Savagery in Kenya
SIR,-While all civilised people must abhor crimes of murder and violence, we are bound to acknowledge that in Kenya, all such crimes are not the responsibility of Africans. Christians, and in particular Catholics must have felt a sense of shame when reading of European officers and police who have been found guiity of mutilating their helpless prisoners. In some cases of ordering their non-European subordinates to castrate their victims, beat them with rile-butts, cut off their cars, and in one case already reported in our Press an African boy-soldier of 16 was ordered by his white officer, having cut off the ear of one African "suspect" who had been brought in. to make a hole in the prisoner's ear with a bayonet, this was done by gripping the bayonet handle, twisting and turning the point round until a hole two inches long had been drilled in. His officer then gave the boy a piece of wire telling him to tie it on to the ear very strongly that it should not come out, The mutilated prisoner Was then led like an animal into the forest. His ear was bleeding profusely, there his fetters were removed, and he was ordered to run. As he did so, the African boy was ordered to shoot, and the man fell dead. This man, and thousands like him, had pot been found guilty of any crime, it is sufficient to be a "suspect." Already over 4,000 Africans have been killed by the military forces for the death of roughly 29 Europeans.
When Hitler carried out "collective
punishments" against the Jewish race, people of all nations, politicians of all parties, preachers of all denominations, voiced their indignant protests. Then, the immorality of punishing innocent people was universal's recognised. How many of those people are concerned today with what is happening in a country, whose people arc supposed to be under our protection? Yet when a European has been killed, and no information regarding the assassin has been forthcoming, the entire population in the neighbourhood, men, women and children have been rounded up, their cattle and bicycles confiscated, their huts burned down. they have been herded in the compound of the local jail (in one case in the shadow of the gallows) and then deported en masse to a distant part of the Kikuyu reserve, stripped of all their possessions, these Kikuyu serfs from European farms are thrust back in their thousands, landless, and destitute into crowded reserves. It is a frightening thought that we are responsible. not only for the massacre and destitution of thousands of innocent Africans, but for imperilling the souls of those young National
are se
Service boys who sent to Kenya
and may be called upon to commit some of these terrible acts.
Before a God who recognises no colour-bar, we shall all one day, be called to give an account of our stewardship.
Monica Whgtely 93 Makcpcace Mansions, N.6.