Violence in the Valley

A thousand miles south of Nairobi, the fear of spreading Mau Mauism haunts the fertile British Protectorate of Nyasaland. The colony's 4,400 Britons raise bumper crops of tea, tobacco and citrus fruits along the Shire River valley, which drains the 360-mile-long Lake Nyasa (see map). They are outnumbered more than 500-to-one by 2,500,000 Africans, whom they call "niggers" and "coons." Last week the

British in Nyasaland were faced with the most ominous outbreak of mass disobedience and rowdyism since David Livingstone, Bible in hand, discovered the lush valley 94 years ago.

Last month a British orange farmer caught two Nguru tribesmen stripping his trees. In a scuffle with police, one Nguru was killed. The violence spread. In Mala-mulo, the American Seventh-Day Adventist mission, with 200 leper patients in its hospital, was besieged by jeering tribesmen. Bands of Ngurus roamed the green countryside, chopping down telephone poles, blocking roads, stoning whites' cars. One British teagrower was seized, forced to stand still while Ngurus sharpened their pangas on the soles of his shoes and made mock passes through his hair with the knives.

Guns & Spears. At the tiny village of Chitera, Nguru tribesmen defied British authority and deposed their chieftain.

When the British marched in 40 policemen and 20 soldiers, they were met by 700 tribesmen armed with spears, clubs and bows & arrows. Tribeswomen screamed encouragement; the police fired guns and dispersed gas; the Ngurus let fly with spears and needle-tipped arrows. When it was over, two Nguru were dead, at least three wounded.

The orange thieves touched off the Nguru violence, but deeper, older antagonisms lie behind it. The Nguru tribe moved into Nyasaland some 40 years ago to escape the repressive ways of Portuguese colonizers in neighboring Mozambique. The British, newcomers themselves, gave the tribesmen squatters' rights, but insisted that in return they pay "rent" by working a fixed number of hours each week on the white men's plantations. Last year, without warning, the colonial government increased the work quota.

On top of that came the British plan to merge Nyasaland with its neighbors, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, to form one big Central African Federation (TIME, Feb. 9). Africans opposed it, preferring distant Colonial Office rule to rule by Southern Rhodesia's white colonials, and fearing that federation would enable the whites to grab more land. A few "safeguards" for the Negroes were written into the Federation constitution, but the nationalist-minded Nyasaland African Congress was not satisfied.

"Chifwamba." The Congress, dedicated to passive resistance, was almost as surprised as the authorities by the violence in Nguru land. But it was quick to capitalize on the trouble to press its own campaign against federation. Its leader is 43-year-old Hastings Banda, who left Nyasaland 21 years ago, got a U.S. education (University of Chicago), makes his home in London's Buckingham Palace Road but keeps in close touch with Ny-asaland's native politicians. Most of the chieftains back Banda's Congress (those who don't are being deposed, like the headman at Chitera) and listen to his admonitions to resist but not to kill.

But in the backlands, other voices are rousing the natives. Secret societies, which have survived years of missionaries' efforts to imprint white customs on the Nyasa black, are busily at work. The jungle is noisy with the beat of tom-toms and the sound of witch doctors crying, Chifwambal It means "Europeans are eating Africans." London professes to be little worried by the rumbles, and one Colonial Office man, obviously proud of his talent as a phrasemaker, spoke of "a tempest in a teagarden." But British planters, who have evacuated their women & children to the market town of Blantyre, remember that London once classified Kenya's Mau Mau as a "minor incident."

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