KENYA: Eye for an Eye

It was a routine week in Kenya's brutal Mau Mau war:

¶ At Kiambu, near Nairobi, four-year-old Andrew Stephens, son of a retired R.A.F. officer, was pedaling his tricycle outside his home when a terrorist bounded out of the woods. The terrorist swung his panga at the child's curly head and all but decapitated the boy. Captured, the Kikuyu tribesman said he had just taken the Mau Mau oath which pledged him to behead a European.

¶ In Nairobi's supreme court, a 17-year-old Briton serving in the colony's emergency police force was found guilty of technical assault for tossing lighted matches at a Mau Mau suspect, and his Kikuyu assistant was convicted of pouring paraffin over the head of the suspect and setting him afire.

¶ In the Aberdare forest, after a British battalion had killed 25 Mau Mau in a running fire fight, one wounded terrorist, lying on a stretcher, opened his eyes and said: "I am General Kago" (a major terrorist leader who last month planted the severed head of a British district officer in a maize patch). The African trooper guarding Kago simply said "Are you?", raised his rifle and shot General Kago dead.