Word: kinsmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...adds Kenya's Minister of Economic Planning Tom Mboya, "much of what we have achieved could be lost overnight." Yet no African leader would stamp out tribalism overnight, even if he could. For safety's sake, the leaders themselves pack their governments with fellow tribesmen. Houphouet-Boigny keeps Baule kinsmen in key posts. In his heyday, Ghana's deposed Kwame Nkrumah heavily favored aides from his Nzima tribe. Mboya, for all his brilliance, may never reach top power in Kenya because he belongs not to the dominant Kikuyu, but to the Luo. So it goes: the central fact of Africa...
...more than 8,000,000-among them 4,500,000 refugees-into a patch of bush and swampland that is one-fourth the size of Biafra's former territory. The Biafrans, most of whom are Ibo tribesmen, fear that they will be massacred just as thousands of their kinsmen in northern Nigerian cities were killed two years ago. Many are starving, but they refuse to come out of hiding in the bush...
...infantryman, customarily headed for an organized North Vietnamese unit but sometimes also for duty as a replacement in decimated Viet Cong ranks, is drilled night and day in the patriotic mission he has been given. "My heart is filled with joy and with an intense love for our kinsmen," one NVA wrote in his diary upon crossing the DMZ into South Viet Nam. The aim of such saturation indoctrination is to try to ensure that NVA recruits are "politically reliable...
...center of reality is the family. Until recently, worshiping one's ancestors was the highest spiritual duty; to be loyal to one's kinsmen is still for most the highest social duty. Legend abounds with stories of filial devotion, including the boy Meng who lured the mosquitoes to bite him so that they would leave his mother and father alone. Chinese tradition tells of a son who reported his father for stealing a sheep; the judge decided that the son should be put to death because he had shown greater loyalty toward the authorities than toward...
...tone of his research is best expressed in the image of a befeathered savage dancer wearing sneakers. Without straining for irony, Gaisseau notes inching progress in New Guinea, where one happy warrior of the cannibalistic Kuku-Kuku tribe is flown away to face murder charges; his kinsmen on the ground wear human hands as talismans, smoke the bodies of their honored dead and lug them around like dolls...