Word: mau
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...cocktail party (with Lady Renison keeping a close personal eye on the liquor bills). He is particularly disliked by Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta, who will probably be independent Kenya's first ruler. In 1960, opposing Jomo's release from detention as a ringleader of the 1952"59 Mau Mau terror, Renison warned that Kenyatta would lead the country to "darkness and to death...
Before the seven-year Mau Mau scourge was eliminated in 1959, the British colonial government decided that it must counter witchcraft with witchcraft, and devised elaborate de-oathing rites, but they were not always successful. Once, when authorities persuaded tribesmen to abjure their bonds to the Mau Mau by sacrificing a goat, a Mau Mau agent slaughtered two dogs, nullifying the "goat oath" with the more potent magic of the "dog oath...
Magic Rites. Among the superstitious Kikuyu, the British have learned, very little can be accomplished without magic rites. The Mau Mau forced horror-struck natives to violate tribal taboos, and so bound them to the movement by cutting them off from all else. Some of the grisly Mau Mau oath-taking rites called for copulation with sheep, eating the flesh of exhumed corpses or drinking the "Kaberi-chia cocktail," a blend of semen, menstrual blood and sheep's blood...
Saturday Sport. The L.F.A. has produced nothing so depraved as the bestial Mau Mau rites. Such traces of relatively mild oathing ceremonies as banana leaf arches and the entrails of animals have been discovered deep in Kenya's forests, but most L.F.A. members are inducted with a simple pledge of allegiance that has even been administered on Nairobi buses...
Though some key L.F.A. officers remain on the loose, the teams draw big crowds throughout the Rift Valley, where Mau Mau was born. This month, 2,000 Kikuyu have been de-oathed. Said one European official hopefully: "I think we've caught this one in time." But there were those who wondered whether the de-oathing would take. "Other tribes play football on Saturday afternoons," said one skeptical white magistrate, "but the Kikuyu take oaths...