The Man They Left Behind

"Isn't it better," said the husky white settler from Kenya somewhat plaintively last week, "for us to let the African take the wheel of the bus as long as we can sit by his side and read the map, rather than wait until he throws us out?" For five years ambitious Michael Blundell, 52, head of the moderate New Kenya Group, has been urging his 65,000 fellow whites to accept a multiracial government before the colony's 6,000,000 blacks take over everything themselves. Last week, as the London conference on the future of Kenya was drawing to a close (TIME, Feb. 1 et seq.), the one man who looked as if he might miss the bus was Michael Blundell himself.

The crucial issue before the conference was: Who would control Kenya's new Legislative Council as the colony moved on to independence? Since the blacks and whites of Kenya could not agree among themselves, Britain's astute new Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, offered a plan of his own. It called for an intricate set of direct and indirect elections, under which 37 seats out of 65 in the new Legislative Council would be held by Africans. Twenty seats would be reserved to Europeans (10), Asians (8) and Arabs (2), but voted on by the entire electorate. This, in diluted form, met many of the original demands of the Africans' vigorous Labor Leader Tom Mboya, 29. He balked a bit, but when Macleod made it clear that this would be a final offer, Mboya accepted.

To Blundell, however, the plan came as a devastating shock. He had already risked his white support by trying to reach a compromise with Mboya, who does not trust Blundell's liberalism and prefers to operate against the more extreme European wing led by Group Captain Llewellyn Briggs. With the ultras, Mboya believes, Africans at least know where they stand. White extremists have already begun denouncing Blundell back home as a dupe. Now, far from rewarding him for his reasonableness. Macleod confronted him with a plan that seemed destined only to stiffen his white critics further. For big Michael Blundell, the bus seemed already moving too fast.

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