Word: sisal
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Twenty years ago, handsome Tom Mboya was just another barefoot child in the untamed highlands of East Africa, where his people had only recently discovered the uses of the wheel. He was born to illiterate parents on the dried cow-dung floor of a grass-roofed hut on the sisal (hemp) estate of Sir William Northrup McMillan, who, a local yarn has it, won his 34,000 acres of Kenya highlands with a throw of the dice in Nairobi's Norfolk Hotel...
...Mboya has come a long way from his origins, but he remembers them and their rigid social order: at the bottom were the African workers, earning $3 a month in the sisal fields; then came the Indian shopkeeper, who sold them kerchiefs, trinkets and tobacco; on top were the few whites around...
...yourself against the white man," warned Tom Mboya's father, a sober, hard-working Jaluo tribesman who was the African headman at the farm's sisal-processing plant. "He is too powerful, and you cannot change him." But Tom Mboya recalls how riled he was at the sight of the stern estate manager, whom the Africans in fear called Bwana Kiboko-the boss who carries the hippo-skin whip...
...Wrote checks totaling $1,378,107 to take over Cuba's entire sisal industry...
...Hemp. In Seattle, the suburban Grinnell & McLean furniture store ballyhooed "Mother-in-Law Mattresses," sale-priced at $9.95, craftily explained to buyers: "After mother-in-law has gone home because of the mattresses' strange odor of miscured sisal, the handy homemaker can cover the otherwise-perfect 510-coil mattress so that it will give years of odor-free comfort and sound sleep...