Mau Mau in the Cathedral

In the blue-black darkness of an African night last week, a gang of Mau Mau warriors crept out of the squalid shantytown where the huge Negro majority of Nairobi's population lives, and moved, unseen, into the heart of the white city. It was Sunday evening, and the sexton had locked the doors of the Anglican cathedral after the evening service, but the Mau Mau broke in and gathered in a group in the chancel. They splashed water from the font for more than an hour in a weird pagan ceremony performed at an altar that faces Mt. Kenya (17,040 ft.). The mountain is the Mau Mau's sacred symbol, and British officers who investigated concluded that the terrorists had been ordaining a new Mau Mau general for the Nairobi area.

The brazenness of this latest gesture served only to disguise the bleakness of the Mau Mau's present condition. Twelve thousand British and African troops have cordoned off the main Mau Mau bands in the tangled forests of Mt. Kenya and the Aberdare range. At upcountry towns like Nyeri (pop. 2,500), stores are now selling more groceries than barbed wire--the opposite of the situation one year ago. Nairobi's Armed Sitters Ltd., a babysitting service that once guaranteed 45-caliber protection for the settlers' children, has folded for lack of business.

The cost of the improvement comes high, and most of it has been borne by the confused and bewildered Africans who outnumber Kenya's 40,000 whites 150 to 1. Since the beginning of the "emergency," Mau Mau have killed 68 whites, 30 of them civilians, and 1,400 Africans, most of them Kikuyu. British security forces have killed 8,000 Mau Mau, hanged 844 and jailed some 70,000 half of whom are mere "suspects." So far the British strategy has been almost exclusively military: white settler extremists denounce as "appeasement" all government attempts to win over the African population by such political measures as land reform and relaxing the color bar.

But with the "emergency" 2 1/2 years old bleeding the colony at the rate of $90,000 a day, the wisest heads in Kenya are coming to the conclusion that reform as well as repression, is indispensable

Against diehard opposition, burly Michael Blundell, Minister Without Portfolio, and spokesman for the liberal whites, has founded a United Country Party, which looks, eventually, to a geniuine multiracial government and a fairer deal for the blacks.

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