RAN: 40,000 march

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'Unity, peace and order' were the demands put forward by the Shah's new Prime Minister as he took office. • Jaafar Sharif-Emami's appeal met with a predictable response. :In north eastern Mashad -holy city of the Muslim Shiite sect, and starting 'Communists' Against Revolution, containing the import. ant essay "The Theory of Structural Assimilation" by Tim Wohlforth is the book on post-war Stalinism that Mandel and Healy would not discuss.

Make sure you gat your copy -available at £1.75 plus 20p p&p from: WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR point of the last wave of violent demonstrationsritual mourning ceremonies for those killed 40 days ago by the Shah's forces developed into a mass demonstration of 40,000.

After a prominent religious leader had presented a set of 14 demands (including a return to Islamic law) as a basis for negotiations with the Shah, the demonstration began break up, with large secti chanting anti-governm slogans.

Three killed Riot police moved in with teargas and then gunfire, killing at least three of the demonstrators.

Once again, the events in Mashad will be only the first shudder in a new convulsion to grip the Shah's dictatorship.

Such crude and bloody manifestations of the class struggle appeared not to ruffle : the diplomatic cordiality of Chairman Hua's meeting with the Iranian dictator.

'Security'

But no doubt they did give an edge to their discussions of maintaining "security' in the Gulf area for imperialism and its allies in the Stalinist bureaucracy ruling China. anti-colonial struggles, this did not signify that. Kenyatta either led or organised the mass movement.

His oratory was an important asset in the development of the movement, and secured his own prestige.

But as the agents of the British government reported, Kenyatta's meetings were the pretext not the reason for mass mobilisations, and his political positions were not shared by his militant audience.

But his efforts were frustrated in the short-term as the increasingly violent struggles against British rule exploded into the first major Mau Mau revolt of 1952.

A State of Emergency was declared, and Kenyatta himself was arrested for 'managing Mau Mau'.

His own indignant description of this charge as: 'one of the most brilliantly calculated fomented and perpetrated lies in the whole history of imperialist intrigue' comes rather nearer the truth.

Authority

But nine years of imprisonment and detention preserved his authority in the nationalist movement and saved him from the exposure of his political positions in the course of the Throughout this period, the British colonial rulers were battling to crush an extended revolt, using the techniques they forced to concede its defeat.

Kenyatta himself was released in 1961 and again became president of what was now the Kenya African Nationalist Union.

Encouraged

Much of his energy was spent on encouraging white settlers and foreign investors to stay in Kenya, arguing that they would be welcome after independnece.

The elections of 1963 gave KANU a majority in parliament whereupon the other parties dissolved themselves into an enlarged KANU, with Kenyatta still at its head, and after independence, as president of a one-party state.

For fifteen years Kenyatta ruled supreme, consistently outmanoeuvring such left' critics as union leader Tom Mboya and Odinga Odinga.

The struggles against colonial rule in Kenya were amongst the most protracted ...and most violent in the whole continent, yet today Kenya is one of the strongest bastions of imperialism in Africa.

That reversal was not of course the work of any one man, but Kenyatta did play a key role in directing such a shift. He fully met his pledge to imperialism of a welcome after independence.

Foreign investment was eagerly encouraged, and, as capitalism flourished in Kenya, President for ten years and, amongst his other posts, Chief Scout of Kenya.

But lacking even Kenyatta's faded prestige as a veteran nationalist, Moi's authority will be a far less effective block to opposition.

Some of that opposition may come from other rival members of the narrow ruling clique which Kenyatta built up around him.

But however successful the bourgeois bureaucracy may be preserving its unity, the Kenyan masses will certainly be thrown into conflict with their interests and with the domination of imperialism as the shortlived boom of the economy sags and plunges into the chaos of the capitalist crisis.

Kenyatta may have been unwilling to loose the reins of power from his grip, but death has spared him the humiliation of seeing them torn from his hands by the masses he patronised and exploited throughout a life of opportunism and gratified ambition.

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