Word: mau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...power struggle at all? Why wasn't power handed over as it was in Kenya, Zambia and Tanzania? Now the situation is pathetic. We are almost at the point of a bloodbath. The guerrillas are everywhere. We come in and stay. We are already bolder than the Mau Mau...
...Bell, now a senior correspondent in Boston, went to Kenya in 1959 and was told by British colonial servants that Kenyatta was confined, or "rusticated" as they put it, near the Somali frontier. The militant Mau Mau leader was said to be a "hopeless alcoholic." A year later, Bell met Kenyatta in a village in northern Kenya. He was tall and dignified, and Bell remembers him manipulating a fly whisk with great style and grace. At first he spoke haltingly, "not because he was a gone alcoholic," Bell recalls, "but because he hadn't spoken English in seven years...
...Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, once regarded by the outside world as a reversion to the terror and bestiality of the African past, came to be viewed as a war of independence. Kenyatta himself, who had been denounced by a British colonial governor as "a leader to darkness and death," became as the ruler of his new nation a symbol of reconciliation without rancor. As a special mark of respect, the British government announced that Prince Charles would represent Queen Elizabeth II at Kenyatta's funeral this week...
...leaving his wife and infant son Peter behind, Kenyatta returned to Kenya to work for African self-rule. He soon emerged as the strongest of the colony's black political leaders, and within a few years was caught up in the controversy over the Mau Mau. After a series of terrorist murders in 1952, the colonial government ordered his arrest and charged him with being the mastermind behind the Mau Mau organization. He was convicted in a sort of political show trial and sent off to nine years of detention and restriction...
...meantime, the slaughter only grew worse. Whites turned their farmhouses into fortresses; blacks who cooperated with the settlers lived in terror of Mau Mau revenge. In the end, only 32 white civilians and 167 members of the security forces were killed by the Mau Mau during the seven-year emergency. But 11,503 guerrillas lost their lives, as did 1,819 Africans who remained loyal to the colonial government...