KENYA WE HAVE A DUTY TO KENYA’S OPPRESSED
1958The NewsletterCliff Slaughter Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
OPP PPA PP PRA RRPOPOLPPIPPPPPPP DD A IN the columns of the Press and the speeches of British and settler politicians, the Kenya problem is presented as one of finding the best way of bringing racial understanding and a suitable degree of democracy to the people of Kenya.
The suppression of Mau Mau and the state of emergency are a ‘cleaning operation’ prior to the main task.
I once heard a Colonial District Officer from the Kikuyu area get to the bottom of the question.
“Our long-term aim has been to create among the Kikuyu a class of wage-earning agricultural workers’.
Looking back on the history of the colony, this is clearly true. The greatest problem for the European settlers was finding people to work for them.
A commission appointed in 1912 came to this conclusion:
“The reasons for the shortage of labour we considered from the evidence to be the following:
‘The wealth of certain tribes arising from the large quantity of land at their disposal, the natural fertility of these reserves, the possession of large quantities of stock and the profits of trade. It is clearly recognized that there are practically no natives who need to work for wages in order to live’. (my emphasis—C.S.)
(Cut this out and look at it whenever you ‘hear about the poverty and backwardness from which the Empire has raised the colonial peoples!).
: .
They plundered their land For the next forty years the settlers and the Government proceeded to repeat the achievements of their capitalist forefathers in eighteenth century England.
They attacked and smashed the basis of the independence