Word: mau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Spending the night in a tree house in Kenya, land of the Mau Mau, Perelman, as he so often seems to do, becomes alarmed...
...more than a dozen countries on three continents that have won independence from Britain since World War II, none has seemed so ill-prepared for nationhood as Kenya. Yet British officials fear a bloody resurgence of Mau Mau savagery if Kenya does not get its freedom from British rule in the near future -possibly by the end of this year. Thus, once again, Africa's remote and bizarre tribal politics were thrust at puzzled European officials who were trying to give a colonial country freedom without chaos...
...Kenya's two major parties and their bosses: KANU's grey-bearded, rheumy-eyed Jomo Kenyatta, 71, and restrained Ronald Ngala, 39, president of KADU† and Kenya's leader of government business. After eight years' detention for his ringleader's role in the Mau Mau uprisings, Kenyatta is still a hero to millions of Africans; he insists on a strong centralized government with a one-house legislature and an elected head of state. KADU urges a Swiss-style federation of six largely autonomous regional constituencies, divided along tribal lines, with a two-house federal...
While Kenyatta was in prison, the 1952-57 Mau Mau uprising was beaten down, but the political tension on which it was built never subsided. The wave of African nationalism would not recede, and the unrelenting pressure for freedom by the colony's 5,500,000 blacks began to tell. Kenya's economy faltered: $2,800,000 in white-settler capital left Kenya weekly, and 800 of the colony's 3,600 white-settler farms went up for sale. In 1960 Sir Patrick Renison still denounced Kenyatta as "a leader to darkness and death...
...Privileges. Belatedly, the whites conceded that Mau Mau had only begun in earnest after Kenyatta's jailing, not before. By early this year, Sir Patrick was saying, "It is arguable that the economy is likely to be more damaged by the uncertainty of [Kenyatta's] continued restriction.'' Finally, as the British realized that there could be no stable government in Kenya without black leadership, and that there could be no black leadership without Jomo Kenyatta, his release became inevitable. To reassure panicky whites, Kenyatta now says that they may keep their farms even after independence...