In 1962, when we were both young, I spent a good number of hours with Mwai Kibaki in Nairobi, listening to him explain the complexities of Kenya tribal politics. He was an official of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the party that would lead the colony of Kenya to independence a year later, and I was a Ford Foundation fellow studying the new nations of Africa. I would drop by his office every week or so and, if he was not busy, he would take time to reply to my questions. He was polite, soft-spoken and matter-of-fact, not charismatic at all, and it never dawned on me that he might become president of Kenya some day...

Mau Mau burst upon the imagination of the world half a century ago, when newspapers and magazines published lurid photos accompanied by accounts of crazed savages slaughtering white settlers and their families in the Arcadian and romantic British colony of Kenya in darkest Africa. The images of an irrational black onslaught were reinforced by the publication in 1955 of Robert Ruark’s bestselling novel “Something of Value,” which was made into a movie starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. To European and American ears during the 1950s, the words “Mau Mau” conjured up chilling terror. Historians and academics have chipped away at these images ever since. Carl Rosberg, a UC Berkeley political scientist, and John Nottingham, a former British colonial officer, published their pioneering work, “The Myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya,” in 1966. More studies have followed over the years. The two latest books, remarkable and lucid accounts by British and American academics that are brimming with new evidence, surely smash the myth and images for good...

It was always inevitable that the new black African governments, insecure and nervous and sensitive to even the shadow of a threat to their authority, would lash out at the Jehovah's Witnesses. After all, this strange, fanatic, fundamentalist sect not only was among the first victims of the Nazis in Germany but was harassed for years by outraged local governments in the United States. Since the independence of most of black Africa, the Witnesses have been banned or restricted in Malawi, Gabon, Cameroun, Zambia, Guinea, Tanzania and Kenya. The sect's most terrible troubles came in Malawi last year and its most recent in Kenya this year. There are relatively few Jehovah's Witnesses in Africa, perhaps 250,000 on a continent of 340 million. They can hardly be called more than a minor irritant. But the threat of their presence has been exaggerated by African leaders unsure of their political power, intolerant of opposition, equipped with fragile institutions, and frustrated by their failure to make nations out of hostile tribes. As ever, the problem stems from the attitude of the Witnesses toward governmental authority. Founded in the United States by Charles Taze Russell in the 1890s, the Witnesses believe that governments are part of "Satan's world.” In their view, therefore, God's authority is always greater than the authority of any government...

Ten years ago, I left New York on a dark, snow-lashed night and stepped down the next day into the morning glare of Dakar, in Senegal. It was an exciting, expectant time for the newly independent countries of Africa. Since that moment in Dakar, I have spent most of the last decade in Africa. Those ten years did not transform a gullible fool into a mean and narrow cynic, but I feel more critical, more doubtful, more skeptical, more pessimistic than I did in 1962. I still feel sympathetic and understanding. But I have learned that sympathy and understanding are not enough. Africa needs to be looked at with cold hardness as well. There have been more disappointments than accomplishments in Africa in the ten years. Two events — the Nigerian civil war and the assassination of Tom Mboya — struck like body blows at the sympathies of an outsider. The war was probably the greatest scourge in black Africa since the slave trade, and it was largely self-made. Murder cut down the man who seemed most to represent all that was modern in new Africa, and it was probably done for the glory of tribal chauvinism. On top of this, the decade has produced a host of other unpleasant events...

BEFORE the murder of Tom Mboya in July 1969, Kenya politicians could mute and obscure their country’s tribal tensions. The tensions, of course, were always there, straining the fragile unity of the new country, but they did not pervade every side of political life. Personal rivalry counted; so did ideology. The assassination changed all that. For more than a year, Kenya was torn by a dangerous and blatant tribal conflict that colored all political activity. In a sense, this only followed what had happened elsewhere in Africa, where crisis invariably heightens tribal hatreds and suspicions. The results, as Nigeria showed, can be terrifying. But Kenya is not another Nigeria. In recent months, the fury has diminished, giving Kenya a time of calm to deal with its tribal problem. Its future depends on whether its politicians learn to do so. At stake is a land of 10.5 million people led by pragmatic men who have nursed the old white settler economy so well that Kenya has one of the highest economic growth rates in black Africa. No other black African country has anything to compare with its fertile soil and energetic farmers. Its wildlife and incredible and varied beauty have made it the tourist center of black Africa. But all this is threatened by the instability inherent in tribalism. Before analyzing the tribal problem, it makes sense to recount the excited political events of the country since the death of Mboya.

African governments are so fragile that they sometimes shatter at the first blow. For much of the last half of 1969, Kenya seemed as if it were due to be an other case in the tradition of the Congo and Nigeria. The gunning down of Tom Mboya on a street in Nairobi last July aroused enough tribal hatred to tear the country apart. Yet somehow, Kenya survived the six months of bitterness. At the start of 1970, it had at least as good a chance for stability as any other country in this volatile, impoverished continent. Kenya’s troubles began with the assassination of Mboya. Mboya, who had been Minister of Economic Planning and Development and the General Secretary of the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU), was one of the rare African politicians who tried to stand above tribe. He refused to appeal to tribal chauvinism in his election campaigns. Yet, ironically, his murder unleashed Kenya’s greatest surge of tribal hatred since its independence in 1963. The aftermath of Mboya’s death mocked everything he stood for. The members of Mboya’s Luo tribe assumed immediately that the murder was the work of the Kikuyus. The Kikuyus, the tribe of seventy-six-year-old President Jomo Kenyatta, are the dominant and best-educated people of Kenya. Though they number only two million in a population of ten million, the Kikuyus have controlled the major ministries of government and the top civil service positions...

Walk down the frenzied, color-splashed side streets of Nairobi where most people do their shopping. This is Africa, but for block after block, the signs on the dukas, as the shops are called, evoke India and Pakistan: Ganijee Glass Mart, Indian Emporium, Patel & Co., Shah & Sons, Ghela Manck, Hindustan Boot Co., Bombay Sweet Mart. Most of the shops of downtown Nairobi are in the hands of Indians and Pakistanis. Wearing Benares saris and Punjabi pants and Sikh turbans, these shopkeepers and their families, with their jet black hair, enormous black eyes and pale brown skin, living in a land run by African blacks, are the most visible evidence of the gravest minority problem in East Africa today. There are 350,000 Asians, as the Indians and Pakistanis are called here, among East Africa’s 29 million people. About half of them live in Kenya, a quarter in Tanzania, a quarter in Uganda. They are the shopkeepers, clerks, artisans and foremen of East Africa, resented and often despised by the Africans who feel cut off from the economies of their own countries. The Asians fill just those jobs and places that Africans believe they now have enough experience and training to take...

The aftermath of the murder of Tom Mboya has mocked what he stood for. Mboya, who seemed to represent all that was modern in Africa to the rest of the world, always shunned the appeals to tribal allegiance that have crumbled political stability elsewhere in Africa. His constituents were mainly the urban workers groping for a modern way of life. Yet his assassination on the first Saturday in July unleashed intense tribal hatreds. Kenya faces a long and dangerous period of instability unless the government can somehow placate his grieving Luo people. Mboya was shot and killed in downtown Nairobi on a street crowded with shoppers trying to make their last purchases before stores closed for the weekend. Two weeks later, police charged a young African with the murder. They released no details about him but his name, but that was enough to confirm all the suspicions that had been excited by tribal passions. The name, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, identifies the accused as a member of the dominant Kikuyu tribe, the people of President Jomo Kenyatta. Without a shred of evidence, most Luos, whether educated townspeople or illiterate peasants, had decided from the beginning that the killer must be Kikuyu. Now they had proof...

LANCE SPEARMAN is a nattily dressed detective who sports a straw hat, bowtie and goatee. He likes Scotch on the rocks, buxom women, El Greco cheroots, and fast cars. He uses reverse karate kicks, his fists, and a hand gun to bring down such enemies as Zollo, the Mermolls, and Countess Scarlett. He is the black James Bond and the most popular fictional character in Africa today. In almost every English-speaking town of Africa, young men, most with no more than five years of schooling, sit on the sidewalks and read the weekly picture magazines that chronicle the adventures of Lance Spearman and other heroes like Fearless Fang, who is the black facsimile of Tarzan, or the Stranger, who is the black Lone Ranger. In Kenya, for example, the adventures of Lance Spearman have a greater circulation than any of the daily newspapers. This phenomenon of popular culture suggests a good deal about the tastes of ordinary semi-educated young men in the African towns — their yearning, their uncertain identification with the fringes of Western culture, their need for fancy in a harsh urban world. The magazines are known in the publishing trade as "look-reads." In effect they are photographed comics that resemble comic books, except that the action is photographed instead of drawn. Little balloons of dialogue appear over the heads of the characters...

When he gets to reviewing American images and interventions abroad, President Nixon might start with the way in which the State Department and other U.S. Government agencies overseas are sometimes upstaged by an old foe of his — American labor. For years, the AFL-CIO has pursued its own foreign policy in Latin America, boasting, among other things, of how it helped to bring down Cheddi Jagan in British Guiana (now Guyana). Now it is turning to Africa. Since the AFL-CIO activity there is fairly new, that might be a good place for President Nixon to choke it off. In its foreign operations, American labor sometimes acts, or tries to act, as an arm of the U.S. Government. But it can be an uncontrollable arm. In January, 1968, for example, Vice President Humphrey visited Kenya with a large party that included Irving Brown, executive director of the African American Labor Center, the main agency for AFL-CIO’s activities on that continent. American Ambassador Glenn W. Ferguson thought it unwise to include Brown because he is disliked by many Kenya leaders, who believe he has shown too much favoritism to Minister for Economic Planning Tom Mboya...

'Neo-Colonial' Economy Booming - The gross national product of Kenya grew by 10% in 1966, a spectacular rate for developing Africa. It has confounded the country's many critics. Since independence in 1963, Kenya has maintained a western capitalist atmosphere in hopes of attracting foreign capital and keeping many foreigners in technical jobs. Although it is committed to "African socialism" on paper, the government has made it clear that it believes nationalization of foreign enterprises is too costly for a poor country like Kenya. The Kenya way of development seems the most logical one. Because it was an old British settler colony, Kenya had a spirit of pioneering free enterprise, a history of foreign investment and a cadre of non-African managers and technicians. Kenya leaders decided it made more sense to build on this economy than to disrupt or destroy it and start anew. For this, Kenya has been criticized, particularly by Africans in countries that came to independence with economies so weak they could be molded into anything...

For nearly four years, one of the world's least known rebellions has plagued the northern quarter of Kenya near the border of the Somali Republic. Approximately 2,600 persons have died at the hands of the rebels or government forces. Last week, the Kenya government allowed newsmen into the area for the first time on a supervised tour. With an improbable mixture of guns, grenades, schools and clinics, the Kenya government is trying to put down a guerrilla rebellion here in the semidesert of northern Kenya. The government's targets are the disaffected Somalis who want nearly one quarter of Kenya to secede and become part of the neighboring Somali Republic. Kenya officials have a purpose in combining a social revolution with police action. They are convinced they can triumph over the Shifta, as the rebels are called, only if they can end the nomadic life of the Somalis and get them to settle down with villages, schools, health centers, and water wells...

Irritability Increases With Accusations by New Vice President; Break May Come - Kenya officials are so annoyed with the Chinese Communist Embassy these days that they flare up at any minor move the Chinese make. The irritation of the Kenyans developed after a series of offensive pronouncements by the Chinese during the last few months. Now, relations between the two governments are tenuous; they might even break. The Chinese offended the Kenya government so much that some Western diplomats believe it was done by design. No diplomat, in their view, could really be as gauche as the Chinese have seemed. An example of the Kenyan irritation came a few days ago when Vice President Daniel Arap Moi accused the Chinese Embassy of interference in domestic affairs because it had mailed some Mao Tse-tung buttons and some copies of his "Selected Works" and "Quotations" to a secondary schoolteacher in a small country town. Moi's angry accusation was surprising since the Chinese mailing differed little from what other embassies, including the American, try to do...

Trade Pact Aims to Draw Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania Closer by Splitting Them a Bit - The new East African treaty of economic cooperation may bring Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania closer together someday by letting them split a little apart now. Stripped of all its flowery optimism, that is the significance of the treaty, which was signed by Presidents Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Milton Obote of Uganda and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania at a recent conference in Kampala, Uganda. In many ways, the treaty is a remarkable achievement, for it salvages the most it can from the old East African common market and lays down a realistic groundwork for a future market. East Africa has had a common market since British colonial days. But the market always helped Kenya more than the other two countries...

General China, Once Reviled by Whites, Wins Respect of Sort Given Old Soldiers - General China, whose name once provoked revulsion and contempt from white men here, has just published his memoirs, like any old respected soldier. The event was another step in the rehabilitation of the image of the Mau Mau. Ten years ago, or even five years ago, it would have been inconceivable for General China to have launched his memoirs at a reception attended by ministers, ambassadors and respected publishers. General China, whose real name is Waruhiu Itote, was a leader of the Mau Mau fighters in the forests of Mt. Kenya from 1952 to 1954. Mau Mau had an image of bestiality and terror then. To Europeans and most Africans here, and in fact to most people throughout the world, Mau Mau meant a barbaric uprising by Kikuyu tribesmen in the 1950s against the white rulers of Kenya, an uprising that overstepped the normal bounds of insurrection because of stark primitiveness, the obscene savagery, the wild-eyed ruthlessness of the heathen natives. The image was painted vividly by Hollywood and Robert Ruark. Of course, the image had to change somewhat when Kenya became independent in 1963. After all, the new president, Jomo Kenyatta, had been convicted by the colonial courts of planning and leading the Mau Mau uprising...

The furore in Kenya over former American Ambassador William Attwood's book on Africa is less important than the forces that fanned it. Since Attwood's "The Reds and the Blacks," was published in the United States, the book has been denounced by the vice president of Kenya, the attorney general, the minister of agriculture, the country's ruling party, the opposition party, the new American ambassador and the editors of Nairobi's two main English-language newspapers. The chief complaint, in the words of Vice President Daniel Arap Moi, is that the book "outrages every code of personal and diplomatic good faith." Kenya officials are angry because Attwood repeats private conversations they had with him when he was ambassador to Kenya from 1964 to 1966. Attwood's successor, Ambassador Glenn W. Ferguson, believes this has made his job extremely difficult; Kenyans won't trust an American ambassador any more...

Attwood Accused of Violation of Ethics and Error in Judgment That May Hurt U.S. - In a rare moment of diplomatic family feuding in public, the American ambassador to Kenya Tuesday accused his predecessor, William Attwood, of a violation of ethics and an error of judgment for writing a book on Africa that may hurt the United States. The accusation by Ambassador Glenn W. Ferguson reflected the bitterness both in the Kenya government and in the U.S. Embassy here over the speed of Attwood in publishing his book, "The Reds and the Blacks," less than a year after he left the foreign service to become editor-in-chief of Cowles Communications, the publishers of Look magazine. On Sunday, for example, Kenya Attorney General Charles Njonjo said Attwood was guilty of "a of faith and confidence" for reporting his private conversations with Njonjo in the book. Njonjo said he would now be suspicious of diplomats. That suspicion, Njonjo said, would make the work of Attwood's successor, Ferguson, more difficult...

African Nation Believes Attention Can Block Somali Republic Aid to Guerrillas - Unlike most African countries, which like to pooh-pooh internal troubles, the government of Kenya is trying to end a guerrilla insurrection in the north by telling the world about it. Kenya believes that the guerrilla movement would disintegrate without help from the neighboring Somali Republic. Through an intense publicity and diplomatic campaign, Kenya hopes to pressure the Somali Republic into withdrawing its support from the guerrillas. That is why Kenya issued a white paper last week detailing four years of bloodshed in the northern frontier district, a desert wasteland that makes up one-fourth of the country but has only 200,000 people. At the same time, Kenya notified the United Nations that it may have to use its "inherent right of self defense" to halt what it called Somali aggression. More than half the people who live in the northern frontier district are nomads of Somali descent. For this reason, the Somali Republic looks on the Kenya district as a lost territory...

Charges Aggression on Northeast Border in White Paper Issued to U.N. Members - The Kenya government threatened war Tuesday if that is the only way to stop what it called aggression by the Somali Republic on the northeast border of Kenya. The threat came in a white paper issued by the Kenya government and distributed to every member of the United Nations. In the paper, Kenya said it was giving preliminary notice, under the United Nations charter, of its "inherent right of self defense" against aggression. With the threat, the long and bitter battling in Kenya's northern frontier district took a new turn. Until recently, Kenya has treated the fighting as a police action against what it called Shifta bandits. These were described as Somali inhabitants of northern Kenya in rebellion against the government...

But Outsiders Give Three-Man Panel of Presidents Little Chance to Succeed - Three African presidents will try this week to salvage the East African Common Market, once a proud symbol of African unity, now a harsh case study of the pitfalls and problems of economic union. Although official statements have brimmed with optimism lately, most outsiders here believe the presidents of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda have only a slight chance to succeed. At the most, the presidents are expected to sign a treaty cooperation that will proclaim continuation of the market while loading on enough restrictions to make it unwieldy or even unworkable. However, the presidents are expected to continue the East African Common Services Organization. Under this organization, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda share railways, postal services, an airline, research institutions, harbor management and other services...

Resettlement in White Highlands Going Well; Agricultural Income Increased - Black African settlers are proving they can farm successfully here in the old White Highlands of Kenya, once a bastion and symbol of white supremacy in Africa. Total agricultural income here has increased over the past five years - the more remarkable when it is considered that more than one sixth of the land formerly worked as large plantations by white settlers has been given to black settlers. Some 30,000 African farmers have been resettled on 1,000 European farms totaling more than 1 million acres in the highlands. Their difficulties have been enormous. Inexperience, incompetence, corruption and politics have hampered the program - but the black farmers, on the whole, have made a go of it. This constitutes one of the most promising and hopeful recent developments in all of Africa. Their success here is dramatic, for the White Highlands were once closed to African freeholders...

New Kenya Immigration Bill Will Define Aliens' Rights, and Is Aimed at Indians - There are 358,000 Indians and Pakistanis in East Africa who face an uncertain and possibly tragic future. African jealousy of Indian success in business and the Asians' own past attitude of superiority toward the Africans has shaken the lives of the Pakistani and Indian traders since independence came to Africa. Two personal incidents underline their predicament. Five years ago, before independence, I cashed a check in a Nairobi bank and waited while an African apprentice clerk labored over the transaction. His Asian supervisor stood behind, impatient, scowling, sneering, shrugging - his every gesture telling me, "These Africans will never learn." Then I recently accompanied a young African into a duka, as rural Asian shops are called. The African sipped his soda and suddenly bust into a tirade. "Where is your money hidden?" he shouted at the Asian shopkeeper...

Stanley Meisler, former Peace Corps deputy director for evaluation and research and Associated Press correspondent in Washington, D.C., Monday, was named chief of the Los Angeles Times news bureau in sub-Sahara Africa, now located in Nairobi, Kenya. Meisler, 33, succeeds Don Shannon, who has been transferred to The Times' Tokyo bureau following two years in Leopoldville, The Congo. The Leopoldville office has been closed. Meisler began his newspaper career with the Middletown (Ohio) Journal in 1953. He moved to the AP bureau in New Orleans a year later and to the Washington bureau in 1958. Meisler covered the House of Representatives prior to his appointment as a Peace Corps official in 1964. Awarded Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1961, Meisler spent a year traveling in Africa, followed by graduate studies in African affairs at UC Berkeley. He has written articles on Africa for Atlantic Monthly, the Reporter, the Nation and other magazines. A native of New York City, Meisler was graduated from City College of New York in 1952.

For most Americans, one dynamic young man, Tom Mboya of Kenya, symbolizes the onrush of African nationalism in the last few years. On his several trips to the United States, he has been publicized in rallies, television shows, and newspaper interviews. He is, for America, the magazine cover boy of Africa. But despite all the American cheers, Mboya is in deep political trouble at home, and some of the trouble stems from those very cheers. Mboya has qualities that appeal to western taste. He is vigorous. He is efficient. He is moderate, though always frank and direct, in his speech. He seems to combine the shrewdness of a politician with the honor of a statesman. Even the British settlers in Kenya, long displeased with the American encouragement of Mboya, have now come to regard him as a main hope for their survival when the colony becomes independent, perhaps some time this year or next. They trust him and would help him. The vision of an independent Kenya led by Mboya has replaced their shattered dream of a white man's Kenya. But Mboya, now thirty-two, will not be at the helm when Kenya becomes independent...

Keepers Of Nationalism - The poverty of tribal, rural hinterlands may be Africa's most despairing problem, but it is in the atmosphere of cities that African leaders tackle the issue. African cities, bustling and impatient, are far away from tribal Africa with its huge and potentially supreme masses. Only 12% of the population between the Sahara Desert and South Africa live in cities. But urban Africa Is vital Africa. The cities are the keepers of nationalism. Their moods create the changes that make headlines and make the new Africa. To understand new Africa, an observer must catch the mood of its cities. Let us catch the mood of three and see three different African ways of adjusting to the modern world...

The words came cold and clipped from the government secretary with gray hair and pale English skin. "When that man enters a room," she said, "I can feel the hackles rise up and down my back. Even if I don't see him, I can feel that man." That man is Jomo Kenyatta. A court has convicted him of managing the savage Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. A British governor has condemned him as "the African leader to darkness and death." Yet, within a year or two, when the colony of Kenya assumes independence, Jomo Kenyatta likely will be the new nation's first prime minister. The gray-haired Englishwoman and other white settlers watch this onrush to power helplessly, with distaste and bitterness. To them, a man streaked in evil and blood is reaching for their rolling, green land. But whites number no more than one per cent of Kenya's six million people. Africans see a different Kenyatta...

Niyi Ishola, a 28-year-old government secretary in Nigeria, admires America very much. One of his great heroes, in fact, is the late John Foster Dulles. But Ishola has a complaint. "Soviet cosmonauts Gherman Titov and Yuri Gagarin give a much better impression than your astronaut John Glenn," he says. "Both Russians wear uniforms in their photographs, and the people respect uniforms. Uniforms show discipline. In his pictures," Ishola continues sadly, "Glenn wears a bowtie." John Glenn's bowtie has not stalled America's drive to win friends and respect In Africa. But this tale of a young Nigerian's concern with astronautical polka dots reflects the difficulty of trying to analyze the impact of U.S. policies on Africa. Africans live in a world remote from the world of Americans. Africans worry about farm plots and factory sites, not Castro and Khrushchev, about building a nation, not building an image. American assumptions about what impresses Africans, or what disturbs them, often lack a true base. The difficult problem of American race relations can illustrate this a bit. Many U.S. policymakers assume that the names Little Rock, New Orleans, Oxford do not endear the United Slates to Africa. The assumption, of course, is true. The treatment of Negroes in the United Slates does bother Africans...