Selected Originals - SHADOW OVER KENYA
Selected originals (offcuts, selected scenes, out-takes, rushes) for story "Shadow Over Kenya" - 54/6.
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<br/>Lots of cuts exist for this story - 8 separate reels. Some very good material which was not used in cut story. This reel has full speech by Sir Evelyn Baring. See other records.
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<br/>There are a few false starts and garbled bits but this is the transcript more or less! Some has been cut for use in the story.
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<br/>John Parsons asks Sir Evelyn to tell us about the current situation. "Certainly I'll do my best to do so. I look at it rather like this. I should say that everybody in Kenya, that is to say whether European, or whether they are Asian, or whether they are African, who are reasonable and have a decent outlook on life, are faced with a threat. A threat in the limited area of the country, and a threat from one of the many African peoples in Kenya only. But all the same it is a serious threat. I think that threat has come about by the result of a conspiracy. A conspiracy that has been laid very deeply and has spread very wide and has been organised by a comparatively small number of very clever and very ruthless men, whose aim without any doubt whatever, was to obtain part of themselves.
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<br/>In order to gain power, they have used methods of most bestial cruelty, and as everybody knows, there are several Europeans who have been killed, there have been Asians who have been killed, but by far the greatest number of sufferers, the greatest number who have died as a result of this movement have been Kikuyu, so the thing is becoming in a way a Kikuyu Civil War. Now you may very well ask and very well wonder given the number of people engaged on both sided, why it hasn't been stopped long ago. Well the answer to that is that it may look extraordinarily... when you're actually on the ground it looks quite different because we are faced with very great difficulties, great physical difficulties.
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<br/>There are two large mountain masses close to the City of Nairobi, one around Mount Kenya and the other is near the Abadres. Each of them is covered with forest, very dense forest indeed. It is just as dense as what I should imagine the Brazilian jungles are, and the Kikuyu were forest people long before the Europeans arrived in East Africa. Kikuyu, that is to say those who are in Mau Mau, operate from those forests and they have to be sought and chased in them. That is our great difficulty.
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<br/>Let me go on and say this, that I think that this conspiracy this violent movement takes several forms. We have got to fight it in whatever form it appears in. Sometimes it takes the form of large organised gangs operating from these forest bases and attacking either European farms, or even more the villages and houses of ordinary Kikuyu living in what is called Kikuyu land unit, that is to say the main area, the agricultural area for Kikuyu.
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<br/>Sometimes it takes quite a different form. Individual assassins mixing with ordinary work people going to work in the morning, coming back in the evening in the city of Nairobi. The first is a military problem, the second a policeman's. Sometimes it takes a form of much smaller gangs committing robberies, committing attacks, committ- ing assassin on houses either on European farm lands or in the Kikuyu reserve, and that is a combination of a military and police problem. Those are the three forms and we have got to try our best to fight all those three forms.
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<br/>John asks a question about different methods of dealing with problems. C.U. Well, to give you a very detailed answer would take too long, but let me say this, at the bottom it is an appeal for information. If we can get information about the individual assassins in the city of Nairobi then we can get at them and to get this information we have got to bring over to our side and to give enough courage enough protection to Kikuyu.
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<br/>It is only Kikuyu who can give up information about other Kikuyu, and that we have tried to do not without success. But it can't be done unless a measure of protection can be given, and gradually, slowly, but after many checks at the beginning, sucessfully we have built up in country areas an organisation called the Home Guard. In the Home Guard are the Kikuyu who have decided they are opposed to Mau Mau. Some of them have been opposed to Mau Mau all the time, others after starting on the Mau Mau side have realised it is leading their people to destruction, to complete destruction, and are coming over the side of all peace loving people in Kenya. It is they who are a very important element indeed in our action against the Mau Mau.
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<br/>They have showed great courage, and under cover of the Army and the Police it is on them that we rely for information and much of the follow-up action. What we have done in the country we are now repeating in the city of Nairobi. Though it is in its early stages in Nairobi, and is not easy to do, the results are already being seen.
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<br/>We have got a lot of problems of peaceful developments as you may well imagine problems of varying means, but the most important one, the one that is right on out doorstep, is the problem of African agriculture. That being caused in the main by a large movement of Kikuyu from one part of the country to the other. We have got plans for African agricultural development. Those plans are of the development of African agriculture as a whole. We have prepared a big and a detailed plan for this and we hope to do a large number of things in it. It is based on some very good work that has been done in the past and has continued right up to the present day in our agriculture in the colony of Kenya and we hope in it to save and improve some of the rather arrid country inhabited by certain, in particular, the Pastoral tribes of Kenya.
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<br/>We hope also to improve production very much in what are sometimes called the African areas of high potential. But there are a great many African people, including Kikuyu, who live in a part of the country where the soil is very good and the rain falls high, and we have plans for improvement in many ways for those areas. Now quite apart from the agricultural question, we have also got the question of general development for the social services, and that too will be based on what has been done in the past. We have got plans, for example, for education. May I give two illustrations.
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<br/>I have no time to go into our education plans. One illustration is of what we call Trade and Technical schools. Technical education is by no means the only sign of education, but I thought I might mention this one. It is one to turn out Africans to be artisans in the factories of Kenya, for that we need a certain standard of education, now we are going to expand that and the boys who do not reach that standard, we are going to offer, we hope, in the future, a chance of a rather rougher form of technical training in what we call rural training school so that instead of be- coming young artisans, the young African will become a handy-man, with, let's say, a knowledge of building and carpentry capable of getting a job in his own areas perhaps, or perhaps on a European farm. Now going from education to health. I have only time to give you one illustration. We have already started and we hope to go on building what we call health centres in the African areas particularly, and the idea of these health centres is a combination of preventive measures and curative methods, and also a very definite aim of bringing medicine and bringing preventive health measures into the houses and the villages of the people instead of waiting for the people to come to the hospital, these are two illustrations of the type of thing we have in mind of two important social services.
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<br/>Now quite apart from social services, we have got to try to develope the background on which our agriculture and industries may grow, and we intend to spend money in the future as we have spent it in the past on that background, on roads, geological survey, on water development, always a very important thing in the dry parts of Africa, and a great deal of Kenya is dry. We are going to be in financial difficulties because of the trouble against Mau Mau. We are going to have to spend a great deal of money on security, but in spite of that, we are confident and we hope that we will be able to go on with both social development and the background such as water and the economic developments I have just spoken of.
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<br/>C.U. Finally, let me say this, the struggle against Mau Mau has been long, i am afraid it will still go on for a long time, but let me add we are not stationary, we are making progress and we are all completely confident that we will eventually succeed and destroy Mau Mau."
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<br/>(Comb.Orig.Neg.)