Africa

by Guy Arnold

  Given the bitterness that existed between the white settlers and the African nationalists over the Mau Mau years it was inevitable that Kenyatta should pay particular attention to the white minority as he took over the reins of power. A photograph, taken from the stage of the Nakuru Town Hall on 12 August 1963 when Kenyatta met and addressed the white settlers for the first time, showing the range of expressions on their faces is extraordinary: suspicion, through doubt, apprehension, bewilderment, disbelief, contempt, fear, reluctance and a tentative desire to accept. The meeting was a decisive moment in black-white coming to terms prior to independence.15 The East African Standard of 13 August reported under the headline ‘Farmers Join Premier in Harambee, Europeans asked to Forget Suspicions, Historic Speech Cheered.’ This was Kenyatta’s ‘forgive and forget the past’ speech.

  We want you to stay and farm in this country. We must also learn to forgive one another… There is no society of angels black brown or white, we are human beings and as such we are bound to make mistakes. If I have done a mistake to you it is for you to forgive me, if you have done a mistake to me it is for me to forgive you, the Africans cannot say the Europeans have done all the wrong and the Europeans cannot say the Africans have done all the wrong. We are all human beings and as such likely to do wrong. The good thing is to be able to forget and forgive one another. You have something to forget just as I have.

  (This theme, of forgiving and working together for the future of the country was employed 17 years later by Robert Mugabe on the eve of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.)

  Kenyatta kept his word to the whites whose contribution to the economy he knew was essential. ‘Kenyatta was no multi-racialist and his conciliatory mood was no sign of weakness. Like all Kikuyu he was essentially a realist, and he knew that for the present, and for some years to come, he could not run the economy without the European farmers and businessmen. Kenyatta’s authority over the country was unquestioned, but he had behind him men who were still bitter and for whom Kenya was a country for black Africans and for nobody else… Kenyatta was strong enough to trounce his own back-benchers in the National Assembly and tell them that he would keep his white officials as long as they were efficient and competent Africans were lacking; yet a time would come when pressure for complete Africanization in government, land and business would be too great even for Kenyatta to withstand.’16

  On the occasion of independence Kenyatta was generous in his remarks addressed to the British, perhaps taking his cue from Balewa’s speech at Nigeria’s independence in 1960. ‘We do not forget the assistance and guidance we have received through the years from people of British stock…’ Kenyatta the realist did not allow the occasion of independence, with the world’s attention briefly on his country, to pass without an appeal for outside help. Nation building, he said, needed the co-operation of outside investors: ‘To our overseas friends we offer a stable political environment and expanding market in Kenya and East Africa.’ He also said that Kenya would not really be free until all Africa was free. And in a warning to would-be troublemakers, showing his iron fist, he said: ‘The fact that the Imperialist Government is dead does not mean that the people can do as they please. There will still be police and there will still be prisons.’

  Despite insistence upon Kenya’s non-alignment, Kenyatta’s sympathies were with the West. They were to be tested sorely in November 1964 over the Congo crisis when Kenyatta was chairing the OAU Commission to find a peaceable resolution to the white hostages then held by rebels in Stanleyville (Kisangani). A joint US-Belgian military rescue operation was planned and mounted even as the US Ambassador to Kenya gave the impression that Washington supported the OAU peace initiative. William Attwood, the US Ambassador, subsequently wrote an autobiographical account of his time in Kenya17 and of this affair he arrogantly claims, ‘As I walked out [of seeing Kenyatta], Ambassador Lavrov [of the USSR] was waiting to come in: the campaign to confuse and capture Kenyatta was really in high gear.’ Attwood clearly missed the irony of his statement. When the full extent of American duplicity became apparent there was deep African anger. ‘That Mzee Kenyatta had been making every effort to save the hostages by peaceful negotiated methods when, behind his back, the Americans and the Belgians launched a different type of operation. It was evident that the Americans had appealed to Kenyatta to use his good offices only as a stalling tactic while they and the Belgians made other arrangements.’18 Attwood titled his book The Reds and the Blacks and as he says in the blurb, ‘As the title suggests, it is essentially about what I saw of Soviet and Chinese efforts to penetrate and subvert Africa, and what we and the Africans and others did to counter these efforts.’ Attwood, a Cold War warrior, is clearly incapable of impartial thought: the subversion of Africa had been a Western achievement and anything the Communists did was mild by comparison. When Attwood went to see Kenyatta after the US-Belgian intervention had taken place, he said, ‘I knew that he felt I had deceived him and that we’d pulled a Pearl Harbour on the OAU.’19

  The Cold War, in any case, affected both the internal as well as the external policies of Kenya. There was the affair of a convoy of lorries full of Chinese arms that passed from Tanzania through the south-west of Kenya en route for Uganda. The convoy was intercepted and seized by the Kenya authorities to cause a crisis between Kenya and its two neighbours, and only after Obote, accompanied by two ministers, had flown to Nairobi to apologize to Kenyatta did the affair subside. In June 1965, however, Kenyatta said: ‘It is naïve to think there is no danger of imperialism from the East.’ He said Kenya rejected Communism and went on: ‘It is natural that we should detest Western colonialism and associate the word imperialism with the West. But if we are truly non-aligned we must not avoid making friends with those Western countries who extend an honest field of co-operation and trade.’ Kenyatta in fact was always pro-Western.

  Oginga Odinga, the Luo nationalist whom Kenyatta had made his Vice- President, was considerably more radical than the President and, if not a Communist as his enemies insisted, was certainly inspired by Marxist theories. Growing distrust between the two men and various policy confrontations made a split more and more likely; in any case, Odinga had soon discovered that he had little real power. When the army mutinied in January 1964 Kenyatta personally telephoned Odinga and told him not to leave Nairobi for Kisumu because the British Army was blocking the road: this was a personal warning, an order for Odinga to stay at home. Communist arms were supposedly being smuggled into the country, and in April 1965 Kenyatta refused a shipload of Russian arms on the grounds of obsolescence. He then became increasingly concerned with the activities of the Lumumba Institute, created as an instrument of KANU, and Odinga’s name was linked with both Russian arms and the activities of the Institute, which Kenyatta closed. Then Kenyatta, under pressure from the British, replaced Odinga as the head of the Kenya delegation to the 1965 Commonwealth Conference in London. In the two years following independence Odinga found himself isolated within the structure of KANU. Their antagonism came to a head in 1966 when Kenyatta relieved Odinga of his portfolio of Home Affairs, which he gave to Daniel arap Moi, a former leader of KADU. (It was one of the ironies of one-party politics that former KADU members became the true Kenyatta loyalists.) Odinga resigned as Vice-President and left KANU, accompanied by Bildad Kaggia and Achieng Oneko, two of the more radical KANU leaders, while 28 members of the Assembly followed Odinga to create an opposition party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). Kenyatta suspended all the dissidents and called by-elections in their seats; this became known as the ‘little election’. When it became clear that they might lose their seats 21 of the dissidents returned to the KANU fold and only seven stayed with the KPU. The election took place on 2 June 1966 and resulted in an overwhelming victory for Kenyatta although Odinga kept his Central Nyanza seat with a big majority. After 20 months of an effective one-party system Kenya had returned to two-party politics. Kenyatta followed the ‘little election’ by introducing a Public Security
Act, which gave the government powers of detention without trial, censorship and control over aliens.

  ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS: TRADE UNIONS, LAND RESETTLEMENT AND ASIANS

  At the beginning of 1964 the problem of unemployment was acute and affected 10 per cent of the labour force. Following tripartite talks between government, business and labour, legislation was introduced to enable the government to employ an additional 15 per cent more personnel while private employers agreed to add a further 10 per cent to their labour forces. It was clear soon after independence that the government would clamp down on union activity and Kenyatta used Mboya as the instrument of this policy. Tom Mboya had come to prominence in the 1950s as a trade union leader: he was Secretary of the Local Government Workers’ Union and acted as Director of Information and Treasurer of the Kenya Africa Union (KAU) before it was banned when the Mau Mau emergency was declared. In September 1953 he had been elected General Secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL) and of this he later said: ‘The KFL became the voice of the African people, in the absence of any other African organisation to speak for them.’ This remained the case until the emergence of KANU just before independence. The strength that the KFL acquired through its political role led Mboya to make a bid for the complete independence of the unions and by the late 1950s it looked as though the unions were powerful enough to successfully dictate their own terms to the emerging political parties. At the same time, the KFL was the only truly national organization without evident traces of regional or tribal conflict. At the 1960 Annual Conference of the KFL Mboya said: ‘The trade union movement must have a right to pronounce on political matters and even to take appropriate action to assist during the struggle for independence… If the movement must be free and independent of government and employers, that movement must be capable of formulating its own policies on those problems that affect the workers either as employees or as a class that lives and occupies a certain position in the society and community in which it exists.’20

  Mboya’s blueprint for free and powerful trade unions, as he was quickly to discover, was anathema to KANU (and other African ruling parties) as it worked to gather all power to itself and saw the trade union movement as a rival and potentially dangerous centre of power. Kenyatta’s government was to brook no opposition from independent power factions and Mboya as a minister of his government was given the task of undermining the trade union movement that he had largely created. And just as Kenyatta cut the union movement down to size so too did Nyerere tackle the power of organized labour. Nyerere saw organized wage earners as a potentially privileged class whose members had to be persuaded to direct their energies towards raising productivity and the living standards of the whole people. This utopian approach to wage earners, whose wages in any case were hardly substantial, was unlikely to make much headway. Nonetheless, when in 1962 he addressed TANU on socialism, Nyerere compared diamond miners and their wages with peasant farmers producing food and suggested that part of the wealth from the mines should go to the community and not all be retained by the mineworkers. Although he conceded that it was the purpose of a trade union to ensure for its workers a fair share of the profits of their labour, a fair share, he argued, had to be fair in relation to the whole society. Nyerere, in a somewhat different way to Kenyatta, saw the unions as posing a possible threat to his socialist society – as well as to the one-party state. Historically, unions have been seen as the vanguard of socialist movements, yet as Africa discovered this was not necessarily the case. ‘Trade union leaders and their followers, as long as they are true socialists, will not need to be coerced by the government in to keeping their demands within the limits imposed by the needs of the society as a whole. Only if there are potential capitalists among them will the socialist government have to step in and prevent them putting their capitalist ideas into practice.’21 Such a reasoned judgement was more academic than real.

  Land remained a central political question after independence. At one stage in the colony’s history Europeans owned 25 per cent of all the arable land in private hands. In the period after independence about 1,500,000 acres were voluntarily sold at fair prices to Africans by the settlers and the process was carried out with little public debate. Kenyatta always paid special attention to land questions and in his speeches he repeatedly called for hard work on the land. In the period 1963–66 more than 170,000 Africans were settled on former European holdings, and the scale of this settlement alone gave some indication of the size of the European land stake in Kenya. At independence Britain had provided £27 million to buy out white farmers and settle Africans in the White Highlands and the programme was carried out with a minimum of either rancorous debate or publicity. Kenyatta, in one of those twists for which he was famous, appointed a former hard-line settler, Bruce Mackenzie, as Minister of Agriculture and Land and made him responsible for this land transfer.

  Conflict between aspiring Africans and the minority Asian community was bound to cause problems after independence. Only about 40 per cent of the Asians had either qualified for or taken out Kenya citizenship during the two-year grace period after independence. Unemployment, the demand for Africanization and feelings of resentment against the Asians, as well as the announcement of Britain’s intention to curb immigration, combined to produce the crisis of February 1968, when pressures against the Asians led to their mass migration to Britain.

  On 18 February Malcolm Macdonald (the last British Governor and first High Commissioner to Kenya after independence) went to Nairobi on a special mission to talk with Kenyatta, ostensibly to persuade him either to halt or at least to slow down measures against the Asians. Meanwhile a British Bill was prepared and rushed through Parliament, depriving Asian holders of British passports of any automatic right because of that fact to move to Britain. The official Kenyan view was that the Asians were ‘the responsibility of the British Government’. Kenyatta said: ‘Kenya’s identity as an African country is not going to be altered to the whims and malaises of groups of uncommitted individuals.’

  Kenyan politics during the first decade of independence were often turbulent while MPs, even if they toed the general party line, could be deeply critical as well. Kenyatta’s powerful position raised him above the need for party support; in consequence, he neglected KANU and some of its members resented this. In 1968 one member of parliament said Kenya MPs were ‘the most underprivileged, demoralized and ignorant in East Africa’, while Cabinet Ministers were ‘the richest, most arrogant and most miserable people’.22 The assassination on 5 July 1969 of Tom Mboya, by then the Minister of Economic Planning, at the age of 38, deprived Kenya of one of its most able political figures. The assassination set off a spate of rumours and a political crisis. Mahason Isaac Njenja Njoroge, a Kikuyu, was convicted of the killing but it was widely assumed that he was no more than an instrument of someone much higher. Anger among the Luo was met by a spate of Kikuyu oathing in support of the government and, for example, three British journalists were expelled for reporting the oathing, which was illegal. On 25 October riots broke out in Kisumu, the heart of Luo country, when Kenyatta visited the town. The disturbance gave him the excuse to have Odinga and his deputy in the KPU arrested along with six other opposition MPs and on 30 October the KPU was banned. In what had again become a de facto one-party state elections were held on 6 December 1969 in which 620 candidates contested 158 seats. The final results showed that even if only KANU candidates could stand that was no guarantee that the bad ones had seats for life: five ministers, 14 assistant ministers and 79 backbenchers lost their seats.

  As Kenya entered the 1970s Kenyatta’s supporters, outside the country as well as inside it, could argue that he had presided over some remarkable achievements. The whites had been mollified to become some of his staunchest supporters; the land question was well on the way to being solved; the economy was not doing too badly and Kenya had become one of the most favoured aid recipients in Africa, while it was also regarded by the West as a firm a
lly in the Cold War despite its pretence at non-alignment. On the other hand, radical Kenyans argued that Kenyatta had betrayed everything the independence struggle had been about. ‘After 1963, the losers were those who had fought for liberation, the winners those eager to “eat”. The African President assured the former colonial rulers that “the government of an independent Kenya will not be a gangster government”. A “gangster government” was presumably one which would repossess the stolen lands for the use of all the people and preside over the creation of a more egalitarian society.’23 The authors of this statement and others below published their views anonymously for they would undoubtedly have landed in prison had their names been known. As they went on to say: ‘As our politicians orbit endlessly around the President, they compete with each other to sing his praises loudly and attract his favour. Obsequious loyalty brings its own reward – a position closer to the warming power of the sun with all the economic privileges that go with membership of the inner circles. A loss of favour could put the politician out of orbit altogether, into limbo or extinction.’ This savage but accurate description went very near the bone and could be applied widely in the Africa of that time. These critics argued that elections were held from time to time so as to allow friendly foreign nations the opportunity to hold up Kenya as the showpiece of democracy in Africa. There is much more in the same vein: the corruption of politicians, the loss of autonomy of such bodies as the legislature or judiciary, a president who rules as a kind of sultan. At the same time the Western powers had soon realized that the President would not flirt with Communism but, rather, had created conditions for capitalist countries to have a free-for-all in Kenya so that Kenyatta was seen as a valuable ally against ‘foreign ideology’: ‘Anything which threatened imperialist control of our economy came into the category of “foreign ideology”… The Americans and British tutored Kenyatta and the young KANU government on “anti-Communist” tactics.’24 These strictures upon the Kenyatta government have to be taken in perspective; his critics were radical Marxists yet the picture they paint was a recognizable one and could be applied to other countries with their untouchable leaders surrounded by their obsequious courtiers.