A Mile or an Inch

Three months ago the first measure of democracy was doled out to the native African tribesmen of Britain's Kenya, but from the Africans' point of view it was a pitiful inch for a desired mile. Under a constitution devised during the height of the Mau Mau rebellion, some 130,000 carefully screened voters representing Kenya's more than 5,500,000 Africans were allowed to vote for eight black members of the national Legislative Council.

Against these eight were ranged 14 members representing the British colony's handful of 42,000 whites, six representing its 158,000 Indians and one to represent the 31,000 Arabs. One of the terms of this multilayer plan was that there was to be no change in it until 1960. Even before he managed to squeak through to victory in a hotly contested campaign in Nairobi, one African candidate was raising his voice against the new constitution which made his election possible. He is 28-year-old Tom Mboya, a member of the Luo tribe, which is second in numbers to the Kikuyus. "I look at him," says one worried Kenyan, "and I ask myself how would I like to face him 20 years from now, when he has 20 more years of legislative experience behind him."

Bilingual Spellbinder. No simple tribesman, Mboya bounces around the countryside in a Volkswagen. His library is studded with the works of Mark Twain, Tom Paine and Plato, and his politics have the pinkish hue of the Nye Bevan Laborites who have taken him up in Britain. He is articulate in English and a spellbinder in Swahili. Last year he toured the U.S. and returned home with $35,000 from the C.I.O.-A.F.L. to build a headquarters for his Kenya Labor Federation.

Immediately after getting elected to the Legislative Council (known as Legco) Mboya welded the seven other newly elected African members into a solid bloc "firmly and unequivocally opposed" to the constitution. Rather than encourage the plan as it stood, the eight refused to accept the two ministerial posts reserved for them in the government, and promptly demanded an additional 15 seats in the council--just enough, Europeans noted, to give them a single-vote majority.

Inevitable Rule. Well aware that the members of Kenya's eleven main tribal groups and hundreds of clannish subgroups find little agreement among themselves, many white Kenya colonists stood by confidently awaiting the first signs of schism among the eight African parliamentarians, but the signs never appeared. "The eight of us will differ in matters of detail," said Mboya, "but on the basic question, we don't." Fortnight ago, as Mboya's restlessness was felt more and more throughout the land, penetrating even the Mau Mau detention camps, Kenya's government ordered government tape recorders installed at all African political meetings. But by last week the whites were beginning to realize that in order to protect their own inch, they might yet have to give Mboya a measure of his mile. A first meeting between black and white was held to discuss council reform, and at least one wise Kenya official admitted: "Some increase in African representation is justified and necessary." Says Mboya confidently: "Rule of this country by the majority is inevitable."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.