Word: tribesmen
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...mats in a camel-skin tent at an encampment a few miles inside Yemen near the Saudi Arabian border. While dagger-wielding, shouting followers raised a din outside, Badr cheerfully predicted that he would be back on the throne in a few weeks. He claimed to command 20,000 tribesmen...
Before the seven-year Mau Mau scourge was eliminated in 1959, the British colonial government decided that it must counter witchcraft with witchcraft, and devised elaborate de-oathing rites, but they were not always successful. Once, when authorities persuaded tribesmen to abjure their bonds to the Mau Mau by sacrificing a goat, a Mau Mau agent slaughtered two dogs, nullifying the "goat oath" with the more potent magic of the "dog oath...
...sparkling meadow at the edge of Kenya's Elburgon Forest, a husky African district officer named Eliud Mahihu asked one of the 200 assembled Kikuyu tribesmen to close his eyes, then led him through the crowd with a broom handle. "He is like a blind man because he has shut his eyes," shouted Mahihu. "If you have taken an oath with the Land Freedom Army, you have shut your eyes too!" By sundown, 130 men and women had stepped forward to renounce their membership in the shadowy army. Suspected members who held back faced arrest and imprisonment...
Such "de-oathing" ceremonies are the British government's answer to the L.F.A., which since its first appearance 18 months ago has enrolled thousands of land-hungry Kikuyu tribesmen as members and threatened to plunge Kenya into a fresh round of Mau Mau-style terror. What gives the campaign a sense of urgency is the timetable of independence. Within a year Kenya may be on its own, and if the L.F.A.'s black terrorists make good their pledge to seize the white settlers' land, the country could find itself in the same shape the Congo...
...rehabilitated, but is also the hottest prospect to be Kenya's first ruler when the colony becomes a nation, possibly within a year. So far, the electioneering has been fairly moderate, but trouble is threatened by something called the Land Freedom Army, a mysterious group of Kikuyu tribesmen with terrorist aims, who have gathered in the forests to revive the hideous Mau Mau oathing ceremonies over carcasses of strangled cats. Like the Mau Mau, they have begun slipping onto white farmers' property by night to maim cattle and terrorize the inhabitants. Once again, Rift Valley farmers strap...