Vietnamese, mostly Catholics frightened by the godless communists, fled south. Buildings were suddenly covered with slogans to celebrate the arrival of the Vietminh. One popular slogan expressed the somewhat idle hope: ‘May President Ho Chi Minh Live a Thousand Years.’ He lived seventy-seven years and lies in a mausoleum in Hanoi – badly embalmed so that he looks more dead than the dead.
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 59