Open the Highlands

In colonial Kenya, the best farmlands are the Highlands, known as the White Highlands because only white settlers are permitted to own land there. Forty-three thousand whites share about 12,000 sq. mi. of the Highlands, while the colony's 5,300,000 Africans are crowded into 52,000 sq. mi. of less desirable farmlands down below, or scrabble for their living in the arid, underdeveloped "Crown Lands" --a euphemism for wilderness. For many years the million-strong Kikuyu tribe, less uneducated than most and peacefully inclined, talked hopefully of expanding their holdings into the White Highlands; instead, the white settlers told them to go expand into the Crown Lands, and vaguely talked of irrigation projects that would some day make the Crown Lands bloom. Frustrated, many of the Kikuyu farmers turned to other occupations, including joining the Mau Mau and beheading whites.

Two years ago, Britain's Tory government, while busy fighting off the Mau Mau, appointed a Royal Commission to take a long, slow look at the East African problem. Last week, in a thoroughgoing, 482-page report, the Royal Commission made one overriding recommendation: the White Highlands must be opened up to African ownership, and African land ghettoes must be done away with. As for the Africans, the commission urged them to drop their old ways of tribal land ownership, and to switch to individual or family land ownership.

Considering that the Mau Mau shooting war is still on, and that Kenya's black v. white feeling runs high, the Royal Commission's report had a Utopian and distant sound about it. The diehard majority of British settlers is sure to oppose it, and to try to sabotage any attempt at implementation; the settlers can say, with reason, that conditions for peaceful transfer of land between races do not now exist. But some day soon in darkest East Africa, a start must somehow be made; something new must be offered the Africans in place of blood-cults and drums, prejudice and pangas flashing in the night.

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