Word: mau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...present literary rate of exchange, one African safari 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...
Author Reid's hero is Nebu, a simple Kikuyu who was once a houseboy for an English planter. Now he is a Mau Mau whose deepest joy comes when a white is made "beautiful," i.e., seen in the final torments of death. The plot is so firmly tied to coincidence as to make it seem slightly ridiculous. After a raid, Nebu drops off from his Mau Mau gang to fol low white tracks through the bush. When he catches up to the white man, he finds his old boss, and after he has killed him, he discovers the white...
...white settlers in Kenya, Mboya's mention of guns and pangas brought unhappy memories of the Mau Mau terror. Last year, under the Lyttelton constitution, Africans in Kenya were allowed to vote for certain members of the 58-member "multiracial" Legislative Council, which, it was hoped, would bring unity to the European, African, Asian and Arab citizens of the colony. Mboya and seven other Africans were elected to the "Legco" but, protesting that Negroes deserved at least 15 more seats, they refused to have any part in the government...
Kenya's more liberal whites can see no way out of the stalemate. They feel it is impossible to go back to the days of absolute white supremacy, which brought on the Mau Mau terror, and equally impossible to go ahead to granting Kenya complete (and all-black) independence on the model of Ghana. But if Mboya continues to reject the gradual "multiracial" approach to self-government, the result will be increasing racial tension that may end in a renewal of fighting-only this time with all the tribes and not just with the 1,500,000 Kikuyu...