Word: mau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...expanding their holdings into the White Highlands; instead, the white settlers told them to go expand into the Crown Lands, and vaguely talked of irrigation projects that would some day make the Crown Lands bloom. Frustrated, many of the Kikuyu farmers turned to other occupations, including joining the Mau Mau and beheading whites...
...years ago, Britain's Tory government, while busy fighting off the Mau Mau, appointed a Royal Commission to take a long, slow look at the East African problem. Last week, in a thoroughgoing, 482-page report, the Royal Commission made one overriding recommendation: the White Highlands must be opened up to African ownership, and African land ghettoes must be done away with. As for the Africans, the commission urged them to drop their old ways of tribal land ownership, and to switch to individual or family land ownership...
Except for a perfunctory romantic thread, the story is all about Mau Mau...
...white hero is Peter McKenzie, a hulking young safari leader who can stalk a kudu, sight a Mannlicher-Schoenauer and get shikkered on gin with the best big-game hunters. The sinister shadow on his life is his childhood playmate, the black Kimani. who becomes a Mau Mau at bestial oath-taking ceremonies in a mountain hideout and butchers Peter's family in sanguinary scenes of the kind that Author Ruark insists upon describing over and over again in detail...
...Ruark is revolting in his anatomical accounts of Mau Mau barbarity, he runs amuck with his stories of the white man's revenge. When the white "commandos" catch the tribesmen, it is literally an eye for an eye. The hero himself cuts off one man's genitals, hacks out another's tongue, and, pinning a Mau Mau woman to the ground, tries unsuccessfully to get her to talk by dropping a two-foot snake upon her genitals. Finally Peter says: "I have shot only wart hogs and camp meat, so to speak . . . Now I want...