A Deal With Kenyatta

From John Biggs-Davison, M.P.
SIR.,-You need a strong stomach in politics. Yet I was sickened by what Fr. Paul Crane, S.J., had to say on East and Central Africa,
Jomo Kenyatta he compares with Archbishop Makarios. One of the simplifications, of anticolonialist and anti-Western propaganda, is to.encircle with a collective halo all leaders of revolt against European rule. Archbishop Makarios is a Christian prelate; Jomo Kenyatta is not just the convicted leader of an insurrectionary movement which cost more than 30,000 African, arid many European. lives and about 160 million which might have gone to peaceful construction. He inspired a near-Satanic cult, whose unnatural cruelty and depravity aimed at the destruction of the human personality and the killing of the soul.
The Mau-Mau rites are too obscene and bestial to be given in full to the British public. The Governor of Kenya, Sir Patrick Renison, described Kenyatta as "the leadei to darkness and death". No, he is not an African Makarios or Mahatma Gandhi. The black mass is not on the same plane as the office of the Orthodox Church.
Kenyatta was convicted of managing Mau Mau. The magistrate's sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court of Kenya, the Eastern African Court of Appeal and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
When the Kenya Government allowed Kenyatta to hold a press conference, the general opinion of the journalists was that his outlook was unchanged. He is believed to think still of Kikuyu supremacy and the rule of superstitious terror, But whatever Kenyatta's state of mind, whether, when, how Kenyatta should be released, is properly for decision by those who must bear responsibility for keeping the Queen's peace. Law and order is a serious matter for those who have survived the Mau Mau rising.
But this is no reason to whitewash the black arts. Mr. Macleod is to blame for confusing the public on Mau Mau when he allowed himself to reverse his own decision not to allow Mhiyu Koinange to attend the Constitutional Conference at Lancaster House. The Kenya Government rates Koinanga as second only to Kenyatta "Appeasement" of this kind is only the start.
But Fr. Crane, speaks not just of Kenyatia's release but of . his "release and admission to office". Some would make Kenyatta President of Kenya without the option of her people remaining, like Nigeria, under the Crown.
Kenya's martyrs and loyalists have not deserved that. But that's not enough for Fr. Crane. He would offer him the Presidency of the East African Federation. We should work for such a Federation, but it should not be smeared with the filth of Mau Mau nor should Kenyatta's name be coupled with that of Julius Nyerere, It was the African Christians whose heroism did more than anything to crush Mau-Mau. We owe them something.
1 doubt if Mr. Nycrere wants to relieve Sir Roy Welensky's Federation of the economic burden of Nyasaland under Fr. Crane's sweeping revision of East and Central African frontiers, Fortunately for Africa, the constancy of Sir Roy and other supporters of non-racialism backed up by Lord Salisbury's influential movement of Peers and M.P.s, has elicited a reasonable decision on Northern Rhodesia. It is now likely that supporters of non-racial partnership will carry Northern Rhodesia and that Southern Rhodesia, freed from the fear of Africanist control of both Northern Territories, will not opt out of the Federation, We have averted the break-up of a Federation which in a few years has won impressive economic aims and ended many colour bars. We must do everything possible for its .success. The alternative is the final division of Southern Africa into states of black, and white, supremacy, Apartheid will then have triumphed on a continental scale,
FR. CRANE COMMENTS:
Pope Pius XI's concordat in the thirties with Hitler's Government should not he taken to imply papal approval of Nazi policy and practice. No more did this country's alliance during the war with Soviet Russia signify any condonation of the horrors attendant on di forced collectivization of tha Ukraine.
would have thought it rather obvious that my suggestions, in a recent interview. with regard to the future of Jomo Kenyatta should be placed in the same category as the above.
Mr. Biggs-Da vison's hopes with regard to the Central Federation would appear to have received a rather early setback if we are to judge by Mr. Kaunda's immediate reactions to the recently published constitutional arrangements for Northern Rhodesia. I would think that Mr. Kaunda's reactions are significant. In his country the African population outnumbers the White in the proportion of thirty to one.