Frontier War

Kenya last week was like Dakota Territory in the days of Sitting Bull (floruit 1876). Painted savages chanted bloodcurdling oaths, swooped down on lonely farmsteads to burn and scalp. The white settlers and their wives ate and slept with pistols at their sides; their vigilante posses, using native trackers, were supported by a battalion of British regulars, rushed to Kenya to face the same kind of tribal uprising that the U.S. cavalry crushed in the Old West.

In the desert outpost of Kapenguria,the Queen's lawyers proceeded in slow, judicial fashion against Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta, the London-educated Kikuyu who, settlers believe, is the brains behind the Mau Mau. Meanwhile, another tribesman had emerged as leader of the Mau Mau guerrillas. Dedam Kimathi, 30, is a stocky Kikuyu with a ragged black beard, a scar on his left cheek, and the middle finger missing from his huge left hand. He was once a clerk for Kenya's Shell Oil Co.; before that, he taught school. Last month a terrified African schoolboy, hiding in the rhino-haunted woods near famed Treetops Hotel,* saw his old teacher hack off the head of a Kikuyu forest guard with a panga knife. Kimathi tied the severed head to his belt, then loped off into the jungle at the head of his band of 40 Mau Maus. The Kenya government has offered -L-500 reward for Kimathi's capture.

Kenya's white settlers blame Kimathi for the recent murder of Planter Roger Ruck, his wife and six-year-old son, hacked to pieces as they strolled in their garden in their pajamas. One white policeman, a friend of the Rucks, is flushing the jungle alone, determined to get Kimathi.

The settlers plan to evict all Kikuyus from a five-mile-wide buffer zone surrounding the 12,000-ft. Aberdare Mountains--the Mau Mau stronghold. By creating a Malaya-style dead zone, patrolled day & night, the planters hope to deprive the Mau Mau of food, weapons and recruits, ultimately starve them into submission. The trouble with eviction is that the settlers themselves depend on the Kikuyus to harvest their crops, dig their wells and cook their food.

Yet eviction is underway. Thousands of Kikuyus are being bundled into boxcars and shipped to overcrowded reserves, even sitting on car roofs with arms linked so as not to fall off. One transit camp is a barbed-wire enclosure on Nakuru racecourse, where evicted Kukes are huddled together in the horses' stalls. Kenya's jails are already overflowing with an estimated 20,000 Kukes.

* The hostel, built in a commodious fig tree, where Queen Elizabeth was staying when her father died, leaving her the throne (TIME, Feb. 18, 1952).

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