Safari's End

Two years ago, Nairobi was a bustling, prosperous capital with hopes of a vigorous future. Today, beggars are on the streets, capital is pouring out of the country, and industrial unemployment has risen to 25%. Reason: the dramatic rush toward black rule has convinced many of the colony's 65,000 European settlers that there is no hope in Kenya for anyone with white skin.

One-third of the best, white-owned farmland is up for sale, but there are few takers even at drastically reduced prices. Many farmers who refused to take huge losses simply arranged with neighbors to run their places, then loaded their furniture on trucks and headed for the coast, where boats carried them off to Australia.

Other Kenya settlers are emigrating by the hundreds to South Africa, lured by offers of loans and jobs.

Even some of Kenya's fabled white hunters are beginning to pull up stakes and leave. Two of the most prominent, Albert and Fred Bartlett, have sold their farm near Mount Kenya to make a new life in Australia; Ken Jespersen is in the U.S. seeking work; Eric Rungren, a veteran elephant hunter, may move to California or Florida and grow oranges. All this promises further damage to the faltering economy, by discouraging foreign tourists.

Ker & Downey, biggest of Nairobi's safari firms, is already considering setting up shop on the Bechuanaland border as a hedge against a bad slump in Kenya.

The thousands of blacks thrown out of work by the farm shutdowns flock to Nairobi, where shantytowns are growing up on the city's fringes. Crime is soaring; auto thefts have doubled in the past year, and many a white farmer upcountry now packs a pistol everywhere he goes--just as he did in the Mau Mau days.

Kenya's present woes will fade if African leaders succeed in convincing the nervous whites that land ownership rights will be protected after Kenya gets independence (probably by 1964). But black hotheads on the fringes keep muttering, "Throw the whites out," and African politicos spend far too much time bickering or jockeying for power. It will be some time before the growing black middle class develops a sense of responsibility, as the head of the Kenya African Chamber of Commerce and Industry admits. In an angry letter chiding his members for misusing government loans and grants, he wrote: "You are undermining our efforts by not using this money to develop your businesses. That's what the money has been loaned to you for--not just for buying more wives." Polygamy also posed a problem in Manhattan, where a United Nations delegate from a small, French-speaking West African country complained of his loneliness at a Manhattan cocktail party last week. "Back home I have three wives," he explained sadly, "but my country cannot afford to send them all with me. And I cannot afford to pick just one of them."

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