Ways of Escape by Graham Greene

Author:Graham Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409020998
Publisher: Random House

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It was 1953 – between my winter visits to Vietnam – and from the window of the room in which I was writing my report on the Mau Mau rebellion, I was aware first, as always in Kenya, of the huge expanse of sky and the terraces of cloud. Never was there a land so wrapped in air; for in Kikuyuland one lives on a mountain-top, with Nairobi at over five thousand feet and this mission in the Kikuyu Reserve two thousand feet higher yet.

Two miles ahead of me across the Chania River was the Mau-Mau-ridden Fort Hall Reserve from which attackers had come to the mission a year before; fifteen miles behind me was the scene of the Lari massacre, where 150 wives and children of the Kikuyu Home Guard were hacked to death; and six miles away I could see the forested slopes of the Aberdares, the stamping ground of the chief enemy, ‘General’ Dedan Kimathi. Outside, the red dust rose in little tornadoes, and the maize crackled like light continuous rain.

In moments of depression I sometimes wondered why I had bothered to come so far to be still so distant from the heart of the conflict. In Indo-China, even in Malaya, there was something approaching a front line; I could feel myself sharing to a small extent in the battle. Here the war was secret: it would happen the day after I left or the day before I arrived. It was a private African war which could be hidden so easily from white eyes, just as seventeen strangled bodies lay for weeks unnoticed in a squatters’ village on the outskirts of Nairobi, a mile from the highway and the houses of officials.

But if I was still far from the real stage, I was also far from the theatre gallery in London where I could hear only the voices of my fellow ‘gods’ telling how the play would end and how it should have been written. What seemed plausible there seemed complacent here, and ignorant.

‘Where is the man of courage who will see that so long as able men like Kenyatta or Kimathi are excluded from effective political power …?’ The voice droned on in the London theatre gallery. From there you could not see the group of burnt huts, the charred corpse of a woman, the body robbed of its entrails, the child cut in two halves across the waist, the officer found still living by the roadside with his lower jaw sliced off, a hand and foot severed. For that, here, was the political power of Kimathi, the power of the panga.

At best I had come down from the gallery to the front of the circle and could see a little more – not of what the play was about but of the movements and moods of the players: I could begin to understand that in this small area of Kenya it was unreasonable to expect people to talk reasonably. There was too much bewilderment and too much fear.

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