Word: jomo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Africans have a superstitious horror of the chameleon, which in Kikuyu is pronounced kipu. It so happens that the initials of Leftist Oginga Odinga's nascent opposition party, the Kenya People's Union, have the same phonetic pronunciation-a fact that President Jomo Kenyatta's political songwriters did not overlook during the nation's three-week special election campaign. All through Kikuyuland last month, Jomo's ardent KANU party youth-wingers chanted a 20-verse warning against the abhorrent turncoats of the "chameleon party," punctuating each stanza with guttural cries of "moto, moto, moto!"-meaning...
...time the returns were counted last week, Odinga was scorched. At issue were the 29 seats vacated by his adherents when they quit KANU last March. Jomo's KANU candidates, whose party symbol is a cockerel, captured twelve seats in the National Assembly and eight in the Senate. Odinga's KPU, represented on ballot sheets as a bull, won seven and two respectively. That left KANU with a plurality of 121 to 7 in the House and 39 to 2 in the Senate...
...claimed that if KPU failed to win all available seats it would be proof that the elections were rigged. "You can be a friend of Kenyatta's only if you crawl and cringe like a hyena," he cried. "He is a frightened man with a little heart." Jomo proved to be equally adept at badinage. At a rally in Nairobi, he warned that the dissidents were prepared to buy votes. "If these people offer money," he said, "you must know it is foreign money meant to undermine the sovereignty of our country. Beware of this political prostitution. Take...
Take the problem of Oginga Odinga, the powerful leftist who last month resigned as Vice President, bolted the ruling Kenya African National Union, and took 27 other members of Parliament with him to form his own opposition party. Although Jomo still had a clear majority in the 130-member House, Odinga's revolt was the first serious challenge to the political unity on which the Mzee (Old Man) has based his rule. Kenyatta's answer was to cut Odinga down to size, and his slices were as quick, neat and deadly as those of a Mau Mau panga...
There was a time when Kenyans solved their political problems with the panga, a two-foot-long bush knife that the Man Mau terrorists wielded to bloody effect against British rule. Independence and parliamentary government demand more subtle solutions. Kenya's President Jomo Kenyatta, whom the British once jailed as the master of the Mau Mau, has been quick to adapt...