NAIROBI, Kenya. After six months of what is known here simply as "The Emergency," the Mau Mau still have the initiative in Kenya's agony of black rebellion. They are fantastically out-numbered, out-gunned and out-brained. They face inevitable defeat. Most of their number will die violently on the business end of a Sten gun or a rope, as more than 500 of them have died to date. By any military standards they operate ineffectually and often stupidly. Their own kin are rising up in anger at the mess they've made of things. 

Three months from now they may well face complete extermination. 

But Kenya is still on its knees before the Mau Mau, still torn by a dark and primitive fear. Its normal economy is shattered, its people are bitterly divided in their loyalties. 

The whole question of colonial rule and white domination over the black man has emerged as a challenge more dramatically than it has in the 50 years since the first white settlers arrived in this beautiful land.

Witchcraft as Weapon

The Mau Mau has accomplished this with one single, awful weapon: the terror of black witchcraft, of savage mutilation in the night, and a brutality that brings dread to white and black alike with every soft African sunset. 

There is no reasonable parallel I can imagine that will bring into focus for Canadians the true story of what is happening in Kenya. 

It is not all told in the lurid, day-to-day stories of atrocities and killings, so common now that only a mass slaying will keep them on the world's front pages. 

It is not told in the mass of propaganda leaflets put out by a half dozen factions, white and black, who choose to interpret these events for their own ends. 

It is, to grope for an illustration, as if one small fanatic cell of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi had been able to spread panic and disorganization throughout North America. Yet that is not a true parallel, either, for behind the Mau Mau there's the long and legitimate history of oppression of one of Africa's largest native tribes.

 In other parts of Africa, as in the Union of South Africa, such oppression is being expressed, if at all, by a slow political awakening of the black man. Here it just happens to have been an explosion.

Life of Terror

 I've spent the last ten days and nights here in Nairobi and on the northern battle front of the Mau Mau. I've talked to the top government and military leaders and to the still-primitive members of the Kikuyu (Kick-koo-you) tribe of more than a million from which the secret society of the Mau Mau sprung.

I've watched the Mau Mau himself a sullen little, spindly legged, coal black man going through the machinery of the British courts for a stern but still passionless justice. 

I've talked with white men and women who never face away from a door or window at night, who live every hour with a gun at their hip or on a stool beside their bath. 

Out of those ten days has come some inescapable conclusions. 

The one which Kenya dreads most of all is  the obvious fact that the Mau Mau, who will surely and rightly perish in the wattle and bamboo forests, has brought this, one tribe an immense stride closer to a square deal. 

The most significant fact to come out of this strange conflict is that the panga and the simi, the razor-sharp machetes which can (and have) taken a man's head off with a single blow, have done more to break down the barriers of race slavery than all the well-meaning efforts of the missionaries or the liberal groups or civil disobedience campaigns. 

Kenya does not dread this alone. Millions of natives throughout the whole of this dark continent are studying the short, blood-flecked history of Mau Mau. There's not a white man in Africa who doesn't know they're studying it.

Benefits Will Be Slow

The benefits will not come immediately, as one senior colonial administrator told me, "To give them concessions now would be simply to admit that violence had won them." 

But today in Kenya an East African Royal Commission is studying questions of land and population for a better dispersal of the native. 

A Cabinet Committee of African Advancement has been set up "to consider if there 'should be an acceleration of the economic and social life of the natives." 

Three of the worst slums on the outskirts of Nairobi, where 20,000-odd natives lived in abject, squalor, have been levelled by bulldozers because they were considered hotbeds of Mau Mau leaders. 

Now Nairobi's city council is pressing a native housing scheme that will replace them. 

I became convinced in these 10 days, too, that the Mau Mau is licked as an outlaw group. 

When the rainy season ends and the heavy forces of military and police units are more mobile it will be the beginning of the end. 

Curiously enough they will be licked by the native population. 

Intelligence officers told me that this last month has shown the long-awaited trend of slowly built-up resentment against the secret society. 

Whatever benefits may indirectly result from the "terrorists–as the government invariably calls them–they alienated vast numbers of their own tribesmen. 

While their avowed purpose is the extermination of the white man, it is their brother native –nearly 500 of them to date–who is murdered in the night and terribly mutilated. 

The Mau Mau, who relies heavily for native support on the black magic of the oath, voluntary or by force, has perverted and defiled the ancient codes of the tribe for his own end. 

Now that Kenya's "security force" has been built up to army-size the wavering Kikuju is able to make his choice. 

That choice seems determined by the fact that, as a permanent thing, he fears the evil of the Mau Mau more than he fears the traditional oppression of the white man. 

With the native organized on his own reserve to combat the Mau Mau the real struggle will move, as it already has to some extent, into the thick forest and the hand-to-hand clashes of patrols. 

In that, final battle, cut off from food and already ludicruously out-gunned, the Mau Mau will meet his end. 

He is an artful dodger, but in every engagement so far he has been the loser. 

Both the benefits of the Mau Mau evil and the end of the society are in the future. 

Today the story in Kenya is still the story of the naked power of terror, of feeling your heart thump at a scraping outside your window or of meeting a black man suddenly on a deserted street and never knowing if the struggle of the races is going to come down to this lowest common denominator of man against man.