Mau Mau and all that

Surprisingly (but maybe not to those who knew him well) it was the Duke of Devonshire who, having been appointed colonial secretary in Bonar Law’s government, issued a White Paper in 1923 about the paramountcy of African interests in the then colony of Kenya:

Primarily Kenya is an African territory and HMG thinks it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.

And yet writing 30-odd years later in his monumental volume Inside Africa in 1954, John Gunther summarised the division of Kenya’s arable land between Europeans and Africans in two pithy sentences:

Roughly Kenya has 68,700 square miles of arable land. A minute handful of Europeans has 16,000 or 24 per cent of this; five and a half million Africans have to get by as best they can on the rest.