KENYA: SOS

In Kenya Colony’s dusty highland capital of Nairobi (pop. 120,000), a quarter-mile-long queue of jumpy white settlers lined up last week to buy rifles and shotguns. White vigilantes patrolled their lush coffee plantations; two battalions of the King’s African Rifles, supported by armored cars, deployed for action. The cause of all the commotion was the Mau Mau (rhymes with bow-wow), an African secret society whose savage warriors have pledged themselves in blood to drive the white man out of Africa (TIME, Sept. 1).

By last week, Mau Mau terrorists, striking from their bush hideouts, had murdered and mutilated scores, burned the homes of 24 tribesmen who went to work for the whites, maimed hundreds of animals by chopping the hooves of cattle, slashing sheep’s noses. Chief Waruhi Wakunga, M.B.E.,* 62-year-old head of Kenya’s most powerful tribe, the 1,000,000-strong Kikuyu, was killed by the Mau Mau seven miles from Nairobi; British Governor Sir Evelyn Baring got a summons to attend a Mau Mau bush court, or be killed without warning. Usually, the Mau Mau give their victims plenty of warning, by nailing the carcass of a beheaded dog to the front door of farmhouses; the society ensures its members’ loyalty by forcing initiates to kiss the freshly plucked eye of a sheep.

To combat the Mau Mau (membership: about 100,000), Kenya’s Blimpish government introduced eight special bills, curbing newspapers and restricting travel after sundown. To counter Mau Mau mumbo-jumbo, which holds the superstitious Kikuyu in thrall, professional witch doctors (fee: one goat per curse) were hired by the government to visit native villages, exorcise evil spirits.

In London, Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton read to the House of Commons a secret Mau Mau oath: “When the reedbuck horn is blown, if I leave the European farm before killing the European owner, may this oath kill me.” Pressed to discuss the causes of Mau Mauism, Lyttelton casually replied: “There are a great many causes. One, which will perhaps strike honorable members as being rather curious, is that many of the tribal dances and other means of ‘letting off steam’ have been suppressed by the missionaries . . . Other causes, no doubt, are land famine and social problems.”

Lyttelton’s offhandedness contrasted starkly with the belated burgeoning alarm among Kenya’s 30,000 whites, who are outnumbered by 5,000,000 blacks. At week’s end, after an S O S from Kenya’s governor, the British ordered a battalion of Lancashire Fusiliers airlifted from the Suez Canal zone to Nairobi.

* Member of the Order of the British Empire, awarded last year by George VI.