The end of colonialism in Africa was not in all places the same as the end of white power. In South Africa, apartheid kept the black population in subjugation, as did white minority rule in Rhodesia. Many whites in Kenya approved of these arrangements and expected to entrench their own power by similar means.
The Mau Mau uprising referred to by the British as an ‘Emergency’, the same term used of the fighting in Malaya, lasted from 1952 to 1960. It had its origins in numerous local conflicts and grew into a civil war, often portrayed as a regression from civilization to savagery. Though they were thrown into panic at the thought that their servants were now probably bound by oaths to kill them, the white settlers were not the real victims of the violence. According to the most accurate numbers available, only thirty-two European settlers died in the uprising, while casualties among the police and the British military amounted to fewer than two hundred. However, eighteen hundred African civilians were killed and many more disappeared, while about twenty thousand Mau Mau died in combat. Colonial authorities conducted a harsh anti-insurgency campaign, which at one point saw seventy thousand Africans in detention camps. Over the course of the whole Emergency, 150,000 were rounded up. Detainees were frequently tortured or sexually assaulted. Moreover, in an extraordinary piece of repression, about two thousand were condemned to death, of whom 1090 were actually executed.1 Greene found the mass hangings repugnant, and later proposed feeding information to sympathetic Members of Parliament so that they could raise a protest.2
He pitched articles on Kenya to the Sunday Times, but without waiting for their answer flew to Nairobi on 25 August 1953. By that time, the trial of Jomo Kenyatta as a supposed leader of the uprising – he actually rejected Mau Mau violence – had been going on for almost a year. Greene wrote to his mother that with every passing day he was more in favour of the Kikuyu and against the Europeans: ‘The settlers make such a howl & yet only about 20 have been murdered: they ought to try Malaya for a change – or Indo-China.’3
In the first of the four weeks he spent in the country, Greene met with the deputy governor, the archbishop, various generals, the commissioner of police, and some politicians and journalists. He met more than once with a legislator named Michael Blundell, who, though liberal by the standards of his community, wanted to crush the revolt; in a 1954 meeting with Winston Churchill this man rejected the Prime Minister’s long-held and strongly expressed opinion that the whites should just sit down and negotiate. In Blundell’s view, the uprising had no basis in legitimate grievances but arose from a mental illness producing atavism – he wanted the rebels strung up. His opinions did evolve, and in 1960 he was part of the negotiations that brought majority rule and an open franchise to Kenya. Many whites saw him as a traitor, and one threw a bag of silver coins at his feet.4
Greene’s complaints about settlers probably arose from conversations with Blundell and his ilk. Someone tried to win Greene over to a hardline view of the conflict by showing him photographs of victims of the Mau Mau, including the charred, disembowelled corpse of a woman; a child chopped in half; and a policeman who somehow survived losing a foot and a hand and having his lower jaw nearly hacked off with a panga (machete). This material gave Greene a sense of the extreme violence of the conflict, which had seen, for example, 120 people, mostly the wives and children of local loyalists, burned or hacked to death by Mau Mau in the village of Lari in March. This was followed by a little-known second massacre, in which the Home Guard, seeking vengeance, killed a comparable number of people thought associated with the Mau Mau.5 Greene abhorred what the Mau Mau were doing, but was under no illusion about ‘trigger-happy units’ assigned to quell the revolt.6 The excesses of the counter-insurgency were well known: General George Erskine, recently appointed commander of East African Forces and one of the more sensible officials with whom Greene met, had issued orders forbidding ‘Football League Competition’ among units engaged in an obscene rivalry over the killing of Mau Mau.7
In his second week in Kenya, Greene visited the Kikuyu reserves, for a time in the company of James Hardie Candler, the thirty-four-year-old District Officer for Kangema Division in the Fort Hall District. The weather was cold and wet and their Land Rover was sliding from side to side on a hilly track south of Nyeri when Candler remarked in a steady voice, ‘Now we’ve had it.’ The vehicle lurched over a bank and stuck there with a front wheel hanging over a ravine. Shortly after, Greene himself drove a hired car into another Land Rover. He and Candler stayed for a night in a small house in the company of two prisoners and two guards who had formerly belonged to the Mau Mau. As a demonstration of trust, Candler did not carry a gun that night, but he did lay a grenade between his bed and Greene’s, just in case they were attacked.8 Seven months later, Candler was shot and killed by the Mau Mau in a roadside ambush.9
Greene himself did not carry a gun while in Kenya, causing a young Kikuyu to remark, ‘You trust in the goodness of God.’10 Conversations of this sort caused him to become very fond of the Kikuyu. As he did throughout his life, he courted danger and one day, driving to a remote military camp, he was confronted by a rhinoceros which, thankfully, did not charge his car but just stood near and shook its enormous head. Afterwards, he wrote that he was more afraid of an encounter with another rhino than of an ambush by the Mau Mau. Greene also arranged to go on a bombing run, but it was not on the scale of what he had experienced in Vietnam – it involved a tiny Piper Pacer dropping four bombs – and yet there was always the risk of being shot down.11
As in Vietnam, he turned to missionaries for an alternative to the official narratives – even as he recognized that they, too, had blind spots. The hardliners in the colonial administration, perhaps remembering the Irish uprising, distrusted Catholics, thinking they were assisting the insurgents, feeding and sheltering them, and tending their wounds.12 Whereas many of the settlers had been surprised by a uprising among their supposedly contented servants and labourers as if ‘Jeeves had taken to the jungle’,13 the missionaries had seen trouble brewing for some time.
In Kikuyu territory, Greene was sometimes accompanied by the Bishop of Nyeri, Carlo Maria Cavallera, who had lost two missions and two schools, but whose priests had been unharmed apart from one shot in the shoulder14 – though later there were deaths. Greene made a particular friend of an Irish priest named P. J. McGill, stationed in Ruiru, with whom he debated the nature of love. Together they played a practical joke on an elderly priest from Alsace, making him appear an alcoholic before his bishop by loading his vehicle with wine bottles that rattled when he drove off. This prank became the basis of the short story ‘Church Militant’,15 a work of greater interest than it seems, as in it Greene makes clear his view that not only is the settlers’ land stolen from the Africans, but so too is that taken by the church despite the certainty of the bishop (closely modelled on Cavallera) that it is God’s will to establish a new religious house for nuns.
This story was written in a single day, 13 October 1954,16 so Greene had had time to reflect on his experiences in Kenya. While there, he had to digest atrocities committed on both sides, and to make some sense of them. He consulted with the Attorney General, John Whyatt, who was trying to maintain due process as the number of capital cases multiplied, and saved a good many lives by a dogged insistence on legal niceties.
No one exercised more influence on Greene’s thinking than Sir John Barclay Nihill, a fellow Catholic who had been Chief Justice of Kenya and was now the President of the Court of Appeal for East Africa. Although obliged to enforce the laws as they existed, he was alarmed at the abrogation of human rights. In one instance he overturned fifty convictions from a mass trial related to the Lari massacre.17 It was probably Nihill who sent Greene to observe a mass trial at Githenguri early in his visit. Later, Greene attended a sitting of the Court of Appeal. Nihill was unhappy about the extension of the death penalty to include, for example, the mere possession of ammunition, as the police seemed to be planting their own .303 rounds on people
they wanted to arrest. When, after the publication of his articles, Greene wrote a further letter to The Times18 describing the cruel behaviour of forces fighting the Mau Mau, killing people for not having appropriate papers and then leaving their bodies to rot in the open to terrify others, Nihill wrote that he was ‘heartened . . . by your fearless letter’ and agreed with it entirely: ‘I feel sure that a terrible harvest of hate is being sown out here.’19
Greene found the British farmers repugnant and annoying, with one very notable exception. About twelve years older than the novelist, Maria Newall, a Catholic, had settled in Kenya around 1949. She was about six feet tall, and Graham’s sister Elisabeth recalled her as devastatingly beautiful.20 She was running a 500-acre farm on the edge of the forest without a guard and without the assistance of other Europeans. Greene was impressed by her good looks and her courage, dubbing her ‘Pistol Mary’. Possibly amorous at first, their relationship evolved into a sincere friendship that lasted several decades. Greene’s Kenyan journal records what she told him of her life. Her first, sacramental marriage ended in divorce, so she remarried outside the church, but her second husband was swindled and committed suicide. During the war she had operated her own ambulance unit and gone out to Cairo, being torpedoed en route. In Cairo, which was presumably where she encountered Elisabeth, she fell in love with the future cabinet minister Sir Walter Monckton (later Viscount Monckton) and had an affair with him, only to be unceremoniously dumped when he married another woman; Newall still loved him and followed his speeches in Hansard. Newall and Greene spent several days together in the latter part of his visit to Kenya. They remained in touch, and twenty-five years later Greene and Father Leopoldo Durán would sometimes visit her in Sintra during the journeys through Spain and Portugal that gave birth to Monsignor Quixote.
Greene’s reading of the situation in Kenya may strike the contemporary reader as unconventional. In his articles for the Sunday Times,21 he followed the same approach that he had used in writing about Indochina, emphasizing complexity and competing interests. He was somewhat more generous about the settlers than he was in private correspondence and maintained that Kenyatta, if freed, would have to be exiled. Despite a note of paternalism in the articles, he was having no truck with the argument that the revolt pitted the civilization of whites against the savagery of Africans. Whereas the oaths and rituals of the Mau Mau were commonly seen as expressions of something mad and brutish, Greene saw them, as he saw, for example, the spiritual practices of the indigenous people of Mexico, as the expression of an authentic religious consciousness that was comprehensible from a Catholic viewpoint, but not from a Protestant or a secular one: it was otherworldly and implicitly sacramental. He did object to some practices, such as clitorectomies (now referred to as female genital mutilation), and, of course, he approved of conversions to Catholicism.
Drawing on his visit to a prison and his conversation with the chaplain to the condemned in Nairobi, a Father Fuller, who was a friend of Nihill, he claimed that the vast majority of condemned Mau Mau converted to the Catholic faith before execution, and, as the priest put it, ‘They die like angels.’ It is rather strange to think that Greene would see the conflict as a problem of theology, but he did. And the essence of his position was that by despising the traditional beliefs and rituals of the Africans, the British ensured that they would have no lasting part in the life of the place they had colonized.
Although the events of the Mau Mau uprising are now remote in time, their consequences are still being felt. In 2013, the British government settled a mass claim by 5200 elderly Kenyans concerning human rights abuses arising from the counter-insurgency with a payout of £19.9 million, and this has been followed by a much larger class action, still before the courts, on behalf of forty thousand people who seek damages for a wider range of abuses.22 As part of the first settlement, the then Foreign Secretary, William Hague, gave a statement to the House of Commons, which included this apology: ‘I would like to make clear now and for the first time, on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the Emergency in Kenya. The British Government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration. The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place, and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence.’23
36
DIEN BIEN PHU
The commandant in the Catholic enclave of Bui-Chu was a confident and thoughtful Buddhist. His famous guest was only a few minutes away, approaching in a jeep through a series of narrow causeways between canals. He was to show the visitor Thui-nhai, a fortified village where the whole population had drawn together in the fight against the Viet Minh – a remarkable thing in the uneasy days of January 1954 and a sign of the enclave’s near-independence from the French. Best to be safe, he decided, and at the last moment sent a team ahead to scout the road to the village. Sure enough, they found a landmine in a box buried in the ground with a piece of wood covering the detonator. The instructions in Chinese for its deployment were still there.1
Just as another person might grow addicted to blackjack or slot machines, Graham Greene wagered his life again and again and just could not lose it. His most engrained habit was survival. Following his brush with the landmine, he wrote in his journal: ‘After lunch lay down & haunted by unpleasant thoughts of C. How strange that one feels no gratitude that the mine was found.’2
This was Greene’s third winter sojourn in Vietnam – there would be one more. In the autumn he had corresponded with Trevor Wilson, now working, as Hugh had, in the Information Service in Malaya. He learned that Wilson had been granted, with no difficulty, a fifteen-day visa to Vietnam. They plotted a return, with Greene flying into Saigon and Wilson into Hanoi, in order to avert or at least delay suspicion on the part of the authorities. Arriving on 30 December,3 Greene hoped for a better reception from the French than on his last visit as he came with the blessing of their high command and carried a message from the chief of staff to the latest commander-in-chief in Indochina, Lieutenant-General Henri Navarre. Indeed, he told his son Francis that he had had a long interview with the chief of staff in Paris in March 1952 with the objective of getting himself off ‘the list of suspects’ and had evidently succeeded.4
On this visit, he would pursue leads in the south, while Wilson, who even in exile stayed in touch with officials in Hanoi, would lay ‘a few trails’ in the north.5 Representing the Sunday Times, Greene’s objectives on this trip appear to have been mainly journalistic, but he needed Wilson’s contacts. His friend was indeed making a report to ‘the old firm’, but only as a means of making some money – he was usually hard up.6 Greene’s journal shows that he spent a good deal of time in the company of ‘Donald’, presumably Donald Lancaster, the MI6 representative who met him at the airport on his earlier visit. However, this does not, in itself, indicate that Greene had undertaken any significant task for the service on this occasion, beyond keeping his eyes open.7 Greene’s relations with the Sûreté seem also to have improved – he visited André Moret, head of the Tonkin section,8 who had clearly become a friend and may even have provided the inspiration for the character of Inspector Vigot in The Quiet American.
On his first evening, Greene wrote in his journal: ‘Is there any solution here the West can offer? But the bar tonight was loud with innocent American voices and that was the worst disquiet. There weren’t so many Americans in 1951 and 1952.’ When he observed to a member of the American Economic Mission that the French might give up on the war soon, he was told, ‘Oh no, they can’t do that. They’d have to pay us back . . . ’ and a sum in the thousands of millions was named.9 That money was the deposit on a war the Americans would soon own.
Of his presence there, Greene wrote: ‘I always have a sense of guilt when I am a civilian tourist in the regions of death: after all one does not visit a disaster except to give aid –
one feels a voyeur of violence . . . ’10 His reaction, common to war correspondents, is understandable. But whatever his psychological motivations, the search for stimulation and for escape, even the side employment for MI6, the task of observing and making known the truths of a place like Vietnam was of such magnitude that any other consideration seems trivial.
Greene arrived at a time when both the French and the Viet Minh were hungry for a major victory that would strengthen their hand in the Geneva peace talks. On 3 January 1954, Greene travelled to the strategic airbase at Seno in the Savannakhet province of Laos and could see that the place would fall if attacked in force. The following day, he met General René Cogny, commander of the French forces in the north, in Hanoi. A tall, handsome officer, he had nearly starved to death at Buchenwald and was left with a permanent limp from his treatment there.
They discussed the huge encampment at Dien Bien Phu, intended to control the approaches to Luang Prabang. Navarre wanted to lure the enemy into a set-piece battle and to repeat, on a larger scale, the victory at Na San on the Laotian border at the beginning of December 1952. There, the French set up artillery, entrenched their position, and constructed an airfield, so that they had a fortress. The forces of General Vo Nguyen Giap attacked in waves, and were shelled and bombed mercilessly. After their victory, the French abandoned the Na San camp, in favour of Dien Bien Phu. Cogny had doubts about the plan, and tended to speak his mind on the subject. He felt the French should concentrate forces on the Red River Delta to ensure that Hanoi was not cut off.11
The Unquiet Englishman Page 29
