Of all the colonial revolts that have convulsed Asia and Africa since World
War II, none have matched Kenya's Mau Mau movement for sheer grisliness.
In seven years of terror beginning in the autumn of 1952, 95 Europeans, 29
Asians and 12,423 Africans were slain by methods ranging from merciful
garroting to having their heads bashed in and their brains removed, dried and
ritually eaten. Last week the British finally got around to releasing the first
complete and authoritative account of the Mau Mau disaster—an almost
clinically detached, 322-page report by Career Colonial Administrator Frank
D. Corfield, 58, onetime Governor of Khartoum.Corpses & Orgies. Like African leaders everywhere, the men who organized
the Mau Mau faced one basic difficulty in forging a nationalist spirit: for the
ordinary African, a man's overriding loyalties are to his family and his tribe.
By compelling Mau Mau members to violate not only Christian ethics but every
tribal taboo as well, says Corfield, Mau Mau leaders deliberately reduced their
victims to a state where a man who took the Mau Mau oath was cut off “from
all hope, outside Mau Mau, in this world or the next.” To achieve this, the Mau
Mau leadership forced its recruits, voluntary or involuntary, to seal their oaths
by digging up corpses and eating their putrefied flesh, copulating with sheep,
dogs or adolescent girls, and by drinking the famed “Kaberichia cocktail”—a
mixture of semen and menstrual blood. And when he was assigned to kill an
enemy of the movement, a sworn Mau Mau pledged himself to remove the
eyeballs of his victim and drink the liquid from them.Once the blood lust had been aroused to this pitch, the oath taker was easily
led to kill his own father or mother, wife, child or master at Mau Mau command.
And any local Mau Mau leader devising a fouler ritual was under obligation to
pass along his recipe immediately to his less inventive colleagues. Since there
were seven basic oaths, which could be taken over and over again, Mau Mau
ceremonies thus became perpetual orgies. The result was that, when a Mau
Mau convert did repent and vomit out his story to authorities, he sometimes
ended by humbly asking to be taken out and shot. His sense of absolute
degradation and “absolute sin,” says the Corfield report, left him no choice.The Expert. Personally responsible for the “general pattern” of this
horror, charges the Corfield report, was Jomo
Kenyatta, sixtyish, longtime Kikuyu nationalist leader still under
house arrest in a remote Kenya mountain village. A mission-educated
nationalist fanatic who spent 17 years in England and Europe, where he
made himself an expert in primitive anthropology and published a
scholarly work on Kikuyu customs, Kenyatta diabolically parodied the
traditional religion of his people in Mau Mau ritual—much as
occultists did in the legendary Black Mass. In fact, reports Corfield,
Kenyatta's work showed “at least a passing acquaintance” with European
witchcraft.
