Reviews of 8 Books about the history of Kenya

When the Windows Were Opened: Life on a Kenya Farm, by Elsa Pickering.

When the Windows Were Opened: Life on a Kenya Farm, by Elsa Pickering, published in 1957 by Geoffrey Bles, is a troublesome book to write about. Why? Because any discussions must begin with the statement that Elsa Pickering had some extremely racist views. There are numerous parts of this book that I simply cannot quote here because they are so racist. Even for the time that it was written in the 1950s, When the Windows Were Opened appears racist. Elsa Pickering didn’t have a good opinion of Africans, especially Kenyans, and particularly Kikuyu people.

I read her book because I wanted to know a bit more about Kenya, and especially Nanyuki where much of it is set in the 1950s, and it does give a bit of an insight into that particular place and time. I can only say that having read this book it is good that things have changed since those days.

Pickering doesn’t have many good things to say about a lot of things, so it would appear. She is particularly intolerant of the many people who worked for her on the 300-acre farm, a few miles from Nanyuki, that she and her husband bought, but she has few good things to say about a lot of the other people she came into contact with. In addition, she beats the children of her workers when she thinks they have got out of hand. Slightly more understandable for that time is her attitude towards women and what could be expected of them. When her husband Bob has to go back to Nairobi for work purposes shortly after they move into their farmhouse, leaving Pickering and her friend Vicky to fend for themselves, they are quite understandably a bit anxious, but her general attitude is that only a man can solve things, talk to the workers and get their respect, and take care of most other issues. She feels that women are largely helpless without men. We also find out towards the end of the book that she cannot cook at all – she doesn’t know how to. Having been brought up in South Africa in a household where servants were readily available, she had no need to acquire any culinary skills.

It was during the time that Pickering lived on her farm that the Mau Mau Uprising developed and there were one or two incidents on and close to her property, but the Pickerings and their workers did not suffer half as much as many people in the surrounding region.

This is a very dated book in most respects. You can admire Pickering for her pluck in making a go of farm life in challenging circumstances, and she ably describes her lifestyle and what she sees and what occurs, but steer clear of her political and social views.

A Kenya Beginning, by Robin Swift.

I very much enjoyed reading A Kenya Beginning, by Robin Swift. This book was self-published recently and was mentioned on a Facebook group of which I’m a member. You never quite know what you’re getting with self-published works, however, Robin Swift has done a grand job of it. I noticed a couple of typos that a publisher might have corrected and one small incorrect detail, but generally speaking, Swift has produced a professional tome.

A Kenya Beginning is Robin Swift’s autobiography. He was born in Kenya in 1940, and spent years in that country, as well as periods in England, Zambia, Rhodesia as it then was, Botswana, then Zimbabwe as it became, and finally he moved to Australia. When he retired he needed a project to keep him busy, hence this book.

Although he was in Kenya during Mau Mau and Rhodesia during the troubles there, he doesn’t dwell too much on those conflicts, but of course mentions them in passing. He worked mostly in farming equipment and this gave him the chance to travel and settle in several countries. Once the Zimbabwe land invasions started, the market for such kit collapsed, and like many others he decided to finally settle on the east coast of Australia.

A Kenya Beginning is a much more enjoyable read than When the Windows Were Opened, and Swift has a far more balanced view of Africa and its people.

Mishkid: A Kenyan Childhood, by David Webster.

David Webster was the child of missionaries in colonial Kenya and was therefore a ‘mishkid’ (though the term was not used at that time). He explains that at his school for white Kenyan boys and girls there were children from three different backgrounds. Firstly, there were the offspring of civil servants and government employees, who were often in Kenya for limited periods while their parents completed their service, although a few also stayed on afterwards. Secondly, there were those whose parents were settlers, who had originated either from Britain or who were Boers who had trekked up from South Africa. They were known as wanachi – ‘people of the land’ and they could not imagine living anywhere else. Then there were the mishkids like Webster. Their parents were in Kenya usually for the long haul and had invested their lives in their adopted country, but they owned no houses or land, and their children’s ties to Kenya were therefore more constricted, even though those who had been born there knew no other country. Webster writes, “Missionary children…are brought up in a foreign culture and environment to which they do not belong, but to which they want to belong, and which causes them intense nostalgia when eventually they are removed from it.” They often ended up with some cultural ambiguity. Webster doesn’t complain about this, but it is an interesting observation.

Webster spent his first years living in a house called Mushroom Hall at Dagoretti Corner, on the outskirts of Nairobi, towards the end of World War Two. His father was an army chaplain and away from home for periods at this time. The family visited Britain on long leave in 1946, allowing Webster to meet his grandparents for the first time. The Big Freeze winter was rather a shock. On return to Kenya, the family made its way to Marsabit, and to their mission station. In those days, everyone entering the Northern Frontier District (NFD) needed a permit which was presented at Isiolo. The barrier across the road was raised, and they continued on their way north to the site of their mission at Karantina. Life was fairly basic but it must have been a wonderful place to be a child. Webster was sorry to leave the NFD to go to boarding school in Nairobi, aged six.

Webster writes well. He has a good eye for detail and a sympathetic attitude towards Kenya. I have very much enjoyed reading about his childhood. Like most youngsters, he enjoyed the holidays more than school but the journeys to and from Marsabit were not without incident, back in the very early 1950s. On one occasion, their car had multiple punctures and could not continue. It was five days before another vehicle appeared! We forget how remote such places were in those days, now that the road is tarmac (as far as I can see, from Google street view). I made a trip on part of this route in 1985 when it was mostly a good quality dirt road, and there was a reasonable amount of other traffic.

1952 saw the visit of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh to Kenya, amid much excitement, which Webster can remember. The same year also marked the beginning of the state of emergency and the start of Mau Mau. One boy in Webster’s dormitory was killed in the school holidays and the father of another boy was murdered at his farm near Nanyuki. As Webster points out, Mau Mau was often worse for those Christian Kikuyu who would not take any oaths, and many were killed. It was also bad for those forced into camps. Travel home to Marsabit became more dangerous, but once they reached the NFD they were safe, because the northern tribes did not support Mau Mau.

The last chapter covers what happened to Webster after his childhood. It is thoughtful and grounded, and he summarises some perspectives on what he learned from his time in Kenya. He writes, “My upbringing taught me that responsibilities in life are more important than rights. We live in a world obsessed with ‘human rights’. There is often no counterbalance of ‘human responsibilities’. I saw lives lived responsibly and responsively to others. Lives of giving, not taking.”

State of Emergency: The Full Story of Mau Mau, by Fred Majdalany.

This book was published in 1962. Majdalany explains that Kenya became a country almost by accident when the railway from Mombasa to Uganda turned out to be not the success that had been planned, and the owners were looking for a way to recoup some of their investment by developing the countryside through which the railway passed.

I intend to read more books about Mau Mau and will then be able to cast a more critical eye on some of Majdalany’s statements. In the meantime, I’ll point out what he claims. For example, he says that the white settlers were attracted to the Kenyan highlands because of the climate and claims that they found the area they developed into what became known as the White Highlands more or less deserted. He says that, therefore, they did not steal the land from the Kikuyus and that this myth arose only when the settlers prospered. In any case, he claims, there was plenty fertile land elsewhere in the country and the Kikuyu traditionally had no concept of land ownership, were unskilled, and scratched a living from ‘pathetic little subsistence’ patches of beans and maize. The settlers were very much supported by Sir Charles Eliot, who was appointed in 1902 the Commissioner, Commander-in-Chief and Consul-General for the East Africa Protectorate. Eliot was an intellectual who believed that the interests of the white settlers were ‘paramount’ and that the country should be conceived as a white man’s country. These were fairly typical opinions in Victorian times. On the other hand, the Colonial Office in London became far more progressive, and within twenty years regarded the long-term interests of the indigenous Africans as paramount.

The First World War changed everything. Africans from various parts of the continent fought on both sides, but inevitably started to question what they were fighting for. Their perspectives were changed by the war and the first African political group was formed in 1920. Meanwhile, the settlers continued to work to develop their farms, where they ruled the roost and rarely regarded Africans as equals. The settlers were generally intransigent in their attitude towards political change, and some sort of conflict was always likely to develop.

During the years after World War II, the Kenyan economy somewhat boomed, and there were numerous new arrivals of settlers from Europe. The European population grew to 40,000 and the Asian population to 150,000 whilst there were now 5,500,000 Africans. The new prosperity was not shared equally, however, and neither was political control.

Majdalany believes that the Kikuyu were ‘masters of the devious’, that they had ‘no sense of time’, were by nature ‘suspicious and secretive’, and prone to ‘mass neurosis’. Also, that the white settlers had ‘neurotic tendencies’, were ‘self-absorbed and parochial’, with a ‘sense of isolation’. Hmm! He does, however, acknowledge that population growth, a colour bar that saw Africans excluded from settler society, and the lack of proper African representation within the government also played a major role in developing resentment.

A State of Emergency was declared in October 1952, but the origins of Mau Mau date back to the 1940s, in particular to the years immediately after World War II when ex-servicemen returned from abroad, and many could not find work. Majdalany cites Jomo Kenyatta’s return to Kenya in 1946 from Europe as a key point, as he became the focus of much resentment. It was soon after this time that the first oathing ceremonies took place and there was mention of a secret society called Mau Mau. Mau Mau combined elements of tribal superstition and fear with political and economic aspiration. It was a powerful combination. Soon, the violence started. There was even a wave of arson a week before the visit by Princess Elizabeth to Treetops. Majdalany seems to think that if drastic action had been taken earlier, Mau Mau might have been nipped in the bud. This is certainly what the settlers wanted. The early violence was Kikuyu against Kikuyu – Mau Mau against those who would not support them, including two chiefs who were killed. During the second week of the Emergency the first settler, Eric Bowyer, was hacked to death with pangas, along with his two African cooks. Battalions of Lancashire Fusiliers landed in Kenya and were dispersed to the area.

The Mau Mau attacks continued, some of them horrifying. Two women settlers, Kitty Hesselberger and Raynes Simpson, hit the headlines when they repelled an attack and killed three Mau Mau intruders. I found this blog post by Simpson’s nephew, who describes the event. The number of settlers attacked was much less than attacks against those Kikuyu who would not join Mau Mau, but it was the murder of the Rucks and their six-year-old son Michael, on 24th January 1953, that galvanised much local and international opinion against Mau Mau. And then there was a massacre of 84 Kikuyu men, women and children by Mau Mau at Lari, and an attack on the Naivasha Police Station.

As the security forces built up strength, they started to take the initiative, and go into the forest where the Mau Mau fighters were based, but the Mau Mau forces were very elusive.

The Emergency was formally ended in January 1960, but by that time the Mau Mau forces had long been defeated by superior arms.

I read an online forum recently where some descendants of Kenyan settlers were complaining that there should be no compensation by the British Government for Africans who suffered during Mau Mau. They quoted Majdalany as having written an accurate account of the period. This helps to put his book in perspective. Majdalany covers the conflict well, but glosses over the detention of tens of thousands of Kikuyu (at one point, 77,000 were in detention) and the resettlement of many thousands in protected villages. He doesn’t even mention that over 1,000 were hanged. Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by David Anderson, published in 2005, covers this area in more detail.

In the Shadow of the Mau Mau: An Eye witness Account of the Terror in Kenya, by Ione Leigh.

Quite a lot of the information in the first part of In the Shadow of the Mau Mau was later used by Majdalany in his book, noted above. In the Shadow of the Mau Mau was published in 1954, at a time when Dedan Kimathi, one of the main leaders of Mau Mau, was still operating in the forest. Clearly, the author Leigh expresses the fear felt by many white settlers at that time. People, including many Kikuyu and occasionally settlers, were being intimidated and killed in rural areas, and this should not be downplayed, but Leigh very much emphasises the sensational aspects of the conflict and gives a lot of space to very gory details of oath ceremonies and atrocities, which are designed to shock.

Again and again, Leigh generalises, e.g., “The African does not appreciate how much he needs European aid and guidance, capital and skill, and how much he owes it” and, “When Britain declared a Protectorate over East Africa in 1895, the population was steadily being destroyed by famine and disease, the country was a howling wilderness, overgrown with bush and jungle and overrun by warring tribes.” It is true that a lot of effort was put into developing Kenya by the incoming settlers, but then, in general, they excluded the local population via a colour bar from enjoying the fruits of such developments, and far too little was done by way of making government more inclusive. In general, the attitude of the settlers was that it would be many, many years before Kenyans could expect any form of self-government and that in the meantime, any political agitation should be dealt with in the harshest manner.

Leigh did not have a good impression of Kenyatta, and a considerable amount of space is given over to describing Kenyatta’s trial in some detail. Perhaps the most telling chapter is the last one, entitled ‘The Underlying Cause’. Here, Leigh writes that “…the African is a different variety of the human species” always likely to revert to a primitive state, and this had been proven by the atrocities committed during Mau Mau. Therefore, Leigh reckons, the same laws cannot apply to Africans as to Europeans. It’s hard to read such an opinion nowadays, but Leigh’s perspective was popular among many settlers at that time. Leigh compares the Kenyan situation with that in what was then the Belgian Congo. Amazingly, she praises how the Belgians had developed few secondary schools but instead concentrated on primary and technical education, which, she claims, meant that there were no Africans there who wanted to become political leaders as there were in Kenya as a result of British Colonial policy which encouraged the development of political awareness. Well, we know from hindsight what happened not too long after in the Congo (see Congo Crisis). She writes that the only long-term solution is co-operation among the several races in Kenya, but soon after claims that the main hope is for widespread European immigration. With attitudes like those of Leigh, it is not surprising that things turned nasty in Kenya, however, this cannot be seen as an excuse for the Mau Mau atrocities.

Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya, by Nicholas Best.

This book was first published in 1979. My edition is dated 2021, and has an Epilogue written in, I think, 2014. According to Wikipedia, “The Happy Valley set was a group of hedonistic, largely British and Anglo-Irish aristocrats and adventurers who settled in the “Happy Valley” region of the Wanjohi Valley, near the Aberdare mountain range, in colonial Kenya and Uganda between the 1920s and the 1940s”. Best’s book covers much more than that period, however, and doesn’t in fact spend a great deal of time on the Happy Valley set itself.

The history of Kenya is described from when the first settlers arrived there. Lord Delamere features a lot, as do some other colourful characters. The growth of the city of Nairobi is described, as is fighting in various parts of east Africa between the settlers and Germans in the First World War. The Kenyan economy grew during the war but slumped afterward. Numerous settlers from Europe arrived after the war to take advantage of generous land purchase schemes, and after often tricky starts, some of them prospered during the 1920s when Kenya ceased to be a British protectorate and became instead a Crown colony.

Europeans were enabled to vote for a reconstituted Legislative Council but they wanted to protect their own interests by keeping the right to vote to themselves rather than allowing the growing Asian community a say, as was wanted by Whitehall. A compromise was eventually reached whereby a minority of Asians were to be elected to the Legislative Council, immigration from India was to be restricted in the interests of the African community, and the highlands were to be kept white. This compromise prevented what might have been a settler armed revolt, but it meant that the Asians remained second-class citizens and the Africans were third-class citizens, with no representation, few rights, and exclusion from owning land in the ‘White Highlands’.

It is interesting that the British Colonial Secretary, in 1923, stated that “Primarily, Kenya is an African territory, and H.M. Government think 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. Obviously the interests of the other communities, European, Indian or Arab, must severally be safeguarded … But in the administration of Kenya His Majesty’s Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on behalf of the African population, and they are unable to delegate or share this trust, the object of which may be defined as the protection and advancement of the native races.” [Devonshire White paper. According to Wikipedia, the White Paper was used by the British government to retain control over the Kenya Colony, and is cited as one reason why Kenya did not develop as a white minority ruled country, as South Africa and Southern Rhodesia did. However, there were long to be tensions between the settler community and Whitehall].

When the Kikuyu eventually complained that they had lost parts of their traditional land without, in most cases, compensation, the settlers argued that it was only since they, the settlers, had developed the land that the Kikuyu had taken any interest in those areas.

The 1930s were not happy times for many people in Kenya. As the world economy slumped, prices for coffee, wheat, sisal, maize, and other commodities fell in price. Many settlers were bankrupted, and only the most efficient survived. In 1932 the British Government set up the Kenya Land Commission to examine boundary disputes and decide on the question of who owned what land. It awarded some land to the Kikuyu, but not enough to satisfy most of their leaders.

World War II changed things considerably. African troops played a considerable role in the far east against the Japanese, serving alongside Europeans, but at the end of the war many would ask what they had been fighting for if they could not reap any benefits from victory. Economically, the war was good for Kenya. Mombasa became an important port, and farming, especially in the white highlands, benefitted from the British Empire’s demand for produce. An important tarmac road had been built all the way from Nairobi to Naivasha and much land had been cleared of wildlife, often shot to provide food for thousands of Italian prisoners of war and internees based in Kenya.

But after the war, many African soldiers returned home to find there were no jobs. Others did not want to work as squatters on white-owned farms. At the same time, more Europeans arrived to settle on the Kenyan land, followed by Asian traders seeking to escape from the conflicts in India and Pakistan. There were great demands on the land, especially as the Kikuyu population had grown four-fold in little more than forty years. This put even more pressure on the lands reserved for them, while the European settlers were prospering. The settlers thought of themselves as the future of a prosperous Kenyan economy and would not share the land or the benefits of development. Disputes gradually progressed into what became known as Mau Mau. Best writes about many of the same Mau Mau events as the other writers mentioned above. I had not known, before, that Idi Amin had served on the side of the government in the KAR infantry.

Once the Emergency was over, a constitutional conference was set up by the new Conservative government in Britain. The Conservatives were keen to prepare for independence as soon as possible, but the settlers thought that they had been sold out, and many started to leave the country, fearful that what had happened in the Belgian Congo would be repeated in Kenya.

Best’s book is a better analysis of the events in Kenya than some of the one-sided books mentioned above. It doesn’t completely get to grips with who owned the land, if anyone, before the settlers came.

Africa on a Tightrope, by Henry Gibbs.

Gibbs’ book was published in 1954 and is about various parts of sub-Saharan Africa, with several chapters towards the end concerning Kenya. Gibbs appears to be a reasonable person, with quite liberal ideas for that time. He does not agree with Communism. You have to remember that anyone who disagreed with the settlers was often branded a Communist by those settlers and often others, and so he is careful to not only explain his perspective but also to show how it disagrees with Communism. Africa on a Tightrope is partially a travel book, but during his travels Gibbs makes various salient points about the politics of the places he is passing through. One important point that Gibbs recognises with respect to Kenya and its future, which differentiated it from the situation as it then was in Rhodesia and South Africa, was the number of Europeans. When he was in Kenya, there were an estimated 30,000 Europeans and 5 million Africans. At that time South Africa had 2,500,000 Europeans and 9,000,000 Africans. Europeans controlled the government of both countries, but Gibbs could clearly see what many settlers refused to recognise, that in the long term the settler community would have to give up their very privileged position.

Gibbs looks at the land ownership issue in Kenya. He writes that when the Kikuyu arrived in what are now the Kiambu and Nyeri districts of Kenya several hundred years ago it was inhabited by the Wanderobo people. [see Wikipedia for an explanation of the Wanderobo/Wadorobo/Dorobo]. The Kikuyu absorbed the Wanderobo. The areas to the south were forested, and this allowed protection against the Masai, the traditional enemies of the Kikuyu. Then, four disasters resulted in a withdrawal, by the Kikuyu, from various parts of their traditional lands. The disasters were smallpox, which killed many thousands of Kikuyu, rinderpest which decimated their cattle, severe drought, and a great locust invasion. They were also being attacked by tribes to the north. By the time the white settlers arrived, the land actually occupied and cultivated by the Kikuyus was much depleted. He continues, “Therefore, when the land came to be regarded as Crown land and was rented on long lease [to the Europeans], the settlers had no conception that, in Kikuyu eyes, they were occupying without authority.”

This seems, to me, to be a reasonable interpretation. Of course, there can be no justification at all for large portions of the lands in question to have then been designated for the exclusive use of the incoming European settlers, with the result that some Kikuyu became squatters on what they regarded as their own land.

Gibbs foresaw the eventual defeat of the Mau Mau. He asks why, if it was supposed to be a Kikuyu movement for the benefit of the Kikuyu, it caused so much violence amongst the Kikuyu themselves.

In the final chapter, Gibbs makes an interesting, and radical, suggestion. Foreseeing future problems in South Africa with the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist Party and the growth of Apartheid, he proposes that Natal should secede and form a federation with the Rhodesias, Nyasaland, Kenya, and Uganda, and sometime in the future, Tanganyika. We now know that the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was short-lived, and a bigger federation would have failed as well, but it could have been an interesting prospect at the time.

Economic & Social Origins of Mau Mau, by David W. Throup.

This is a more research-based book than the other titles mentioned above. It presents a view of imperial and local government, as well as examining the social and economic causes of the Kikuyu revolt known as Mau Mau.

We have seen from the other titles I’ve looked at above that Kenyan settler attitudes, which were often racist in anyone’s terms, were embedded in white Kenyan society and that there were sometimes conflicts with the more liberal Colonial Office. We’ve seen that the Kikuyu had become impatient with slow progress towards allowing Africans a say in government and that WWII had a profound effect on Kenya, not least because of the number of unemployed Kikuyu after the boom war years.

Throup introduces several more elements which had an influence on the local situation. For example, the fact that many of Kenya’s chiefs were British appointees who had often alienated emerging African politicians who remained excluded from the decision-making process. Secondly, the squatter Kikuyu communities in the ‘White Highlands’ found their cultivation and stock-holding rights reduced after the war, with no commensurate increase in wages. Thirdly, the alienation caused by forced labour on communal terracing and grass planting (to reduce erosion). Fourthly, the rapid growth of Nairobi (17% per year population increase) with many living in poverty, and lots of crime.

Throup writes that Mau Mau was an alliance between three groups of discontented Kikuyu: the urban unemployed; dispossessed squatters from the White Highlands; and poor peasants and tenants of the junior lineages of mbari (sub-clans) in the Kikuyu reserves who were becoming a landless rural proletariat as the senior lineages established control of the land. These three groups had nothing to lose from a campaign of terror. Throup notes that Baring, the governor who arrived in 1952, failed to see the political divisions inside the Kenya African Union and the wide gap between Kenyatta and the militants, and thereby denied himself the opportunity of incorporating Kenyatta into government, with the chance to isolate the Nairobi militants and their rural allies.

Land alienation, the demarcation of fixed Kikuyu reserves, and population growth had all destroyed the traditional system of shifting cultivation and the land and the people were suffering. How to deal with this situation seemed to be beyond the local administration.

Throup looks in detail at the influence of the Colonial Office, the influence of the previous governor Mitchell, and the influence of the settlers on the situation in the White Highlands. The interests of the settlers dominated everything, and however crucial they may have been for financing Kenyan development and attracting foreign investment, they effectively hamstrung the government’s agricultural campaign in the Kikuyu reserves. The Kenyan government’s policies often disregarded the interests of Africans, which did not help the situation. There were initiatives intended to control the social and economic development of Kikuyus, which, while they may have evolved in order to try to reduce land degradation, today appear very short-sighted and can even be likened to social experiments elsewhere at, or around the same time, for example in the Soviet Union and China. It is little wonder that the Mau Mau conflict eventually erupted. One example which caused hardship and bad feeling and undoubtedly led to further events was the Olenguruone affair, which Throup describes in Chapter six.

He details how the Kikuyu chiefs and their supporters tended to benefit from state patronage, in terms of grants for ploughs, seeds and preferential access to cattle, whereas the Kikuyu Central Association members, askaris returning from the war, and others felt excluded from the ‘pork-barrel’. Kenya’s economy, controlled by the Kenyan government and put into action by district administrators, created many divisions and caused much resentment. This was one reason why many chiefs were targetted during Mau Mau.

Throup’s book goes into a lot of fine detail, and I cannot do it justice by trying to summarise all that he writes. If you want to understand Mau Mau, however, it is essential reading.

The following statement, which I found reported in Hansard 18 December 1934 vol 296 cc959-61, under the heading KENYA (LAND COMMISSION), is quite damning and is at the heart of the Kenyan land question which was to cause so many problems in the 1950s.

In December, 1932, the chairman requested that, in order to enable the commission fully to consider their sixth term of reference in all its bearings, a definition might be supplied of the “privileged position” to which allusion is made in that term. I caused the chairman to be informed, in reply, that the privileged position in question involved:

1. (i) the right of Europeans to acquire by grant or transfer agricultural land 961 in an area now to be defined and to occupy land therein;
2. (ii) that no person other than a European shall be entitled to acquire by grant or transfer agricultural land in such area or to occupy land therein.

I also found a statement by John Stonehouse, who was later to find fame for other reasons, in Hansard 1958: “A very small minority of the African people are allowed to go into the White Highlands, and those who are allowed to go there are given a miserable income, That is an argument in favour of allowing the Africans to have their own farms on the White Highlands.”