Word: mau
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...death cell at Nairobi one day last February, China convinced his captors that the Mau Mau, reduced to dispirited remnants, were ready to surrender if the British would give a sign. On the order of the governor of Kenya, he was smuggled out of jail, disguised as an African policeman and flown to Nyeri, where he set to work to write letters to his Mau Mau colleagues. China's letters offered safe conduct to Mau Mau representatives if they would meet British officers to talk over a truce...
...brown Scot who grew up with Kikuyu children on his father's coffee farm. He speaks Swahili, Meru, Kamba, Kikuyu, French and Afrikaans. Day after day, following China's directions, Henderson and Ruck drove into the forest, unarmed and alone. The forest had eyes, and one captured Mau Mau reported a snatch of dialogue between two Mau Mau sentinels...
...China's letters in hollow trees or in cleft sticks planted in forest clearings. Once they took China with them, his curly head protruding from the turret of an armored car. Another time, Henderson, scouting on his own, hid behind a thick-fronted banana tree and watched a Mau Mau oath-taking ceremony in which the new members were forced to eat human eyeballs gouged from still-living victims. The rite included other barbaric practices in sadism and sodomy...
Days and weeks passed, and the Mau Mau sent no reply. The news leaked out to Kenya's white settlers, and many of them denounced Operation China as "appeasement" and "a disgrace." But at last the Mau Mau answered, and most of their replies were favorable. A dozen terrorist '"generals" from Mt. Kenya and the Aber-dares agreed with China that the "white elders and the elders of the forest must meet...
...fell to Henderson and Ruck to meet the Mau Mau chiefs and escort them, under safe conduct, to talks with Major General George Heyman, the British chief of staff. The two policemen drove their jeeps deep into murderland. One big parley was ruined by sheer heavyhandedness. Major General Heyman arrived, but as the army communiqué put it, "the Mau Mau representatives came within a few hundred yards but something frightened them off." The "something" was 1,800 British and African infantrymen, poured into the area to protect the British brass...