U.S. Envoy Back in Kenya Regime’s Doghouse : Africa: The donation of a package of ‘sinister’ schoolbooks has reignited anti-American rhetoric in Parliament and the media.

And now, the affair of the “sinister” schoolbooks.

U.S. Ambassador Smith Hempstone is under attack here for donating a package of textbooks, including autobiographies of some seminal American black figures, to a dirt-poor government school during a tour of the Kenyan countryside in late January.

The books have been seized by the local police and termed “sinister” by the area’s member of Parliament. They have become the occasion for a new outburst of anti-U.S. rhetoric from the nominally pro-American Kenyan government. As before, the main target is the outspoken ambassador.

“Hempstone in Fresh Dispute,” was the lead headline in Monday’s Kenya Times, which is owned by the ruling political party here, the Kenyan African National Union, or KANU.

The latest outburst apparently heralds the beginning of a larger campaign. American diplomats here have already been warned by Kenyan government sources to expect a sustained barrage of criticism from lawmakers after Parliament opens its 1991 session today.

What is likely to occur is a familiar procedure in which members of Parliament take the floor in succession to proclaim Kenya’s independence from outside pressure and to belittle their targets’ character, often crudely.

In recent times, the targets of these sessions have included the Canadian government, which earned Parliament’s ire by allowing film of protests in Ottawa and Toronto by Kenyans of Somali extraction to be aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and Ethel Kennedy and her daughter Kerry, who critiqued Kenya’s civil rights record in 1989 during a visit here to present a human rights award to a Kenyan dissident.

On this occasion, Hempstone, a conservative journalist who was once editor of the Washington Times newspaper and covered Africa for the Chicago Daily News more than 20 years ago, appears to be a stand-in for what is really bugging the government of President Daniel Arap Moi: American officials’ increasing criticism of Kenya’s human rights record and a congressional move to freeze American aid to the country for the same reason.

Hempstone seemed to indicate as much when he remarked, in an interview about the schoolbook controversy, “Welcome to the mother of all disinformation campaigns.”

The immediate issue is a trip the ambassador made last Jan. 29 to the semi-arid Laikipia plateau of Kenya, which is mostly occupied by cattle herders of the nomadic Samburu and other tribes. His main purpose was to visit a Peace Corps project in the area, but on the way he stopped at a secondary school, financed mostly by donations made at Kenyan political gatherings. As is customary, he dropped off a gift package of about 30 books for its otherwise empty library.

The package included about 15 titles, among them “The Souls of Black Folk,” the classic by W. E. B. DuBois; “Narration of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” that black writer’s autobiography, and “Up From Slavery,” by Booker T. Washington. There were also anthologies of American fiction, an abridged version of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and handbooks entitled “Simple Engine Repair,” “Basic Accounting” and “Small Business Management.”

Embassy sources here say the package was a standard one prepared by the U.S. Information Agency and that thousands of similar volumes have been distributed around Kenya without incident.

The embassy learned a few days later that the books had been seized almost instantly by the local district commissioner, but the affair did not become an issue until the region’s member of Parliament made it public Sunday. Hempstone was trying to “pollute the minds of peace-loving wananchi (common people),” said the lawmaker, Danson Ndumia, who went on to accuse Hempstone of “sneaking into the area.”

This all suggests that U.S.-Kenyan relations may be heading into a trough as deep as that of last summer, when the U.S. Embassy gave shelter to a prominent dissident, arranged his departure from the country and issued pointed complaints about the Moi regime’s general treatment of its political opponents. Three leading dissidents have been in jail, without being charged, since July; their main offense appears to have been calling for an end to the 10-year one-party rule of KANU.

During that period, Ambassador Hempstone was also the main target of Kenyan rhetoric.

“Shut Up, Mr. Ambassador” was the headline on one front-page editorial in the Kenya Times. The issue then was Hempstone’s warnings that the U.S. Congress was increasingly inclined to expect recipients of U.S. foreign aid to make progress toward democracy, a criterion that the Moi government was failing to meet. In turn, the regime here viewed such remarks as interfering in Kenya’s domestic affairs. Rumors then indicated that Moi was considering requesting Hempstone’s recall.

Eventually, Herman Cohen, U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, visited Nairobi to warn that Hempstone’s views fully reflected those of the American government.

After a period of entente during which the Moi regime supported the U.S. side in the Persian Gulf War and assisted in the evacuation of U.S.-trained anti-Kadafi Libyan commandos from Chad, the State Department two weeks ago again enraged the government by assailing its arrest of Gitobu Imanyara, editor and publisher of the Nairobi Law Monthly, a leading journal for opponents of Moi’s regime. Imanyara has remained in jail on charges of sedition for publishing an editorial suggesting that Moi was showing favoritism to his own tribal group, the Kalenjin, in appointing ministers and chairmen of government corporations.

Perhaps of even more concern is a congressional bill sponsored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) freezing $4.95 million in military aid to Kenya left over from last year’s appropriation. The bill also prohibits the State Department from giving Kenya any “economic support funds,” which is quasi-military aid. Kenya’s $26 million in general development assistance is unaffected by the bill, which already has more than 40 co-sponsors among the 100 senators.

American aid to Kenya is probably too important for the East African country to risk a complete breach with Washington, for official American donations help the Kenyans cover their 30% budget deficit each year.

But that has only made the Moi government sensitive to American criticism, especially since it regards its human-rights record as superior to those of such neighbors as Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda.

“Kenya’s (economic) foundations are so shallow that any criticism of this kind by the U.S. shakes the entire country,” said Philip Ochieng, editor in chief of the Kenya Times, in a recent interview.