THE TABLET, August 1, 1959. VOL. 213, No. 6219.

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published a s a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN il 84 0 AUGUST 1st 1959

N INEPENCE

Violence Premeditated: TheN y asaiand issu e .

Africans in the Federation : Impressions in Rhodesia. By J. E. Alexander.

The Views of Professor Rernal: Philosopher of Marxism. By Colin Clark

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Chess n_n------- m-----■ mmmmmmmmmmmm — — ■■—

CROSS

Mr. Nixon's visit to Moscow is to be seen as the companion piece to Mr. Macmillan’s, and both Western statesmen have had a characteristic and representative national flavour about them. Mr. Nixon emphasises that he comes from a humble home, where plain speaking leaves no sore feelings, and enters on very public dialogue in a manner that is outside the British tradition. It is all to the good that statesmen of both Western countries should show themselves informally in Russia, and that neither Mr. Khrushchev nor anybody else should think it worth while to treat the two allies differently with a view to separating them, as Stalin had some success in doing in the last year of the war. As a dogmatic atheist, Mr. Khrushchev had no business to complain of prayer as interference, but he resents America’s week of prayer for enslaved peoples, not because he thinks it is likely to lead to such practical results as thunderbolts from above, but for its psychological effect on those taking part in it.

But Mr. Khrushchev seems to have missed an elementary point when he asked Mr. Nixon whether the Russian crowds looked enslaved, as though there were not other nations, notably the Hungarians and the Poles, whom the Americans have in view. The Russian people have never known political freedom : they went in a few months from the power of the Tsar to the power of the Bolsheviks, and, while they have found the Bolsheviks much more thorough, and therefore more oppressive, masters, imposing a grimly materialist teaching in place of the immemorial Christian faith, they have found compensations, still small, but with the promise of more to come, from the long succession of five-year plans in which they take part. Mr. Khrushchev makes the impression that he is a real Marxist, for whom only classes, and not nations, are social realities.

The Nixon visit has eclipsed the Geneva Conference, which seems likely to break off again, for the sake of much needed vacations. I t will do so after making a little more progress, but very little; the chief being an agreement to avoid any admission of total failure, and to consider some sort of standstill arrangement over Berlin, which is merely taking note of the present position. Mr. Gromyko may feel that i t is, after all, a

TALK positive achievement that the future of Berlin has been formally treated as an unresolved political problem, and that to that extent the Russian contention that a highly anomalous situation cannot endure indefinitely has been advertised to the world; and that the East German Communist State has been insinuated into international discussion, From the Western side, it can be said that the position in the summer is less fraught with a sense of crisis than it was at the beginning of the year, and this alone is sufficient justification for continual conference although not for bringing together the Heads of States, if Mr. Khrushchev has no more to say than the things he is prepared to say to all callers. The Wood and the Trees in Africa

The Opposition have been doing their best to make sure that the British electorate, when it looks at Africa, shall not see the wood for trees. This was true of both this week’s debates on the events in March of this year in Kenya and Nyasaiand. The great wood to be kept in view in Kenya is the very remarkable success that the Kenya Government has had in rehabilitating Kikuyu prisoners so that it could then release them. At the height of the Mau Mau troubles there were 82,000 held. Now only some 1,100 of the hard core of Mau Mau remain. Many of them are men guilty of crimes for which, if they did not suffer the capital penalty, they could certainly not have expected release after four or five years. I t has been a programme of rehabilitation through work of public utility, such as the Mau Mau oath made its takers abjure, so that a psychological change for the better happens once they violate it. Hardly anyone would have predicted, before the Mau Mau had been mastered and its abominations ended, that there would be hardly any of the Mau Mau in captivity by the end of the fifties. I t is a remarkable achievement, and the background against which the killing last March of eleven Mau Mau prisoners by their African wardens has to be seen.

There may still be doubt—Mr. Enoch Powell expressed it with great force—whether the disciplinary action has been taken high enough up the administrative ladder. But the Opposition have never had any case