Word: leopards
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...LEOPARD (159 pp.)-Victor Stafford Reid-Viking...
...equals roughly one novel about Mau Mau trouble. Most such books shine only a feeble light into an area where burning racial hatred has obscured the underlying questions of right and wrong-or else they glare with a Ruark-like, eyewitness sensationalism. It may be a virtue of The Leopard that its author, Victor Reid, has never been in Africa...
Novelist Reid is a Jamaican journalist; his only other novel. New Day, reflected the color and sensuousness of his native Caribbean island. What he has tried for in The Leopard is more than a look into a Mau Mau mind. It is no less than an effort to glimpse the African soul suffering between felt injustice and the dim knowledge that the white man's impact has ended once and for all the chance of returning to the Eden of primitive ignorance and tribal pride that existed before he came...
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...
Such bizarre beasts-human beings usually hopped up with hashish and kept in captivity by local experts in black magic -are no strangers to the orderly process of British justice in Africa. In much of Africa the trained, crazed killers masquerade as leopards, perform their dark deeds in leopard fashion by pouncing on the backs of unsuspecting victims from the low-hanging branches of forest trees, slashing their backs and necks with razor-sharp knives fitted to their fingers like claws. In Tanganyika, however, lions are man's most prevalent enemy. There the fashion trend is toward lion skins...