ALL KENYA ARMED
Roses, Guns At Wedding
This is the second of a series by Jack Scott, Sun writer, on Mau May 9, 1953
NAIROBI, Kenya. The first decision that must be made by a new arrival in Nairobi is whether or not to invest in a gun. The immigration- officer at the airport asks you two simple questions. One "Have you ever been expelled from Kenya, Uganda. Tanganyika or Zanzibar?" he asks with a grin. The other "Do you have any firearms?" is a deadly serious matter. If, as I did, you answer "No," it is as if you'd arrived without legs or hands. Everyone, man and woman alike, packs a rod. I haven't seen so many shooting irons since "High Noon." In the ornate lounge of the posh New Stanley Hotel men in dinner jackets may be seen with rifles slung on their shoulders or heavy khaki ammunition belts and well-filled holsters cinched around their middles. A bejewelled dowager opens her evening bag at dinner to extract a dainty handkerchief and you catch the dull gunmetal glint of a snub-nosed automatic. At the exclusive, members-only Equator Club, where a small combo plays hot jazz to keep up the spirits, a wedding party arrived for the reception and Daused at the cloakroom tn rhcvAr thai nv.;iin., . tx.v-ii. U1XC1 V, Two of the party carried Sten guns and the bride carried roses.
No Guns For Sale
When I decided to be arm ed for a trip to the "battle front" I found it impossible to purchase any kind of gun and had to borrow an ancient .38. At one outdoors-equipment shop which has now become an arsenal for Nairobi's civilian population, the proprie tor explained that I might Ijput my name down on a llwaiting list. He was expect ing some spienaia liuie .&& Beretta automatics from Italy. Most of his male custom ers, he said, prefer the .38 Webley revolver because of its range and the availability of ammunition. The ladies, Nairobi's ver sion of the pistol-packing mama, are more partial to a small Czechoslovakian pistol which presumably has an effective range onlv at point-blank, but fits snugly in a hand-bag and has an extremely wicked look. Because of this demand prices have gone up sharply and an automatic worth around $15 , before "the Emergency" will now find a ready buyer at $35. Some of this gun-toting, which gives any gathering place the atmosphere of an old-time astern saloon, is undoubtedly ostentation. You have the picture of the hotel guest before his mirror adjusting his tie and then adjusting his gat, fashionably slung low on the left hip. One man at lunch the other day wore a heavy Colt .45 so that it dangled deep in his lap and in his high, khaki, ribbed-cotton stocking was a knife with a naked blade eight inches long.
'So Little Effect' Seen
There is also a noticeable trend to the cultivation of immense "operational" moustaches and any casting director could pick out a hundred men in the street as perfect types for a bad movie about the dauntless British on the fringe of the savage domain. There's a ready explanation for this tendency to self-drama. The males carry their shooting irons, they say, because there's a $300 fine if they are stolen. But some of the less flamboyant citizens of Nairobi have coined the phrase "Walter Mitty-ism" to describe the more fierce-looking of their brothers and, like Thurber's character, it is apparent that a great many men and women are embellishing the facts, which are grim enough, with some heroics. Although the evidence is all against it, Kenya seems determined to believe that the Mau Mau is on the verge of extinguishing the white race, To the new visitor, who may possibly look at the facts more objectively, the really astonishing thing about the Mau Mau terror is that it has had so little effect on the white man except emotionally and economically. Of the more than a thousand deaths so far only 13 have been "whites" and four of them, raw, untrained recruits in the Kenya Regiment, were killed "In an un- expected clash with a Mau Mau gang. Of the others at least two, and propably more, were cases where the natives had very personal reasons for slaying their white employers and, in fact, the majority of deaths involve the servant-master relationship. The Mau Mau is, indeed, fanatically "anti-white" and "anti-Christian", as his primitive oaths reveal, but he seems strangely disinterested in the obvious methods of expressing his vengeance.
Trains, Power Intact
The little train climbs on schedule from the sea level of Mombasa to the thin air of the 5500-foot level of Nairobi and grinds for many miles through territory in which the Mau Mau holds sway,. Yet there has never been a case of tampering with the narrow guage rails. The telephone and power lines, which might cut off Nairobi from the outside world at least temporarily, have never known the snip of shears except in those pre-Emergency cases where young tribesmen sought a length of wire to decorate the ears of their amorata. The whites still use all the roads of Kenya without fear of ambush. I was a passenger on a bus the other day with more than a dozen men and women. We rolled for miles through uninhabited bush country, a sweet set-up for any armed Mau Mau who might care for a sitting white target. Yet there was more nervousness among the clients at the New Stanley bar than here in the home grounds of the terrorists. It's my conclusion that the fear which grips Nairobi and a perfectly understandable fear is a reflection of the aura of primitive mysticism which Is the Mau Mau's only potent weapon. Some authorities here estimate that at least 50 percent of the million-strong Kikuyu tribe have taken one or more of the Mau Mau oaths. A great many of these natives, driven from their reserves by intolerable over-c r o w d i n g, now work in Nairobi and live in the "locations" on the city's outskirts. Since the be ginning of the Emergency there has been at least a murder a week within a short stroll of the hotel where I am writing this.
Savage Oath Feared
Only last week the Kenya Police here revealed the discovery of a Mau Mau "directive" which is typical of the secret society's use of fear to coerce the native into cooperation or silence. "We must take an oath," it read, "that those who hinder us and who help the whites must die as they sleep, together with their wives and their children, and their property must be destroyed as if a great rainstorm had come and their foot prints had been washed out for ever and ever and our warriors should drink the blood of these enemies." This kind of horror comics thing has a terrible grip on a native less than a generation away from savagery. In the "screenings" of the urban Kikuyu here in Nariobi hundreds have been imprisoned or sent back to the reserves as suspected adherents to that kind of witchcraft.
Thus, at dinner, surrounded by sophistication and civiliza tion, a sullen black man who is serving you and can never be sure if he, too, is not one of those who is bound by a pagan ceremony, and the taste of warm goat's blood, to have your life. Then a gun on the hip may seem a most comforting companion.