In December 1960 de Gaulle toured Algeria, encountering extreme hostility from the colons, and a warm welcome from many Muslims. Israeli intelligence tipped off de Gaulle’s security service regarding one of the four active plots to kill him that week. Angry pieds noirs fought pitched battles with the police in Algiers and Oran. Much to their surprise, on Sunday 11 December a mass of green banners and ululating Arab women indicated the recrudescence of the FLN in the Algiers kasbah. The demonstration turned violent, with randomly selected Europeans having their throats slit, while an Arab mob wrecked the Great Synagogue.
The long-awaited coup was launched on 10 April 1961 when German Foreign Legionnaires arrested the army Commander-in-Chief and a minister of public works, who were visiting from Paris. It proved to be almost laughably misconceived. Challe so despised the radicalized colons that he excluded them from participation, alienating Jouhaud, who was of colon stock. Godard had failed to square many commanders outside Algiers, imagining that they would follow the plotters’ lead, but in the end only 25,000 of more than 400,000 French troops in Algeria supported the putschists.
De Gaulle was no Pflimlin. Tanks were stationed around the Assembly and government ministries, and trucks on airport runways, but while some of his supporters succumbed to panic at the prospect of paratroops descending on Paris, de Gaulle simply remarked: ‘Yes, Fidel Castro would be here, but not Challe.’ He went on television to deliver one of the great speeches of his life, imploring French men and women to aid him in this hour of emergency when he became France.40 Thumping the desk for emphasis, he poured scorn on the gaggle of retired generals who in their ‘frenzy’ had embarked on this Latin-style pronunciamiento, like a lot of uniformed clowns. The main impact of the speech, however, was on conscript soldiers who heard it on transistor radios in Algeria; these youths had long resented the swagger of the Paras and Legionnaires, who regarded themselves as real soldiers and the rest as milksops. Realizing that the putsch had failed, Challe surrendered, while Jouhaud, Salan and Zeller fled. The green berets of the 1st Colonial Parachutists blew up their ammunition stores, departing to the strains of Edith Piaf’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’. Challe, and Zeller, who surrendered after a week on the run, received fifteen-year jail sentences and loss of rank and pensions. Salan, Jouhaud and Godard were sentenced to death in absentia. Hundreds of more junior officers were purged from the military list. 1st Colonial Parachutists were disbanded and ceased to exist.
Lost Soldiers
Shortly before the coup, de Gaulle had used his banker friend Georges Pompidou to offer the FLN a unilateral ceasefire together with talks about Algerian independence. These began at Evian on Lake Geneva in March 1961 but failed in the face of the uncompromising Belkacem Krim. Almost inexplicably, Camille Blanc, the young Mayor of Evian, was assassinated as these talks started. He was one of the earliest victims of the OAS, a terrorist organization that incorporated military deserters who fled after the failed putsch with existing colon counter-terrorist groups. Its earliest declarations of intent were apocalyptic and Spenglerian:
Frenchmen of every background,
The final hour of France in Algeria is the last hour of France in the world, the last hour of France in the West.
Today everything is ready to be lost or saved. Everything depends on our willpower. Everything depends on the National Army.
We know that the ultimate battle approaches. We know that, to win this fight, there must be total unity and absolute discipline. Moreover, all the underground national movements and their resistance organizations have unanimously resolved to unite their forces and their efforts in a single fighting force.41
Total unity and absolute discipline hardly characterized an organization riven with internecine conflicts. Ironically, the OAS modelled itself on the FLN, although another model was the Zionist Haganah and Irgun.42 Jouhaud and Salan were notionally in command, with Godard responsible for strategy, but in reality the killers ran the show – men like Delta Commando leader Roger Degueldre, a veteran of Dien Bien Phu. People the OAS deemed collaborators were very publicly stabbed or killed in drive-by shootings. Plastiques (bombs made of plastic explosives) rocked Algiers, Bône and Oran, as well as Paris.43 The colon political leadership used such techniques as pirate radio broadcasts or interrupting television services with their own news bulletins, and a series of ‘weeks’ involving banging pots and pans, flying streamers or paralysing traffic to mobilize the settler population.44
Algiers became a ghost town after dark, with rival gangs of murderers roving the streets. The age of gunmen dropped as wired-up teenagers stalked their victims. On a single day, 3 January 1962, the OAS killed 127 Muslims and left hundreds more wounded. These killings became so normal that pedestrians simply stepped round the corpses lying in the streets. The violence spread to Paris, where, on a single night in January 1962, there were eighteen explosions. On 7 February that year a young law student tried to assassinate the writer and Gaullist Culture Minister André Malraux, but instead his plastique blinded and disfigured Delphine Renard, a four-year-old girl, in the apartment below. More were killed when a demonstration denouncing the attacks turned into a police riot. The incessant terrorist atrocities brought the French and the FLN back to the negotiating table, this time in the Chalet du Yéti, a glorified garage for snowploughs high up in the Jura, before reverting to Evian. De Gaulle was now determined to wash his hands of the Algerian problem, even if that meant forgoing Saharan oil and gas, whose reserves (and the costs of accessing them) were a matter of guesswork at the time. While these talks inched towards their denouement, the number of killings in Algeria rose to thirty or forty a day. By this time both the civilian government and the military command were in fortified redoubts outside the city. Having failed to rouse public support, General Salan formally declared war on the French state.
The Evian talks reached an agreement in mid-March 1962, the most salient feature of which was that after a three-year transitional period the colons would have to choose to become Algerians or resident foreign nationals. The nationalists had achieved its key objective of denying the colons dual nationality in an independent Algerian state. In fact their view was that the colons had to choose the suitcase or the coffin. The OAS reacted by firing four mortar bombs into a Muslim crowd celebrating in an Algiers square. The reaction of the authorities was, at last, brutally effective. Twenty thousand regular troops besieged the OAS stronghold of Bab el-Oued in Algiers, using aircraft and artillery to eliminate OAS snipers on the rooftops.
After 90 per cent of French people – excluding the colons, who were not allowed to vote – had approved the Evian Agreements, the OAS launched a scorched-earth strategy, Operation Apocalypse, setting fire to hospitals and schools as well as the huge BP oil refinery in Oran. Two hundred and thirty Muslims were gunned down in one week, including seven elderly cleaners murdered on their way to work and nine Muslim patients lying in their hospital beds. In a single year the OAS killed 1,400 people, 80 per cent of them Muslims.45
The French government had calculated that 100,000 colons might leave Algeria in the first year of independence. FLN warnings about suitcases or coffins clarified minds. In June 1962 alone, 350,000 Europeans headed for the docks and airports. By the autumn some 1,380,000 Europeans had left. They were followed by former harkis fleeing FLN death-squads, exiled to a land that seethed with indiscriminate resentment against all Arabs. In Algeria French troops watched passively as nationalist guerrillas marched into the major cities. On 4 July the French flag was lowered and replaced by the green and white crescent banner of independent Algeria. Half a million people had died in an eight-year war, the vast majority of them Muslims.
The poisonous end of the French Empire gives the final and absolute lie to the myth of the mission civilisatrice, just as the sleazy means employed by de Gaulle’s right-hand man Jacques Foccart to maintain France’s informal empire in black Africa shame the General’s memory. In Algeria Ahmed Ben Be
lla briefly became the darling of the non-aligned Third World until deposed in 1965 by the deadly Houari Boumédiène, who gave up all pretence at democracy. Enveloped in romantic myth, the dogmatism and violence of these years entered into independent Algeria’s DNA. France’s Algerian expatriates also bolstered the metropolis’s political right in a way that Britain was ultimately spared because of the much smaller numbers of European settlers in its more volatile colonies. Royal Tunbridge Wells never threatened to become Aix, Orange or Toulouse, despite its many retired colonial colonels. That was not true of the dominant Conservative Party, to whose troubles in Africa we should turn.46
13. TERROR AND COUNTER-TERROR: KENYA
The Image of Africa
By the late 1940s Kenya had become a favoured location for film-makers requiring Technicolor skies, smiling natives and lions that roared on cue, an exotic backdrop for Hollywood stars with manly chests playing big white hunters. King Solomon’s Mines brought Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. But Mogambo was the big one. At Christmas in 1952 Nairobi’s Government House hosted Clark Gable, Grace Kelly and Gardner. Gardner’s husband Frank Sinatra sang ‘White Christmas’ to a perspiring audience that included the Governor Sir Evelyn Baring and his wife Lady Molly. Kenya also attracted the world’s attention that year when Princess Elizabeth, on a tour with Prince Philip, learned at Treetops Safari Lodge that her father George VI had died and that she was queen. It would later win renown from the discovery of the oldest human ancestor by the naturalists and archaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey, and Joy Adamson’s story about the orphaned lion cubs she successfully returned to the wild, as told in the book Born Free, which so many children won as a school prize.1 Into this colonial idyll intruded the Mau Mau ‘emergency’, which confronted two characters so representative of their respective cultures at that time as to merit the term ‘paradigmatic’.
‘The Great One’
The Barings occupied Government House in Nairobi for seven years, starting in September 1952, though Sir Evelyn’s appointment came six months earlier. He had injured his hand and, besides, letters from his predecessor Sir Philip Mitchell were more concerned with the delicacies of how to socially sidestep divorcees than with unrest in the colony. Though aged only sixty-one, the outgoing Governor was an exhausted man who had ceased to travel through his vast domain. His Directorate of Intelligence and Security was similarly confined to Nairobi, which largely explains why warnings about trouble ahead, including detailed reports from Louis Leakey, were ignored.2
The youngest son of Lord Cromer, the ‘Maker of Modern Egypt’, Evelyn Baring had every advantage in life, not the least being the enormous wealth of the banking branch of the family, which he affected to disdain. Educated at Winchester, the traditional factory for senior British civil servants, he achieved a first-class honours degree in history at New College, Oxford, before following in his father’s footsteps to pursue a career in the empire. His earlier career was spent in the Indian Civil Service, where work involved widening his competence as a magistrate, and play included sticking wild pigs with a lance and dodging the annual ‘fishing fleet’ of hopeful girls sent out to look for husbands by ambitious parents. But there was no chance of Baring being hooked, as he explained to his eccentric mother Katie: ‘snobbery, that most excellent of failings, protects your son absolutely’.3
Connections and nepotism guaranteed steady promotion, but in 1933 an attack of amoebic dysentery, which permanently damaged his liver, forced him to abandon India. He spent six years working for the family bank in London, during which time he married Molly Grey and so joined himself to her extremely distinguished family. When Evelyn was made a peer in 1960 he took the title of Baron Howick in honour of the manor Molly had inherited from her most famous ancestor, the reforming Prime Minister Charles Earl Grey.
By now among the best-connected individuals in Britain, Evelyn joined the Foreign Office in 1938 and in 1942, aged only forty, he was appointed governor of Southern Rhodesia as Sir Evelyn. In its laudatory account of why the youngest ever colonial governor had been appointed, the Daily Telegraph commented that Baring was ‘a man of the world, a good mixer and has the advantage of a fine physique’. He was indeed strikingly tall and slim, and hence known in Africa as ‘the Great One’. Something of the rarefied atmosphere the Barings inhabited is conveyed by the story that, when they boarded a warship bound for Durban, Lady Molly handed the welcoming admiral her handbag, taking him for a porter.
Evelyn would spend the next seventeen years in Africa, first in Southern Rhodesia, then as high commissioner in South Africa, simultaneously governor of the African enclaves of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland, and finally as governor of Kenya. Molly ensured that wherever they went the country-house lifestyle of their grand home in Northumberland was replicated. In Rhodesia and Kenya the Barings lived in the high colonial manner in Salisbury and Nairobi, having to endure a suburban villa only in Pretoria. There, unusually in their limited experience of lesser humanity, they could hear their neighbours’ gramophone. In general the seigneurial manner worked well with black Africans, less so with the white settlers.
By 1944 Baring had wearied of Southern Rhodesia, where the name of the game was to prevent the local English settlers from emulating their Dutch Afrikaner neighbours by formalizing racial discrimination. Molly’s cousin, the Dominion Secretary ‘Bobbety’ Cranborne (Marquess of Salisbury from 1947), appointed Baring to the high commission in South Africa. There Baring cultivated the friendship of the elderly Prime Minister Field Marshal Jan Smuts, a member of the British cabinet in the two world wars, a big player in the shaping of the post-war world in which both believed the empire could play a key role.
In June 1948 Smuts was ousted by the Afrikaner National Party, which regarded him as a traitor to their race, severing Baring’s access to the top level of South African government as it embarked on the creation of apartheid. Baring’s lordly manner also became a decided political liability. In 1952 the Conservatives moved him to the lesser post of governor of Kenya.
The Making of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta
The man Governor Baring chose to confront rather than co-opt was born circa 1889 as Kamau wa Ngengi in the village of Gatundu, centrally located in what was then known as British East Africa. He was a member of the Kikuyu tribe, who constituted only about 20 per cent of the black African population but who occupied much of the best farmland and were the most advanced in terms of agricultural practice and their willingness to adapt. As he was to all intents and purposes an orphan, his medicine-man grandfather, Kungu wa Magana, became the formative figure in his young life.
At about the age of twelve, his grandfather sent him as a boarder to a Church of Scotland Mission school twelve miles north-west of Nairobi. While there he learned to read and write, was trained as a carpenter and took the name John Peter in Christian baptism, which he changed to Johnstone Kamau. He was also initiated into his tribe through ritual circumcision, rejecting a choice between the two identities and becoming a man of two worlds. Moving to Nairobi, he dressed in raffish Western clothes but affected a colourful beaded belt, called a kinyata in Kikuyu, the first step in constructing the identity by which he became famous.4
Kamau worked first as a jobbing carpenter, before joining the Nairobi Public Works Department as a peripatetic meter reader, purchasing a motorbike, a bit of land and a shack he called Kinyata Stores. Literate and persuasive in English, he rose quickly in the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), a political organization formed in 1924 to present the concerns of the Kikuyu to the colonial government. Land was the principal grievance. It was the Kikuyu’s misfortune that their lands were those that white settlers most coveted in terms of climate and quality of soil. After the First World War there was an influx of settlers, many of them former military men who knew little about farming and even less about the local culture. They imagined the land was vacant of humanity, not realizing t
hat African pastoralists practised transhumance, moving back and forth over hundreds of miles to find grass and water, and that the Kikuyu shifted their farms to avoid soil depletion.
Additional vexations included whites’ lack of respect for ancestral burial grounds, sacred trees and the like. Although the element of semi-legal dispossession was as great an irritant here as elsewhere in the world, it was not a simple morality tale of white villainy as trumpeted in recent works of ahistorical advocacy. On the reserves Kikuyu chiefs and elders disposed of substantial lands, and were just as keen on protecting their property from squatters and their herds from the skeletal beasts of their poorer fellows as any white farmer. Furthermore they had their tribal police, officially recognized by the British authorities, to back them up. Rebellious young males were encouraged to leave, for this was as much an inter-generational conflict within the Kikuyu as it was a rebellion against white rule.5
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