Burning Spears

For 58 days the little red schoolhouse had served as a courtroom. Surrounded by barbed wire, guarded by armored cars and lines of soldiers, with reconnaissance planes flying overhead, the court was ready to pass sentence.

Among the six accused Kikuyu tribesmen, one stood out: a paunchy, bearded man of about 50, with slightly bloodshot eyes, who wore a giant bloodstone ring on his left hand. He affected a kind of personal uniform: an open-neck, rust-colored sport shirt, crepe-soled suede boots, a leather windbreaker and dark brown corduroy trousers fastened with a gaily embroidered native belt. In Kenya such belts are called kenyattas, and from his fondness for wearing them, the man had derived his last name. His first name had been of his own choosing, the Kikuyu word for an unsheathed dagger or a poised, burning spear: Jomo.

Jomo Kenyatta, a proud, able, warped and lonely man, is a symbol of the sad conflict of civilization and savagery, a leader of his people who used the skills civilization taught him to give savagery a new kind of power. He was an orphan, a ten-year-old goatherd, when he was taken in by a Church of Scotland mission in Kiambu and treated for a spinal disease. The mission educated him, baptized him Johnstone Kamau. After this he learned carpentry, edited the first Kikuyu-language newspaper and studied black magic. "My grandfather was a seer and a magician," he later wrote, "and in traveling about with him and carrying his bag of equipment, I served a kind of apprenticeship in the principles of the art." In 1929 he was sent to London to present Kikuyu grievances to the British government. His view: "Africans are not hostile to Western civilization as such . . . but they are in an intolerable position when the European invasion destroys the very basis of their old tribal way of life, and yet offers them no place in the new society except as serfs."

At the London School of Economics, Kenyatta studied anthropology and fell among Marxist intellectuals. He made several trips to Moscow. In 1934 he shared an apartment with Paul Robeson while the American Communist was making Sanders of the River. He married an English schoolteacher, Edna Grace Clarke, and had a son named Peter, but abandoned both when he returned to Kenya in 1946. By then he was a powerful man among the million-strong Kikuyu. He formed the Kenya African Union and established schools in which the teaching was based on old Kikuyu tribal lore and customs, including black magic.

Last week, in the little red schoolhouse in Kapenguria, Jomo Kenyatta stood up for sentence, accused of having used his influence to foment unrest among the Kikuyu tribes, and of "managing the Mau Mau," the secret terrorist organization which has murdered 542 uncooperative Kikuyu and nine whites in the past year. Said Kenyatta, in a soft, purring voice: "We have not received justice . . . None of us would condone the mutilation of human beings. We have families of our own."

Wearily, Judge Ransley S. Thacker answered: "I don't believe you. I think that soon after you came back from Europe, you began to organize this Mau Mau society with the object of driving out the Europeans and of killing them if necessary. I am satisfied that the master mind behind this plan was yours, and that you took the fullest advantage of your power over your people and their primitive instincts."

The sentence: seven years hard labor for Kenyatta and his five accomplices. After the sentencing, Judge Thacker was flown to safety in Uganda, a trip of 500 miles over forests and mountains where lurk the Mau Mau, who have sworn to kill him with their burning spears.

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