Word: mau
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This display of armed might was Britain's answer to the Mau Mau (rhymes with bow-wow), the African secret society that threatens to wipe out Kenya's 30,000 whites (TIME, Oct. 27). Part land hunger, part savage revolution against the domineering white man and the bewildering 20th century, the Mau Mau's blind fury could, if left unchecked, turn the Crown Colony of Kenya into another Malaya. Once pooh-poohed as mere "press exaggeration," the Mau Mau have already mutilated scores of whites and "loyal" blacks, with their favorite weapon, the panga-a long, machete...
Near Nyeri last week, a Kikuyu chief and two black policemen were hacked to pieces when they surprised a Mau Mau oath-taking ceremony. Only one top Kikuyu chief survives; he is being closely guarded. Police witnesses ("Traitors," according to the Mau Mau) have had both hands cut off or were tied in sacks and drowned. A British colonel and his wife were slashed about the neck and face as they lay in bed one night...
...societies run by witch doctors and pledged to the slogan: "Africa for the Africans." One called itself the "Men of God"; another was the "Spirits of the Dead," led by a soccer player named Elijah, who used his soccer medals to persuade the tribesmen that he was divine. The Mau-Mau is the most feared and successful of them all. From their jungle hideouts, Mau-Mau raiders burn the huts of tribesmen who go to work for the white man (at 7? a day), murder white farmers with knobkerries and assagais, snipe at British officials...
Their whispered propaganda makes much of the fact that 3,000 whites monopolize almost all the fertile land in the cool "White Highlands," leaving the blacks to grub for a living in barren, low-lying "reserves." The Mau-Mau teaches that the white man's medicine (e.g., anti-rinderpest inoculation) kills instead of curing, and that pregnant black women are aborted in white hospitals...
Kenya's British police have caught and jailed 1,000 Mau-Mau blacks, flogged thousands more. Yet the secret society is growing at a pace that suggests professional organization and funds from abroad. The Mau-Mau's leader, Kenya officials are sure, is black-bearded Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta, 50, a thickset Kikuyu dandy, who runs the outwardly respectable Kenya African Union (K.A.U.), whose stated purpose is Negro advancement. A London-trained anthropologist who wrote (1938) a first-rate study of his people, Facing Mt. Kenya, Kenyatta is a devotee of Red magic. He spent...