The United States Arms the Settlers?

Abstract

William Baldwin had been in Kenya fighting the resistance for fifteen months and he was frustrated. The British Army was a “damned nuisance in the jungles of Kenya,” he complained and being a U.S. national he thought more of his kind were necessary if the settler regime were not to collapse. As he saw it, the idea of a departure of the settlers would be like saying “the United States [should] be turned back to the American Indian.” As he saw it, there was no reason whatsoever to give any quarter in squashing “the Mice”—this “army of apes that comprised the Mau Mau.” This was “grim, horrible, necessary work”; thus, “in order to deal effectively with the Mau Mau problem, a number of concepts held dear in democratic societies must be discarded...” And while they were at it, they needed to smash the Asian population too: “the average Asian was utterly useless,” why “some had even been caught supplying the Mau Mau with guns, ammunition, food and clothing...” Certainly, apartheid laws were a necessity: “if the European prefers to eat or view a movie without the proximity of a smelly, unclean native who may scratch himself and spit on the floor, that is his privilege.”