Word: africanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Salaam, capital of the neighboring British protectorate of Tanganyika. 19-year-old Brian Hay ward and a handful of African 'troopers under his command were found guilty of 1) .tying up Mau Mau suspects with thongs round their necks, 2) whipping the soles of their feet, 3) burning their eardrums with lighted cigarettes. Hay ward was fined ?100 ($280) and jailed for three months, but the English judge did not think that the soldiers should be judged too severely. "It is easy to work oneself up into a state of pious horror over these offenses," said he, "but they...
Another Briton, Captain Gerald Selby Lewis Griffiths, 43, was court-martialed in a wooden hut in the heart of the Mau Mau badlands. He was accused of murdering a captured Negro forest worker suspected of belonging to Mau Mau, and of ordering his African rifleman to "shoot anyone you want, so long as he is black." Griffiths told the court that he kept a Scoreboard in his officers' mess, recording the number of Mau Mau kills and captures. His company was aiming to raise its total to 50 kills, and to encourage his men he offered them a five...
...check his theory, Dr. Jeffreys studied names which ancient African tribes gave to corn. He found that many of them called it by the name of the tribe to the north or the northeast of them. So he concludes that American corn was not brought to coastal Africa by the Spanish or Portuguese but that it came overland from the north, probably introduced by earlier Arab navigators...
Stopping Dimwit. Another primitive African, undoubtedly human, was recently found by Keith Jolly of the University of Cape Town and described by Professor M. R. Drennan in Britain's Nature magazine. In a "blowout" (wind-eroded area) near Saldanha, 80 miles north of Cape Town, Jolly found the ground littered with the bones of extinct animals: mammoths, giant wart hogs and a primitive giraffe. Among the bones were 25 fragments that fitted together into a thick-walled, beetle-browed human skull...
Arab Explorers. Another Witwatersrand professor, Dr. M.D.W. Jeffreys, has been working on a more recent problem of African history: Did Africans make contact with the Western Hemisphere before the time of Columbus? Dr. Jeffreys thinks that they did, and he bases his theory on pottery made about 900 A.D. by the Yoruba tribe of West Africa. Some of it appears to have been decorated by rolling a corncob over wet clay. Since corn almost certainly originated in the Americas, this suggests that Africans, or Arabs sailing from Africa, crossed to the New j World 500 years before Columbus and brought...