Word: mau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Before dawn, some 400 Mau Mau came out of their strongholds to fight in the open. They first raided the white man's clubhouse at Thika, 34 miles northeast of Nairobi. They dragged out the African barman and slashed him to bits with their sharp pangas; they tore up a picture of Sir Winston Churchill, downed all the mineral water in the bar, and made off towards the police post at Kandara, 16 miles away. At 9:30 a.m. they confidently attacked the post in bright sunshine−but the British were ready and waiting. A relieving column...
Commanding General Sir George Erskine sent his 39th Brigade in pursuit. The crack Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers caught one Mau Mau detachment at a river crossing, ambushed another in the Maragua Valley. In this valley alone, the Fusiliers bagged 76 Mau Mau. The R.A.F. strafed and bombed the Mau Mau remnants as they fell back to their forests, and the British soon had them cornered on a wooded hill known as Blarney Castle. Mau Mau losses in the battle so far: 197 killed, including two "generals." Total British loss: three wounded...
This was the biggest battle of Kenya's emergency, and the British won it so completely because they had advance warning. "General China,'' the Mau Mau's onetime No. 2, who was captured by the British and sentenced to death (TIME, Feb. 15), is now cooperating with the British. Erskine hopes to use China to persuade other Mau Mau leaders to surrender...
...Damned Impertinence." The skirmish was the one bright spot in an increasingly dark picture. The war against the Mau Mau gets worse, not better. A joint Tory-Laborite parliamentary delegation returned to England and reported sharply last week that Kenya's emergency is fast spreading, partly because the colonial government "has not yet secured the full support, loyalty and understanding of the majorities in all the racial communities...
...emergence in Africa, flew Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton. It was Lyttelton's third visit to Kenya in 16 months, and the war's latest statistics bore out his concern. Six thousand British, 44,000 African troops, police and home guards are now deployed against some 14,000 Mau Mau and their supporters. The war costs more than twice as much ($1,800,000 a month) this year as last. In Kenya, the moderates among−the settlers have a hard time getting heard, and the extremists seek an impossible solution in a land where whites are outnumbered...