Word: kikuyu
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...camps. Many of them, still marked by the blood-oath fanaticism of the old days, are considered cases more in need of psychiatric care than punishment. But last week the father of the terror, bearded London-and Moscow-educated Jomo Kenyatta, the notorious "Burning Spear" feared by whites and Kikuyu tribesmen alike, was let out of jail. He had served his seven-year sentence, with 28 months off for good behavior...
Star Witness Rawson Mbogwa Macharia, a frail little Kikuyu shopkeeper, testified six years ago that Kenyatta himself had given him the Mau Mau oath, that he had been stripped naked and made to walk seven times through an arch of banana leaves and to drink human blood. Last spring, hoping for money, Macharia made the rounds of Nairobi newspapers showing a letter to him from Kenya's attorney general written before the trial. In return for his testimony, the letter said, the government would reward Macharia with a round-trip air ride to England, a two-year college course...
Author Reid's hero is Nebu, a simple Kikuyu who was once a houseboy for an English planter. Now he is a Mau Mau whose deepest joy comes when a white is made "beautiful," i.e., seen in the final torments of death. The plot is so firmly tied to coincidence as to make it seem slightly ridiculous. After a raid, Nebu drops off from his Mau Mau gang to fol low white tracks through the bush. When he catches up to the white man, he finds his old boss, and after he has killed him, he discovers the white...
Wounded, Nebu tries to get to a white town to deliver the boy to his friends. In his uncomplicated Kikuyu mind, he knows that he has wronged his white master and wants to atone by returning the youngster. As he carries him through the bush, trailed by a leopard waiting for a chance to make a double kill, Nebu is tormented by his son's presence even more than by his festering wound. The leopard, an implacable figure of retribution, provides a horrible ending that blends all the tragic elements of white, black and half-black frustrations and hatred...
...independence on the model of Ghana. But if Mboya continues to reject the gradual "multiracial" approach to self-government, the result will be increasing racial tension that may end in a renewal of fighting-only this time with all the tribes and not just with the 1,500,000 Kikuyu, who supplied the hard core of Mau Mau rebels...