Word: spearmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Beside the Kaduna River one day last week, a gaudy explosion of sound and color broke over Britain's largest colony. Spearmen whooped and saddlery creaked. Drums bongity-bongity-bongitied. Reed pipes wailed, wooden kafo horns growled out Louis Armstrong blue notes. The Emir of Kano's jester wore his best blue-dyed sheepskin wig and beard. Some of the warriors wore chain mail, wide-bladed swords or helmets of Crusader descent...
...Blacks. When the British army occupied Egypt (1882), an attempt was made to bring order also to these vassal states, but for a score of years a local religious leader, the Mahdi, with thousands of fanatical followers called Dervishes, resisted the British. At Omdurman (1898) the 60,000 Mahdist spearmen were whipped. A year later the British made a treaty with Egypt, cutting Egypt in for a half share in the management of the Sudan. For all its name, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (an area one-third the size of the U.S.) was a solid segment of the British Empire...
...dissatisfaction, in Kenya and in Britain, over the conduct of the Mau Mau war. Despite periodic announcements that the guerrillas were on the run, 7,000 Mau Mau, armed with homemade guns and spears, are pinning down a division of British regulars and 28,000 Kikuyu Home Guardsmen, Masai spearmen and Samburu trackers. Erskine, to his credit, succeeded in penning the Mau Mau into a mountain redoubt: the tangled Aberdare highlands. But his bluntly stated conviction that bullets alone would never wean the mass of the Kikuyu tribe away from their Mau Mau sympathies antagonized many of the crustier...
PADDLE-FOOTING through blue-green waters off the Bahamas, these submarine spearmen are demonstrating one of the fastest growing of modern sports. Since the end of World War II, the number of spearfishing addicts in the U.S. alone has grown to almost 1,000,000. The sport has spread, from the Mediterranean, where it started, as far south as Latin America and the coral shoals of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Alone, in pairs, or as members of spearfishing clubs (there are close to 100 in the U.S. today), skin divers take goggle-eyed aim at everything with fins...
...Some spearmen (also known as bottom scratchers, gogglers, frogmen) satisfy themselves with homemade spears, inexpensive flippers and masks. But there is a growing tendency among expert spearfishermen (such as those shown on the following pages) to mechanize with aqualungs ($115 to $275) for underwater breathing, to use powerful spear guns charged with steel springs or compressed...