Word: mau
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...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...
...involved took off carrying sealed orders. But once they understood their mission, the pilots understood the security. They were on their way to Maralal airstrip, 200 miles from Nairobi, to bring home Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta. the man the British sent to jail in 1953 for organizing the ferocious Mau Mau terror. After eight years. Kenya's Governor Sir Patrick Renison had convinced both himself and the Colonial Office in London that British forces could handle any threat to public order posed by the old African nationalist's release...
...beard was mottled with grey, but the clothes that he wears like a uniform-brown leather jacket, baggy corduroy trousers, red tie-were the same as the clothes he wore at the time of his arrest by the British in 1952. Now as then, he denies complicity in the Mau Mau terror which cost the lives of more than 13,000. Says Kenyatta: "I have never been a violent man. My whole life has been antiviolence." As for the eight years of detention, partly spent at remote Lodwar, where the hot winds have blown the land into a veritable moonscape...
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...