The Darkening War

Before dawn, some 400 Mau Mau came out of their strongholds to fight in the open. They first raided the white man's clubhouse at Thika, 34 miles northeast of Nairobi. They dragged out the African barman and slashed him to bits with their sharp pangas; they tore up a picture of Sir Winston Churchill, downed all the mineral water in the bar, and made off towards the police post at Kandara, 16 miles away. At 9:30 a.m. they confidently attacked the post in bright sunshine -but the British were ready and waiting. A relieving column of the King's African Rifles thundered up to the post as the Mau Mau closed in, and the riflemen leaped from their trucks and charged. One 23-year-old lieutenant bayoneted eight Mau Mau. "I was lucky," said he. "I happened to be well placed." In all, the Mau Mau lost 39 at Kandara. British losses: none.

Commanding General Sir George Erskine sent his 39th Brigade in pursuit. The crack Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers caught one Mau Mau detachment at a river crossing, ambushed another in the Maragua Valley. In this valley alone, the Fusiliers bagged 76 Mau Mau. The R.A.F. strafed and bombed the Mau Mau remnants as they fell back to their forests, and the British soon had them cornered on a wooded hill known as Blarney Castle. Mau Mau losses in the battle so far: 197 killed, including two "generals." Total British loss: three wounded.

This was the biggest battle of Kenya's emergency, and the British won it so completely because they had advance warning. "General China,'' the Mau Mau's onetime No. 2, who was captured by the British and sentenced to death (TIME, Feb. 15), is now cooperating with the British. Erskine hopes to use China to persuade other Mau Mau leaders to surrender.

"Damned Impertinence." The skirmish was the one bright spot in an increasingly dark picture. The war against the Mau Mau gets worse, not better. A joint Tory-Laborite parliamentary delegation returned to England and reported sharply last week that Kenya's emergency is fast spreading, partly because the colonial government "has not yet secured the full support, loyalty and understanding of the majorities in all the racial communities."

The delegation recommended that 1) Africans should be invited to join the government with full ministerial responsibilities; 2) Africans should have access to the fertile lands, which are now mostly reserved for white settlers; and 3) the color bar must go. The report was generally cheered in Britain, but in Kenya, many a hard-bitten settler called it "damned impertinence." Complained one old colonial administrator: "You can't conduct war against murderers with kid gloves."

Respect, Then Esteem. Into Nairobi last week, to adjudge the balance between the settlers' anxiety, the campaign's necessity, and the black man's historic emergence in Africa, flew Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton. It was Lyttelton's third visit to Kenya in 16 months, and the war's latest statistics bore out his concern. Six thousand British, 44,000 African troops, police and home guards are now deployed against some 14,000 Mau Mau and their supporters. The war costs more than twice as much ($1,800,000 a month) this year as last. In Kenya, the moderates among -the settlers have a hard time getting heard, and the extremists seek an impossible solution in a land where whites are outnumbered 177 to 1. The well-meaning but ineffectual governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, is going home on sick leave and may not return.

One, hopeful sign: the appointment of one of Britain's top policemen, Colonel Arthur Young, 46, to replace Kenya's retiring Police Commissioner Michael O'Rorke. Young, boss of the City of London's police, is the man who helped General Sir Gerald Templer reorganize Malaya's police. He considers it his job to build up "first of all respect, and then esteem" for Kenya's ill-trained, badly equipped and sometimes indiscriminately cruel 24,000-man national police force.

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