Word: mau
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From the tangled, blue fastness of the Aberdare Mountains, a Mau Mau leader named Simba ("The Lion") wrote last week to a white settler: "I have just returned from a course for brigadiers in Abyssinia, and have under my command one division of 12,000 men, 400 machine guns, 300 Bren guns, 100 Sten guns, 10,000 rifles and 40 mortars . . . I could wipe out 50 battalions . . ." Next day, with a band of hand-picked warriors, he struck hard at the settler's estate...
...Moslem and Hindu leaders of Kenya's 120,000 Asians (most of them Indians) demanded the right, as Kenyans, to join in the fight against the terrorist Mau Mau. White settlers, who are outnumbered 3 to 1 by the Indians, 130 to 1 by the native Africans, protested that arms might make the Asians uppity, but the British Colonial Office, strapped for military manpower to cope with the Mau Mau, ordered 6,500 young Indians, between 18 and 23, to be drafted for military service...
...Mau Mau are stronger, and more skillfully led than at any time since the emergency began." To contain the Mau Mau, who have be gun to mount attacks in company strength, the British have been forced to deploy 5,500 British infantrymen (many of them from the Suez Canal Zone) and 4,000 African Riflemen, at a cost of $700,000 a month. Thousands of Kikuyu are in jail, tens of thousands in hiding, yet Mau Mau gangs terrorize the countryside within sight of Nairobi...
...main Mau Mau forces are concentrated in two guerrilla armies, lurking in the forested highlands : one under "General Russia," a scar-faced ex-schoolteacher whose real name is Dedam Kimathi (TIME, Feb. 23); the other under "General China," an elusive desperado who dominates Mt. Kenya. One Mau Mau band, 150 strong and heavily armed, last week at tacked the trading center of Kanderudu, repulsed a British patrol and seized its transport. The soldiers called for air support, and counterattacked. Result: 40 Mau Mau were killed (ten by an African trooper who kept firing his Bren gun even after...
...numbers because then we can mow them down," said Major General William Hinde, director of military operations in Kenya. With Lyttelton's approval, he ordered 10,000 Kikuyu Home Guardsmen, recruited to defend their homes, to be armed with shotguns. Yet as Lyttelton plainly saw, stamping out the Mau Mau would require more than shotguns. The problem, as in Malaya, is to assure the majority of natives of the government's concern for their welfare, and to protect them against the Mau Mau. Snapped General Sir Cameron Nicholson: "We need a great sense of urgency at all levels...