Word: macharia
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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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...
...Kenya government did indeed keep its promise, at a total cost of ?1,500, but nothing seemed to satisfy Macharia. Found unfit for one job, he huffily turned down another. A beer shop the government helped him to open flopped. Blaming all his troubles on the government, Macharia decided on revenge. In November he signed an affidavit for People's Convention Party Leader Tom Mboya charging that the Kenya government had paid...
...Month. The government, insisting that it had paid him only to testify, not to lie, promptly put Macharia on trial for signing a false affidavit. In its own defense it argued that some sort of inducement was necessary to get testimony, since 36 potential witnesses against Kenyatta had been murdered...
Once again the prosecution was up against Kenyatta's flamboyant old defense counsel, Denis Nowell Pritt, Q.C., this time representing Macharia. He would bring forth evidence, said Pritt, that would make him ashamed of being English. At one point he melodramatically exclaimed; "I think I may be physically...
When the prosecutor produced an unpublished manuscript in which Macharia accused Kenyatta of being "the 100% leader of the Communist Party in Africa" and a man who had his own private Gestapo to kill enemies, Macharia insisted that the government had paid him ?29 a month to write such lies. Finally Pritt called Kenyatta himself...