Prince Harry, second son of the heir to the British throne, has just been withdrawn from military service in Afghanistan and returned to Britain. His presence there was a secret until discovered by a U.S. television network from where, like a wild fire, the item ignited media the world over.
Images showed us the handsome young prince on foot patrol in an Afghan village, and an interview in his quarters where he commented on his military service in a very open and engaging way. Reporters speculated on what a trophy the prince’s head would be––recognizable by his curly red hair–-in Taliban hands.
The British command must have had similar reflections when it transferred Prince Harry back home. Where does his grandmother come in?
Before making the connection, I might add that the British command must be a pretty knuckle-headed organization to send the prince to a war zone in the first place. One TV commentator revealed that sending him to Iraq had been mentioned at one time, but that someone high up had thought Iraq too dangerous.
I wonder why no one thought Afghanistan was not dangerous, unless the rationale was to show that princes are just like everyone else––which of course they aren’t. We do not usually see TV reports on just any young soldier transferred from Afghanistan to England. The connection between the prince’s precarious situation and his grandmother’s over fifty years ago is that the same lack of care, prudence, and common sense was operating when Princess Elizabeth was sent to Kenya on her honeymoon in 1953.
Kenya is also in the news today, much more than Prince Harry. After a bitterly contested presidential election, an agreement has been brokered by the ex-Secretary of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, whereby the two contestants share leading positions in the new government. In the meantime, the world was shocked by the unprecedented violence with over 1500 dead in the streets, especially in a country like peaceful Kenya where photo safaris, package tours to animal reserves, “Out of Africa” nostalgia (with Meryl Streepe and Robert Redford) gave no indication that long time neighbors would be slicing each other’s throats open, refugees crowded into insalubrious camps––wait! “Unprecedented”?
In the collective English memory, maybe even world memory, the name “Mau Mau” incorporates itself into a vision of even greater violence, over fifty years ago. It was the start of the struggle for Kenyan independence, leaving 1800 African civilians and 32 white settlers dead, not to mention the thousands of actual combatants (statistics from Cornfields “Historical Survey” in Andersen’s “History of the Hanged”.
In popular memory these figures are often wrongly exchanged). The connection between the Kenyan War and Princess Elizabeth is similar to the connection between the Afghan War and her grandson. Why were either of them where they were? We know why Prince Harry was in Afghanistan, but why was Princess Elizabeth honeymooning in Kenya in 1953 in the middle of the Kenyan rebellion? This is not a reproach against her filial devotion. Her father, King George VI, had been ill recurrently, but the best medical advice consulted saw no reason for the Princess to postpone her honeymoon with the Duke of Edinburgh.
The British Empire was still large and varied enough to provide attractive holiday sites, and what more interesting to a princess, known for her love of animals, than the Kenyan wild life reserve, especially near the Aberdares forest where guests could look down at the animals from the Treetop hotel? The future queen was doing just that in February 1953.
In the rest of Kenya, a State of Emergency had been declared in October 1952 after the assassination of various Africans loyal to Great Britain. Extra British battalions were sent to Kenya, and then in January the Kenya government began building up its own Home Guard. Commentators remark, however, that attacks against or even murders of blacks did not cause undue concern to the white settlers who originally felt that their government could deal with this adequately; the British colony in Kenya, moreover, was the “creme de la creme” and from the highest strata of British society, another reason for the Princess to honeymoon there.
The first murders of whites, beginning in October 1952, did not, however, disrupt the plans for the honeymoon. There is even a report that after one attack, the Mau Mau (popular deformation for the “Muhimu” political group) retreated to the Aberdares forest. Well, the Princess was back home by then, but why had she been sent to Kenya in the middle of a period of violence against whites?
It was more than a calculated risk, I agree, that the Mau Maus would not storm the Treetop Hotel, but then again, what a feather in their cap if they did! And what a feather in the Talibans cap (neither group wears feathers, of course) if they got Prince Harry! And what negligent, not to say sloppy, administrative planning––did Churchill know? did Gordon Brown know?––in both cases! We do remember that Prince Harry’s mother was not very well taken care of on her last foreign trip either, but she was out of the Establishment by then, and it was not duty-bound to protect her.