The Passing Show: As such (1961)

The Passing Show Column from the April 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

As such

The two American RB-47 airmen who were released by Russia recently after being shot down over the Barents Sea gave their own stories to reporters at an American air force base. They said that they had returned the fire of Russian fighter planes. One of the reporters recalled that previous American reports of the incident had claimed that the aircraft was unarmed. The airmen replied:

The aircraft, as such, was not armed with an offensive weapon of any sort. We carried two 20-millimetre automatic cannon which were mounted aft, pointing to the rear. This was a defensive weapon purely to protect us from attack from the rear. 

How automatic cannon, whether pointing up, down, forwards or sideways, can be anything else than offensive weapons was not made clear. And what exactly does “as such” mean in the first sentence? An aircraft carrying automatic cannon is armed as an aircraft, not as a submarine.

But merely to point out the absurdities of the airmen's statement would be to over-simplify the matter. For these airmen are only repeating what their masters, the American ruling class— along with every other ruling class—have always said. No country has a "Ministry of Attack”. No country produces "Offence Estimates". No country, to judge from its own propaganda machine, ever attacks another. In all wars, each country simply defends itself against the others: the enemy is always the aggressor. And if the hydrogen bomb is claimed as a "defensive" weapon, who can blame the two airmen for claiming that their automatic cannon were not offensive?

Jomo Kenyatta

Sir Patrick Renison. the Governor of Kenya, recently refused to release Jomo Kenyatta and gave two reasons for his decision. They were:

The political campaign for Kenyatta's release, “which has roused many emotions and which has not allowed divisions and personal fears a natural atmosphere in which to diminish. 

Kenyatta's refusal to “make any statement or reveal his thinking about the great issues which Kenya is facing." in spite of the fact that six Ministers, including three Africans, had visited him in August.

These reasons (given in the Times. 2-3-61) are remarkable. Leaving out the long words, the first one means simply that the Governor of Kenya isn’t going to release Kenyatta because the Kenya Africans have made it plain that they want him to be released. The Governor can hardly expect anyone to believe that he would have released Kenyatta if there hadn't been a campaign demanding it.

The second reason is even more extraordinary. Dictators have often put people in jail, or kept them in exile, because they have ”made statements” or "revealed their thinking" about public issues; this must be the first time a political leader has been kept in exile because he refused to take up a political stand

When thieves fall out

The Socialist position is straightforward. We are opposed to any attack on democratic freedoms, whether it is jailing for political reasons, restrictions on the right to vote, or any other weapon in the colonialists' armoury. But we are not blind to the real nature of the struggle in Kenya, it is the old struggle between land and capital. On the one side are in Kenya, it is the old struggle between capitalists, whether they are those who hope to establish full-scale industrial capitalism in Kenya, or those who have already established it in Great Britain. We welcome any extension of democracy in Kenya which this struggle between two rival propertied classes has produced or will produce. But we know that democracy is never safe in a capitalist society. That has been seen in Germany, in Italy, in Spain, in Czechoslovakia and the rest. Only in a Socialist society will democracy be safe from overthrow.

Out of my way

An irate letter-writer in the Sunday Express recently told how he had parked his car beside a parking meter in accordance with the instructions on the meter, went to the theatre, and returned to find his car vanished.

Eventually, after very considerable frustration annoyance, and expense, I found it at one of the police yards miles away. 1 was ordered to pay £2 to recover it—which I refused to do. The only explanation I could get from the police was that I had committed the offence of being on the royal route to the cinema— although how I was expected to know this is beyond my power of reasoning.

The removal of one’s car. however, is only one of the minor inconveniences that may follow if one gets in the way of a royal progress. It could be much worse. In Katmandu, for the visit of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to Nepal, a new road was built from the airport to the royal guest house. It took 14.000 men over a month. It wasn't a question here of simply removing cars to make room for royalty: whole houses were bulldozed down. Even churches were not sacrosanct. "One temple was shifted 30 yards and worshippers one morning found the principal idol hanging on the end of a crane " (The Observer, 26-2-61). So much for the respect paid to religion when it conflicts with the convenience of the ruling class. Religion, of course, is maintained by ruling classes because it helps to keep the rest of us in our places. Perhaps it is naive for us to expect a ruling class to take its own propaganda too seriously.

Alwyn Edgar

The liberation of Africa (1978)

From the October 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

It might as well be made clear at once. The title of this article is black humour. In the whole of this mighty continent (Europe would fit into a corner), from Cairo to the Cape, there is hardly a square mile of liberty—even of the capitalist brand such as exists in places like Britain where the proletariat is at least able to organise itself into trade unions and political parties (and where the SPGB can publish, and you can read, this journal).

For a hundred years and more, almost the entire continent was carved up among the powers of Europe, mainly England and France but also including Portugal, Belgium, Italy and pre-1914 Germany). The European imperialists had little difficulty in ousting the native rulers who were in many cases barely out of the Stone Age—but who, like all ruling classes, had treated the subject classes with horrifying oppression and exploitation. It would be anybody’s guess whether the mass of the African peoples were subjected to more vicious exploitation under the Europeans than they were under their own native rulers (some of whom, among other delights, were always ready to sell their subjects for transportation to slavery). However, there grew up in the African countries (just as in India and South America) a movement to liberate the Africans from the European capitalists—a movement which was eagerly supported by European leftists of the Fenner Brockway ilk (it may be news to some readers that this ancient ILPer, a colleague of such as Maxton whose names sound like history lessons, is alive and well in the Lords where he occasionally pontificates about Africa without the slightest sign of realising that he spent his life helping to con the Africans from a white-ruled hell to the black-ruled hell that they have to endure now). We in the SPGB always did our best to point out that nationalism, whether in Ireland or India or Africa, was simply a trap for the working class and that those who laid down their lives for this cause were merely substituting a native ruling class for a foreign one. With the kind of "benefits” that are made so horrifyingly clear every time you open a paper or switch on the news.

It may be worthwhile to have a very brief look at a few of the dozens of countries where nationalism has won the day. In the north there is Egypt where the lot of the mass of the people is at least as degraded as it was in British days and where, only a year ago, President Sadat rewarded the poor devils who crossed the Suez Canal in the teeth of Israeli guns in the Yom Kippur War by decreeing a massive increase in the prices of the poor basic foods that they subsisted on—with no comparable increase in wages. As these workers were already only just about subsisting, there were riots in Cairo and Alexandria which were put down with at least as much brutality as was used by the British. And the "ring-leaders” (the name the ruling class always gives to workers who have the cheek to kick against the pricks) are still rotting in gaol—as though rotting in the normal poverty of Cairo’s slums is not bad enough. That should teach the Egyptian workers to fight their masters’ wars against Israel. (Sadly, there is no reason to think it will. Any more than in the case of British workers.)

Sadat recently had the impudence to hold a referendum where the voters were given the chance to say they thought there was too much political freedom! And, according to Sadat, said it. There is of course no freedom whatsoever in the land of Egyptian “Socialism”. (Almost all these countries now have the nerve to call themselves socialist.) Except the freedom of a small ruling class to get inordinately rich while the people who produce the wealth live in abject poverty.

Similar conditions obtain in the other countries of the north of the continent, in the former French colonies, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Senegal, all of which have divested themselves of European rulers since the war. In all of them the position of the working-class is one of wage slavery compounded by the opposition of the native rulers to the formation of trade unions or independent political parties. One day, the workers will no doubt succeed in getting them. But meanwhile, their fate is deplorable. And as we move south of the Sahara, conditions are even more appalling. The very names of places like Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the “Central African Empire” (ruled by a murderous megalomaniac called Bokassa, formerly a soldier in the French army, another General Amin) are enough to give nightmares to anyone with the slightest knowledge of the excesses that are perpetrated there. Then we have Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo. One might have thought that the atrocities committed by King Leopold in pre-1914 days—his speciality was to cut off the hands of natives who impeded his quest for profits—would be unequalled. But the former Belgian soldier, Mobutu, who now rules in Kinshasa (formerly Leopoldville) can compare with the worst of them. And to some purpose. The fortune that he has spirited out of the country (against the day when he may have to get out in a hurry) is reputed to make him one of the richest men in the world. And this brings us to Angola with whose president, Netto, Mobutu has apparently come to terms recently after the wars and massacres that have taken place in the copper-rich province of Zaire, twice invaded recently by rebel forces stationed in Angola. Angola, like all the worst hell-holes, is now a "Marxist” state if you please. Marx repudiated Marxists in his time, but he could never have dreamt that his name would be purloined by the kind of regimes that exist in Angola and Ethiopia where mass murder and constant terror—against their own subjects, as well as against neighbouring black countries—are worthy of Genghiz Khan.

In Nigeria, the largest and potentially the richest country in the continent, once again there is not a vestige of freedom and the lot of the workers can be gauged by an item which was mentioned in the Socialist Standard some years ago but is worth repeating in the present context. The government of this rich country, which had recently finished off a war attempted secession by Biafra (and finished off around a million people by guns and starvation) had the effrontery to put an advert in that well-known liberal paper, the Guardian, calling on British capitalists to invest in factories in Nigeria where the main advantage was “the cheapest wages in Africa”—seven cents an hour. Just enough to keep a monkey in peanuts. So much for black workers in independent Africa. The black capitalists make royalty look like beggars. At the very time when Biafran workers were literally starving to death (and when all fighting had ended) the Nigerian chief, General Gowon, got married. The papers were full of the stories about planes coming in from France carrying tons of the most delectable foods—and French chefs to deal with them for the delectation of the ruling class wedding guests. Yet only a few days before this article was written, there was an article by the editor-in-chief of the Observer, Conor Cruise O’Brien, saying what a nice chap Gowon is and how graciously he accepted the coup that kicked him out—so that he could live in Hampstead on the millions he had salted away!

We can only just glance in passing at such details as the war between “Marxist” Somalia (formerly backed by “Marxist” Russia but now armed by America) and “Marxist” Ethiopia (formerly backed by America and now backed by “Marxist” Russia). Suffice it to say that thousands of poor people fight and die in places like the Danakil desert where, in temperatures that go up to 150F in the shade, life is just about on the margin even in peace time. And Kenya. Here, we have just ben regaled with the story of the funeral of M’zee, the Grand Old Man and Father of the People, Jomo Kenyatta. Some of us knew Kenyatta in the ’40s when he was in Manchester; our word for him was “four-flusher”. He played the leading rôle in getting rid of the British in Kenya so that now there is, as always, a small, exceedingly rich, black capitalist class and a mass of liberated black workers who are suffering at least as much poverty, unemployment etc. as they ever did. And let anyone who criticises the leadership beware. Even an MP who had the nerve to open his mouth in Parliament was kidnapped by Kenyatta’s guards and his body found dumped in a ravine. The Commission of Enquiry is still sitting!

Still, these poor Third World countries do get aid from places like Sweden; a herd of magnificent Swedish cattle, each beast being worth a hundred men in hard cash, was donated to improve the Kenyan stock. No doubt it improved the stock on the farm belonging to Kenyatta’s sister where the entire herd ended up. Then, a year or two later, a proud announcement was made by Tiny Rowland the chairman of Lonhro, the British firm trading mainly in Africa (the actual “unacceptable face of capitalism”—Heath): "We have appointed the first black man onto our Board”. Great news for the downtrodden proletariat. Especially when the new director was the son of the same Kenyatta’s same sister. How many African workers, conned by leftists of all colours, were made to suffer privation and even death in rebellions like the Mau Mau so that a few blacks should own the country instead of a few whites? And who will win the election to succeed Kenyatta? Nobody. No election, see.

All of which leaves us but little space to deal with the appalling state of affairs in Rhodesia which is now filling the papers (not to mention the cemeteries). The white capitalists have undoubtedly treated the black people in unspeakable fashion ever since the days of the unspeakable Rhodes. And now there are massacres of blacks and whites so as to sort out which black leaders will come out on top in the struggle for power when the whites are dethroned. Which will get the black Mercedes and which the hearses. There is no more principle involved than in the struggle between A1 Capone and Jack Diamond —or Stalin and Trotsky. At the time of writing, the favourite for the role of Stalin is a gang-leader called Mugabe, backed by Nyerere of Tanzania (another black “socialist” dictator who has an enormous number of political prisoners rotting away in his gaols). Mugabe has been most honest for a politician. He has made it perfectly clear that there will be no freedom to oppose him once he gets power. One man one vote —for Mugabe, or else. He has also made it clear that there is a grisly fate awaiting those who are now opposing him—which means huge numbers of ordinary blacks as well as leaders (and ordinary whites). And when there was a debate in the Commons about a dreadful massacre of missionaries and their families, a loud-mouthed leftie, a former actor called Faulds, blamed the massacre on those who failed to give “one man one vote”. Knowing full well Mugabe and Co have declined to take part in elections. Saying in effect: We have got the guns. We are going to take power on our terms and to hell with democracy. And if a lot of “our" blacks are going to get killed in the process, who cares?

And while on that note it is apposite to mention the role of our former “socialist” Premier, Sir Harold Wilson. When sanctions were first proclaimed against the Smith regime many years ago, he boasted they would bring down the white regime “in weeks, not months". And the British navy have mounted a blockade outside Beira ever since. And now even a paper like the Observer (Sep 3) calls Wilson a hypocrite because he was at that very time conniving in supplies of oil—the heart of the matter—being pumped into Rhodesia by British government-owned BP in order to defeat those very sanctions. Still, as the paper says, some hypocrisy is essential in government; it is merely a matter of how much! Wilson went too far! And the dreadful thing is that the majority of workers, of all colours, just swallow the hypocrisy of capitalism as though no other system is possible.

L. E. Weidberg

50 Years Ago: Jomo Kenyatta (2011)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir Patrick Renson, the Governor of Kenya, recently refused to release Jomo Kenyatta and gave two reasons for his decision. They were:

  “The political campaign for Kenyatta’s release, ‘which has roused many emotions and which has not allowed divisions and personal fears a natural atmosphere in which to diminish.’
Kenyatta’s refusal to ‘make any statement or reveal his thinking about the great issues which Kenya is facing,’ in spite of the fact that six Ministers, including three Africans, had visited him in August’…”

Dictators have often put people in jail, or kept them in exile, because they have “made statements” or “revealed their thinking” about public issues; this must be the first time a political leader has been kept in exile because he refused to take up a political stand

The Socialist position is straightforward. We are opposed to any attack on democratic freedoms, whether it is jailing for political reasons, restrictions on the right to vote, or any other weapon in the colonialists’ armoury. But we are not blind to the real nature of the struggle in Kenya, it is the old struggle between land and capital. It is the old struggle between capitalists, whether they are those who hope to establish full-scale industrial capitalism in Kenya, or those who have already established it in Great Britain. We welcome any extension of democracy in Kenya which this struggle between two rival propertied classes has produced or will produce. But we know that democracy is never safe in a capitalist society. That has been seen in Germany, in Italy, in Spain, in Czechoslovakia and the rest. Only in a Socialist society will democracy be safe from overthrow.

(from ‘The Passing Show’, Socialist Standard, April 1961)

News in Review: Too Simple (1964)

The News in Review column from the February 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

AT HOME: Too simple

Peter Simple, the Daily Telegraph engaging columnist, is one of the few unrepentent reactionaries still in business. The bluest of Tories now profess to be progressives, but not Simple. He hates science, looks with suspicion upon anything labelled as progress.

His mythical community of Stretchford is a typical new town where masses of workers have been dumped and where their standards of culture and ignorance have taken control. His satirising of the popular press, through the medium of Jack Moron, is positively savage.

It is almost inevitable that, because he flinches at ugliness, because he probes constantly for left wing humbug, because he hates mob ignorance, Peter Simple should sometimes hit a nail on the head. This is what he wrote on December 18th last:

  Teenagery is an industry. It brings immense profits to those engaged in it. It is as much a typical feature of our civilisation as the indiscriminate use of agricultural poisons, the destruction of the seemliness and beauty of our surroundings, the plague of motor-cars. None of these things would be a problem if there were no money to be made out of them. It is useless to appeal to the better nature of those who profit from the teenage industry.

Simple has no answer to the problem but then he is not the sort of man from whom we expect answers. Indictment is his field: “There is no money,” he says, “in decency.”

It is too much to expect the Daily Telegraph to benefit from their columnist's flash of insight and realise that the ugliness and the futility of the world is caused precisely by the fact that all production is carried on because someone hopes to make a profit from it. But that is the truth of the matter.

As long as capitalism lives there will be the soulless wastes of Stretchford and there will be the sort of people who gobble up the spew of Jack Moron. And, presumably, there will be Peter Simple to look on it with a weary, irascible eye, hating it all but nevertheless supporting it.


ABROAD: Kenya, too

Everyone should now be accustomed to the nauseating acts which are played out whenever another country gets its independence. The celebrations among the people of the country, who appear to be happy in the delusion that they have gained something from the substitution of one set of rulers by another. The extreme nationalism of the new government — often imposed with a heavy hand. The back slapping and banqueting, between men who were only recently denounced as insatiable terrorists and the representatives of the government which so denounced them. All very familiar and all very sickening.

So it was when Kenya became independent, last December. An estimated £400,000 was spent on the celebrations, including a Miss Uhuru beauty contest which Mr. Jomo Kenyatta left in a huff because the band did not play the Kenya National Anthem when he arrived. Persuaded to return, the new Prime Minister warned that non-Africans must respect the African personality (wasn’t there a man, before the war, who used to say the same sort of thing about the Aryan personality, at big rallies in Nuremburg and other German cities?) and said that if the band had not been Africans they would have been deported.

The Duke of Edinburgh attended a garden party where four former Mau Mau generals also turned up, but the Duke did not leave because his job was to stay and be chummy. Mr. Kenyatta had his photograph taken dancing with the rather bewildered looking daughter of Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys, who had presumably been briefed by daddy to do the honours to the ex Mau Mau leader. Mr. Kenyatta received a telegram from Sir Alex Douglas-Home which looked forward to welcoming him at the next Commonwealth Prime Minister’s Conference in London.

Now with all this mateyness flying about nobody would think that not so long ago Kenyatta and the other Mau Mau leaders were reviled by the British government as primitive savages, heads of a secret society with disgusting initiation rites, terrorists who delighted in orgies of violence. This is the sort of propaganda which was put out in the past about other nationalist movements —about EOKA in Cyprus and the IRA in Ireland, for example.

In each case it eventually suited the British ruling class to come to terms with the nationalists. The propaganda changed and the nationalist leaders were welcomed to the circle of international rulers; their past, no matter how bloody, was forgotten and they soon became respected men. Kenyatta is only the latest of yesterday’s enemies to receive this treatment.

The state of Kenya is beset with all the usual problems of a newly independent African country and the future of its people is not bright. Whatever hardships they may suffer, we may be sure that there will always be plenty of official hypocrisy for them to consume.


BUSINESS: Buses for Cuba

It was not surprising that Washington expressed its regrets at the contract under which the Leyland Motor Corporation will supply four hundred buses to Cuba. Castro is perhaps America’s biggest and blackest bogy man at the present.

But equally it is not surprising that Leyland are eager to do business with Castro. They are no exception to the rule that production under capitalism is carried on for profit and they are ready to send their goods anywhere, if they think that the return is good enough.

Leyland are not, of course, the only vehicle manufacturers with this idea—the Cuban deal was settled in the face of competition from German, French, Japanese, Spanish and Czech salesmen. The struggle for export sales, in this case, is obviously at least as fierce as for the home market.

Governments, as a rule, encourage their industries to export and often offer all manner of financial incentives to them to do so. there are exceptions to this, though—when the overall interests of a country's ruling class make it inadvisable for them to trade with another country, a government will often restrict or forbid exports to that country.

So it is at the moment with the U.S.A., which has a long list of countries on its black list, including Cuba.

But some industries chafe under these restrictions. In this country, for example, there is more than one pressure group which advocates the development of trade with the Eastern bloc, even at the risk of upsetting the Americans. These groups arc not interested in the politics of the thing: they are concerned only with the fact that the Iron Curtain countries and China might well be a very profitable market for them to exploit.

There are at present no British restrictions upon non-strategic trade with Cuba and, for Leylands, selling buses there has for a long time been an attractive proposition. Over eight hundred have been sold since the war and Leylands are hoping for another order for a thousand. The firm also say that the Cubans pay their bills promptly and reliably, which just about seems to clinch it as far as the bus makers’ interests go.

And if these interests clash with the wishes of the State Department, that only goes to show what a confused system we live under. Capitalism's alliances are supposed to make the world a safer and more settled place. But even within those alliances there are all manner of divided interests, of stresses and strains and—often—open rifts.

The Passing Show: Mr. Wilson on class (1963)

The Passing Show Column from the August 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Wilson on class

In a recent interview published in the Observer, Harold Wilson, Leader of the Labour Party, made some extraordinary statements. Among other things he said:

“The Labour Party must represent the whole country. If you mean what class do I think I am—well, what is the answer? Elementary school, Oxford common room, what does it add up to? There are millions of people—trained, skilled, professional—for whom these phrases about class are becoming more and more meaningless. The white coat, the growing technological character of modern industry is making some of the old battlegrounds unreal.”

Wilson apparently thinks that if a worker can speak grammatically, or do a skilled job, he is no longer a worker. It seems that in some unexplained way the worker can, in Wilson's view, become a capitalist by taking English lessons at night school. What a maze of unreality must surround a man who thinks that wearing a white coat instead of overalls alters a man's class position in society. And the statement that "the Labour Party must represent the whole country "' is merely ridiculous when put against the fact of the vast chasm which yawns between the ten per cent, of haves and the ninety per cent, of have-nots.

There are no prizes for the answer to Wilson's question about what class in society he is in. In fact, the answer is here—if he has enough property to live without working, he is a member of the upper class; if not, he is a worker. There are also no prizes for the answer to this question—in whose class interest is Wilson working? With his talk about "representing the whole country" and his denial that the class struggle even exists, the answer is crystal clear: Wilson is working in the interest of the capitalist class.

Too much

Earlier in the same series, Wilson actually committed himself to the following remarks:

“Quite honestly, I've never read Das Kapital. I got only as far as page two— that's where the footnote is nearly a page long, I felt that two sentences of main text and a page of footnote were too much.”

This is despite his own claim that "economics became his field."

Mr. Wilson was apparently in such a haze that he could not distinguish page two from page fifty-two, or the beginning of a chapter from the end of it. The first footnotes in Das Kapital which might reduce the main text to this extent are the ones that concern Ricardo, at the end of chapter one, on commodities. In the edition nearest to hand (William Glaisher, London, 1909) these footnotes begin at page fifty-two. In no conceivable edition could they come on page two.

But what a pity that Wilson was not able to overcome the tremendous hurdle presented to his comprehension by some rather long footnotes (he was, after all, only an Oxford lecturer on economics). He might have learned that there is more to a man's position in society than the colour of the coat he wears. He might even have learned that there are two classes in society—an owning class and a working class. One feels that he might not have survived the shock.

Fruits of victory

Colonial "freedom fighters," leaders of "independence movements," run so true to form as soon as their countries have achieved their "independence" that it becomes almost farcical. Once they themselves are in power, once the native capitalist class has ousted the imperialists, their tune always changes immediately and abruptly. They always make the same speech to warn all the suckers who supported  the "independence movements," thinking it would make a radical change, that the workers' position will be exactly what it was before; only the nationality of the exploiters has changed.

Jomo Kenyatta is the latest to make this speech (The Times, 29/5/63):

We are not going to compromise our independence by begging for assistance. The Government will make it quite clear that our progress, our hopes, our ambitions will be fulfilled only if we have hard work from every citizen.

So now the struggle is over, we've all fought hard, victory has been won: and your reward is—a lot more hard work, and don't you forget it.

And yet the workers all over the world still go on falling for these confidence tricks.

It's easy for some

Two small girls, one none, the other twelve, are "to share in a 25,000,000 development scheme in Hampstead, London. The investment has been given to them by their father, 42-year-old property man Mr. Peter Robins (Sunday Express, 28/4/63). By the time the girls are respectively nineteen and sixteen, they should have an income of about 10,000 per year each.

The way to get into the capitalist class, the capitalist class tell us, is to work hard and save. But the capitalists themselves always seem to start off by being capitalists. It's certainly a lot quicker when Daddy gives you such a lovely start, isn't it?

Alwyn Edgar

Report on Mau Mau (1960)

Book Review from the July 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau Mau, carried out by Mr. F. D. Corfield, has now been issued as a Government Blue Book. It contains the following statistics of casualties up to the end of 1956

Terrorists: Killed 11,503. Captured wounded 1,035. Captured in action 1,550. Arrested 26,625. Surrendered 2,714.

Security Forces: Killed 167. Wounded 1,582.

Loyal Civilians: Killed 1,877 (including 32 Europeans). Wounded 978.

The cost of the emergency up to June 30th, 1959, is shown as £55,585,424. before the massive technical and numerical superiority of the British Government Security Forces finally overwhelmed this African uprising, all the violent measures of ruthless repression were called into use, even down to interrogation under torture and the hangman busy in the concentration camp.

Mr. F. D. Corfield, who is a former Governor of Khartoum Province, has produced a report which points a sanctimonious finger of blame at almost everyone except the British Government and the narrow interests that they represent. As an apology for the British Government, as a self righteous justification that might confuse and misdirect, the Corfield Report does a serviceable job. But as an objective historical account of the cause and development of a particularly ugly piece of human history the report is useless and in every way unworthy of its title.

The main contention of the report is that leading Africans, and in particular Jomo Kenyatta, encouraged by sympathy from many outside sources, and unwittingly aided by the facilities provided by a "liberal" government, perpetuated rebellion as a manifestation of their personal malevolence. The report says, "Without the freedom afforded them by a liberal government Jomo Kenyatta and his associates, would have been unable to preach their calculated hymn of hate." Mr. Corfield is completely convinced that the government of Kenya was pre-occupied with "...the material progress of the peoples of Kenya." He says, "One has only to read the annual reports of the provincial commissioners to realise the immense efforts made by officials and unofficials to raise the material and moral welfare of the Africans."

These are the terms in which the report ignores the naked and cruel self interest of the white landowners' mission in East Africa. For a rational society of controlled purpose to be confronted by a primitive social grouping over which it held immense technical superiority would involve problems of a most delicate sociological nature. Its approach would be scientific procedures, its motives would be humanistic. But when the envoys of European propertied society landed in East Africa to preach the Gospel of Self Interest and predatory exploitation they were interested only in smashing the social organisation of the African inhabitants and making them servants and labourers. Here surely was the bed rock basis of the Mau Mau violence. Mau Mau, though loathsome in form, arose inevitably from the indignities, the injustice and the sheer primary poverty of the African's plight. This is well known and the evidence for it is even contained in the government's own Colonial Publications. In contrast with the hypocritical Corfield report the African Labour Efficiency Survey, 1949 (Colonial Research Publications, No. 3) is a realistic appraisal of the problems of making the African a more efficient and effective wage worker.

In viewing the East African situation (in 1947) it says, "The East African comes from a tribal economy in which his human needs of sustenance can still very largely be met . . . He has not, to any significant degree been detribalised . . . The East African has not been bent under the discipline of organised work. In his primitive economy, the steady, continuous labour is carried out by women. In respect of the few working activities which in the past occupied him he was free and independent. Though the tasks he performed were prescribed by tribal law and custom, he could do them in his own way and at his own speed, for him time had no economic value. The work he did for others was not for wages, but was one of the duties arising out of his relationship with his fellows. He gave satisfaction by his work and derived a measure of contentment from it. In these circumstances he was willing to do what was required of him. To work steadily and continuously at the the will of another was one of the hard lessons he had to learn when he began to work for Europeans."

Even so, the report reveals the positive measures taken by the Kenya Government to coerce Africans into seeking wage employment. In the first instance the Kikuyu and other East African tribes were enclosed within small reserve areas which to an agricultural people was disastrous. In the terms of the report, South Nyeri, one of the three component districts comprising the Kikuyu reserved lands, had a population estimated in 1944 to be 542 to the square mile. This population density is probably among the highest in the world. As well as this the Government instituted a hut tax and poll tax, payable only directly in cash. Thus within two simple but brutal measures the authorities began to reduce the African from a dignified tribesman with a stake in his community to a dispossessed wage worker forced into white landowners' service or into industrial undertakings.

The report dwells in some detail on many reasons for the African workers' so-called inefficiency, including lack of education and poverty. It says, "Perhaps in some respects the greatest handicap is physical and arises from malnutrition." On the question of wages this report is equally forthright, " . . . it is clear that the wage plan does not ensure wages adequate to enable an African residing in any of the towns to bring up a family." Again: "It is therefore with more confidence that the whole survey team, including the medical and nutritional investigators, record their reasoned observation that they found much discontent concerning wages in relation to cost of living."

Apart from laying bare the ruthlessness of of British Colonial policy, even in modern times, the report contained a disquieting warning. Quoting a doctor who lived in East Africa for two decades it said "A doctor . . . can assert that the cause of the poor work output is more mental than physical. Malnutrition and disease play their part but, sitting and talking with the workers in their homes, one became aware of a very grave discontent which, unless constructively guided and relieved, may well threaten civil peace."

It was the violent repression that Mau Mau provoked that enabled British interests to finally destroy the Kikuyu and other tribal structures. The way is now clear for the rapid conversion of East Africans into wage workers. Mau Mau retaliation was bloody and horrible, primitive political struggles often are, but undoubtedly British colonial policy first provoked the violence.

Pieter Lawrence