Green City in the Sun (77 page)

     "Damn it, Grace! Listen to me! We have a desperately bad situation here! All the missions are being hit. You heard what happened to the Scottish mission last week."

     Grace pressed her mouth into a stubborn line. Yes, she had heard about it; it had made her sick, and she hadn't slept since. What the Mau Mau terrorists had done to those poor, innocent people! It was even worse than the Lari Massacre back in March. And this strike had taken place in broad daylight! Mau Mau were getting bolder, their tactics viler.

     The government, in Grace's opinion, had made a big mistake in finding Jomo Kenyatta guilty and sentencing him to seven years' hard labor. He should not have been arrested in the first place, to her thinking; there was no proof that he was the force behind Mau Mau. And now, instead of putting a stop to the "freedom" movement, the unjust treatment of Kenyatta had only served to fan the flames. Thousands—jobless and dissolute young desperadoes who had nothing to live for and who cared only for killing and stealing—were fleeing into the forests every day.

     The heaviest Mau Mau activity was in the area around Bellatu and Grace Mission. The Royal Air Force was now steadily and systematically bombing the Aberdare forests nearby; Tommies were seen in great numbers, setting up roadblocks, interrogating everyone; all telephones had been taken over by the government, all conversations were screened, and only English was allowed.

     Mau Mau was escalating, not just in the number of freedom fighters in the forest but in general Kikuyu sympathy. African children were being taught to sing hymns substituting the word
God
with
Jomo;
servants, once loyal and trusted, were becoming the willing or unwilling agents of Mau
Mau; white settlers were now asked to lock their house staff out of the house at 6:00 P.M. and not to let them back in until morning. All over, no one knew whom to trust, whom to suspect.

     And the atrocities were mounting—on both sides. Loyalist headmen were being murdered daily; the missions attacked; settlers' cattle mutilated; home guards torturing suspects by burning their eardrums with cigarettes. The oath-taking ceremony, which had once been described in the newspapers, was becoming increasingly more savage and obscene—children were now used, and animals—so that such descriptions were no longer printable.

     The whole world, it seemed, had gone mad.

     "I'm asking you for my sake, Grace," James said as he followed her into the living room. "I won't rest until I know you're protected."

     "If I carry a gun, James, it means that I intend to kill someone. I will not kill, James."

     "Not even in self-defense?"

     "I can take care of myself."

     In exasperation he holstered the gun and set it on the table. Absolutely every settler in the province had taken to wearing a gun except for this stubborn, obstinate woman. At sixty-four Grace still carried herself with the determination of the old days, that square-shouldered, stiff-upper-lip willfulness that had been one of the reasons he had fallen in love with her. But she was gray-haired now and wore glasses. In the eyes of Mau Mau, a frail, defenseless white woman!

     Mario came in, a little stooped and completely gray after all these years with Memsaab Daktari. He brought a tray of tea and sandwiches and was about to set it on the table when he saw the gun.

     "These are bad days, bwana," he said sadly. "Very bad days."

     "Mario," said James as he picked up the gun so that the tray could be set down, "we suspect there is an oath giver in this area. Do you have any knowledge of that?"

     "No, bwana. I do not believe in oaths. I am a good Christian man."

     
Yes
, thought James darkly. And another prime target for Mau Mau. Was this Grace's defense? An aging houseboy whose devotion to his white mistress could mean his death sentence?

     "Memsaab," Mario said, "Daktari Nathan says he will need your help in surgery this afternoon. There are twelve more boys needing to be done."

     "Thank you, Mario. Tell him I will be there." Grace sat down next to the radio. "Poor Dr. Nathan. He's doing twenty circumcisions a day now. And I understand the Nairobi hospitals are swamped with cases."

     It was all because the tribal circumcisers—witch doctors—had been rounded up and jailed as Mau Mau suspects. Kikuyu parents, frantic to maintain tradition, were turning to local hospitals, where surgeons performed the operation under less than traditional conditions. Only the girls continued to be circumcised in the old way, by Mama Wachera.

     Grace turned the radio on. When "Doggie in the Window" came through, she murmured, "Everything is American now."

     She shifted the dial. The Nairobi news broadcast reported first on international events—in the United States the Rosenbergs, accused spies, had been executed; the USSR had exploded its first hydrogen bomb—and then the voice of General Erskine, the new head of the East African Command, came on.

     First he announced the government ban on the KAU and its restriction on the formation of any African political group. Then he said, "From bitter personal experience, you know more about Mau Mau than I do. I only know that this Evil Creed has led to crimes of the greatest savagery and violence and that respect for law and order must be restored without delay. I have been sent by the War Office and shall get on at once with this task. I shall not be satisfied until every loyal citizen of Kenya can go about his work in peace, safety, and security."

     "So," James said quietly, "General Erskine is here. I would say that they have sent in the big guns."

     A
FTER THE BROADCAST
James and Grace left her house and followed one of the paved lanes that crisscrossed the thirty acres of Grace Mission. This location had been decided on as being the best for emergency settler meetings. The mission was central to most farms, and one of the schoolrooms could accommodate the large crowd that always attended. When
they arrived, they found Tim Hopkins standing on a box in front of the blackboard, calling for attention.

     It was uncomfortably hot in the classroom, even with all the windows open. Nearly a hundred angry and frightened settlers, with gun holsters on their hips and rifles in their hands, sweated in heat that had oppressed the colony unabatedly since March. The tension in the air was due to more than just Mau Mau: with the continuing drought there was a prediction of ninety-five percent crop failure.

     "Can we have it quiet,
please?"
Tim called, but to no effect.

     Everyone, it seemed, was talking at once. Hugo Kempler, a rancher from Nanyuki, was telling Alice Hopkins about his thirty-two cows that had been poisoned by Mau Mau. "Autopsy found arsenic in their maize."

     Alice, in turn, told of the disappearance of her entire labor force. "Sixty of them, all gone off in one night. That was last week, and not a one has come back. My sisal and pyrethrum are going unharvested. If I don't find labor soon, my entire farm will go bust."

     Finally, because he was unheard over the din, her brother pulled out his gun and fired it into the air. The crowd was instantly silenced.

     "Now listen!" he shouted, wiping his perspiring face with a handkerchief. "We've got to do something! There's an oath giver in this area, and we have to find him! And fast!"

     A rumble of agreement went through the crowd. Mrs. Langley, who had come out to Kenya with her husband in 1947 upon India's independence, stood up in her prim cotton dress and gun holster and said, "We've tried talking to our chaps, but we get nowhere. We try bribes or threats, but they just won't talk."

     Heads nodded; murmurs went around. They all knew it was impossible to get the Kikuyu to talk about Mau Mau. Although many Africans were sympathizers, many were not, but they kept silent out of fear. Only last month a man who had given evidence in Nairobi in a special Mau Mau court was later seen being forced into a car by four men and hadn't been seen since. Even those who testified under police interrogation and signed statements did not then later show up in court and were unlikely ever to be heard from again.

     Mr. Langley stood up next to his wife. A small, weathered man, he had left India because, like hundreds of others who had swarmed to Kenya in 1947, he could not abide living under "native" rule. "I lost my best headman two nights ago," he said. "He was locked inside his hut and burned alive with his wife and two children. And then all my dogs were poisoned." He paused. There were tears in his eyes. "We hadn't been hit until then. It was done by our own chaps, I'm sure of it. They'd been loyal until they were forced to take the oath."

     Fear stood out on every settler face. The power of the oath, once taken, was their biggest, most insidious threat. Devoted houseboys, treated for years like family, could overnight be made into assassins. Even if the oath was forced upon him, once a Kikuyu had eaten the raw dog flesh and drunk the cup of blood, he could not disobey a command from Mau Mau.

     "The trouble is," Tim said, "we have to find a better way to fight these monsters. How can you fight an enemy that never shows itself? We all know how it is for Mau Mau. They live in hidden camps in the forest, they're supplied with food and clothing and medical supplies by women who smuggle them all in, and they're provided with information on the movements of the security forces. They have an incredible network of communication—using hollow trees as letter boxes! Only last week they were successful in staging a boycott of Nairobi buses, and they've stopped Africans from buying European cigarettes and beer. The wogs are far more impressed by fear of Mau Mau than by any desire to restore law and order!"

     Everyone started talking again, and Tim had to shoot his pistol once more. "What we've got to do," he shouted, "is find out who the oath givers are! That's our priority. Then we have to find the secret underground. Find out who's smuggling guns and ammunition to Mau Mau. And once that's done, cut the bloody lines to them and starve them out of the bloody forest!"

     Mona, who stood at the rear of the classroom with Geoffrey, stared at Tim Hopkins. She had never seen him like this. His face was red; his eyes blazed. He was exploding with anger and bloodlust. In the past few months Tim had become what the people called a "Kenya cowboy," a self-appointed vigilante with a contingent of riders, a sort of farmers' cavalry, whose purpose was to aid isolated farms. Such private forces were manned mostly by
the sons of settlers, European boys born in Kenya who were fighting to hold on to land that they believed was as much theirs as the Africans'. Young men like Tim resented the word
native
in reference to the black tribes, arguing that Kenya-born whites were just as "native" and had just as much right to ownership of this country. While some of these cowboys were compelled by noble purpose and acted in a civilized way, many of them were just as sadistic and barbaric as Mau Mau. They were known for arbitrarily stopping Africans and giving them thorough beatings with little or no cause. Tim, Mona prayed, would not turn into one such as they.

     "What I do not understand," said the soft-spoken voice of Father Vittorio, "is why the government simply does not give them what they want."

     "Why should they do that?" asked Mr. Kempler.

     "The Africans are not asking for so much, are they? Better wages, trade unions, the freedom to grow coffee, the elimination of the color bar—"

     "We give in to the niggers," shouted another man, "and they'll take everything!"

     "But Mau Mau would be finished if the government gave the Africans economic and political equality with us."

     "Why don't we just hand over the whole lot and pack up and leave?"

     "Gentlemen!" Tim called. "Please! Let's not fight among ourselves. We have to decide on what to do about this oath giving."

     Mona grew impatient. Nothing new was being said at this meeting, the heat was deplorable, and the gun holster hung heavily and uncomfortably around her hips. Stepping back a few feet so that she stood by the open doorway, she looked around the mission compound. It seemed unusually quiet today.

     She thought about David. At that moment he was working in the hot sun somewhere on the estate, fighting to save her crop. She knew she should be with him.

     Mona recalled their conversation of two days ago, when they had paused in their work to sit under a tree with a thermos of cold lemonade. David had spoken softly, his voice barely louder than the drone of bees around them: "Violence does the African cause harm. It is essential that the solutions to our problems be based on truth and nonviolence. I saw what terrorism did
to Palestine, and I see what it continues to do now in the new state of Israel. I doubt that in thirty years the fighting between Arab and Jew will have ended. We all should follow the great example of Mahatma Gandhi.

     "You know, Mona, Mau Mau would be finished if Britain would only grant economic and political freedom to Kenyans. But instead, they have committed the blunder of banning the KAU. My political party had nothing to do with Mau Mau. We met peacefully and tried to work out our differences through legal channels. But the government has proscribed the KAU, and that was a big mistake."

     David always talked to her that way—honestly, directly, and with an aim to make his position clear. Not like Geoffrey, who lectured her and talked down to her as if she were a child. On that sultry afternoon under the tree, when they sat alone and far away from prying eyes, sharing the lemonade, David had said, "A new world has come out of this last war, Mona. Britain is no longer master of the world. She must see that Asia and Africa are rejecting her. Once people break out in violence, it goes on and on, and in the end the government will make concessions—we know that. Why, then, not make the concessions
now?"

     He had turned to face her, his voice earnest. "British policy over the past fifty years has forced the Africans to resort to violence in order to wrest bit by bit a measure of human freedom. Look at the tragic examples of Ireland, Israel, Malaya, and Cyprus. I wonder, Mona, when Britain will learn the folly of the repression and the denial of human dignity!"