Roots of Outrage. John Davis Gordon
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gun the police had given me.’
‘Wow!’ Jill whispered.
‘Anyway,’ Sheila ended, ‘after that we finished the fence and watchtowers quick-smart. And bought new dogs. The Mau Mau mutilated all our other dogs. Stuck them on spikes. Alive. Now we’ve got four new ones – Dobermans. Trained. Accept food from nobody but me. Only let out at night. And,’ she added, ‘now we’ve got the Masai guards. We’re pretty safe. But the swines still come down out of the forests to maim our cattle.’
‘And how’s Fred now?’ Mr Mahoney said.
Sheila smiled wearily. She took a sip of wine and her glass trembled. ‘Tough as nails, my Fred. I haven’t seen him for three weeks. He’s up in Aberdere Forests – in freezing mist, ten thousand feet above sea level. On patrol, looking for Mau Mau hideouts. Comes back after weeks, wild and woolly and reeking and exhausted, gets roaring drunk, then off he goes to join another patrol.’
Jill demanded: ‘What does he do when he finds Mau Mau hideouts in the forest?’
Sheila looked at George Mahoney. He said: ‘This is her Africa.’
Sheila sighed. ‘To cut a long story short, they spend days, weeks, tracking down their hideouts. Then they ambush. And kill them.’
‘How? Machine guns and hand grenades and all that?’
‘Yes.’ Sheila turned to George. ‘And? Do you think the same could happen in South Africa?’
‘Guaranteed,’ George sighed. ‘This government will drive the blacks to bloody revolution. And be ruthless in trying to stamp it out. So it’s going to be a much worse bloodbath than Kenya. But that’ll be some time coming, the government has got an iron grip at the moment.’ He added: ‘The tragedy is that the bloody excesses of the Mau Mau create the impression that the South African government is right. The man on the street looks at Kenya and says, hell, the blacks are savages, so the South Africans are right.’
Sheila said: ‘And who’ll start it? This African National Congress? What do you make of them?’
George nodded pensively. ‘I like them,’ he said. ‘They’ve been around a long time, since 1912 you know, ever since the British gave them a raw deal at the end of the Boer War. They’re reasonable people. Indeed, they even supported the Smuts and Hertzog governments for a while, because they thought the Natives Land Act may give them a fair deal. Then they seemed to give up. Then apartheid seemed to revitalise them. Now they’ve issued their Freedom Charter, but they’re nonviolent. For the moment – this government will probably drive them to violence soon. But right now they’re the very opposite of the Mau Mau. The people to worry about are the PAC, the Pan-Africanist Congress, under Robert Sobukwe, who split away from the ANC over the multi-racialism of the Freedom Charter – they’re the people who want. “Africa for the Africans”. The only problem with the ANC is they’re clearly socialists. The “commanding heights of industry” must be nationalised, they say. That would be disastrous. And that, unfortunately, is the influence of the communists in their ranks. The South African Communist Party has been banned since 1950 and gone underground, and it’s no secret their policy is to ride to power on the back of the ANC. And their orders come direct from Moscow. So the ANC is in danger of becoming a communist organization unless their leadership is careful.’
‘And, how good is that leadership?’
‘Pretty good,’ George nodded. ‘I like this guy Nelson Mandela – he’s head of the ANC Youth League, a potentially powerful branch of the movement. He’s very intelligent, and he’s a lawyer. My firm has had some dealings with his firm in Johannesburg. Sensible chap, he’s a Xhosa, comes from this neck of the woods –’ he waved a finger over his shoulder – ‘I believe he’s of “royal blood” in that he’s heir to the chieftancy of the clan. And he’s recently married a very nice lass from these parts who’s a fully qualified social worker. The leadership impresses me as reasonable, totally unlike the sort of people you’re dealing with in the Mau Mau.’ He added: ‘Nelson Mandela’s law partner is the acting president of the ANC, a chap called Oliver Tambo, also a Xhosa. Or a Pondo, they’re the sort of poor country cousins of the Xhosa –’
Mrs Mahoney said to Sheila, ‘The Pondos are the ones who wear the blue blankets, whereas the Xhosa wear the red blankets –’
‘Except, of course,’ George Mahoney smiled, ‘neither Mandela nor Tambo wear blankets now, they wear pin-striped suits!’
Everybody laughed; then Mrs Mahoney said to Sheila: ‘And is the Mau Mau crisis affecting Harker-Mahoney?’
Sheila sighed. ‘Terrible labour shortage. The Kikuyu who haven’t taken the oath have fled back to the reserves in terror. HM Shipping is still going strong. And most of the stores, because Kenya is swarming with the British Army and Air Force now, fighting the Mau Mau. But our coffee plantations are virtually at a standstill. No labour.’
‘And how’s business in West Africa?’ George said.
‘Well, I’m not au fait with HM’s offices in Ghana and Nigeria. But Fred says things are looking shaky there too, with independence.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Kwame Nkrumah, the Great Redeemer.’
‘Why?’ Mrs Mahoney groaned. ‘Why is the British government hell-bent on giving these people independence, willy-nilly?’
Sheila said: ‘The Tories have lost their nerve … the government’s full of pinkoes.’
‘They must know they’re not ready to govern themselves yet.’
‘I wonder if they do know,’ Sheila said. ‘They meet a few smart ones, like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, and think the whole of Africa is composed of charming black Englishmen. They don’t realize that the rest have only recently dropped out of the trees. Independence will be the biggest failure since the Groundnut Scheme.’
Luke glanced at his father and the old man gave him a conspiratorial wink. ‘What’s the Groundnut Scheme?’ Jill demanded.
Sheila began to speak but George Mahoney said, ‘Luke, explain to your sister.’
‘Well,’ Luke said, ‘after the war there was a food shortage. So the British government started a massive project planting peanuts, because they’re very nourishing, and it was called the Groundnut Scheme. They sent out all the seeds and fertilizer and tractors and stuff and hired thousands of blacks. But they made a terrible botch of it because nobody knew about peanuts, and in places they even ploughed cement into the soil instead of fertilizer because they couldn’t read. But the biggest problem was that they couldn’t persuade the blacks to stay on the job because they didn’t understand what money was. They didn’t understand that their wages could buy things, because there were no shops out there in the bush. So the whole scheme collapsed. Cost millions of pounds.’
Jill said, ‘Is that why that book about the Mau Mau is called Something of Value? Things in the shops?’
George Mahoney smiled. ‘Luke? You’ve read the book.’
Luke said: ‘What the book says is that if you take away a man’s tribal customs, his values, you must expect trouble unless you give him something of value in return. Your values. But if he cannot accept your values, because he is uneducated, then he is lost. Neither one thing nor the other. And that causes trouble. And that is what is happening in Africa.’ He looked at his father for confirmation.
‘Right,’ George said to his daughter. ‘The white man came along and said to the blacks: “You must not worship your gods, you must worship my God.” Then, “Now that you worship my God you cannot have more than one wife.” And, “Now that you worship my God you must stop selling your daughters into marriage.” And, “Now that you worship my God you must stop fighting, you must turn the other cheek, you must stop carrying your spears and shields, even though these are symbols of your manhood.” And, “Now that you worship my God you must be industrious, you must stop making your wives do all the work, and