Spreading Terror

Though the British have killed 4,600 Mau Mau in firefights and by execution, the terror in Kenya lives on. Last week the Security forces completed Operation Anvil, rounding up 35,000 Africans in the capital city of Nairobi. Of these, they penned 26,500 Kikuyu in concentration camps, or on Manda Island where no guards are needed because the Indian Ocean swarms with sharks. But still the terror spread:

¶Near Mombasa (pop. 85,000), chief town in the steamy coastal plain, a gang of blood-smeared Negroes buried the remains of two mutilated sheep, then crept back to their huts after taking the Mau Mau oath: "I swear to kill a white man, or may this oath kill me!" One of the oath-takers was a 31-year-old Negro servant, well known for his loyalty to Mrs. Eileen Ennis, one of Mombasa's 2,000 whites. He returned to the Ennis household with two panga knives, slashed Mrs. Ennis and stabbed her sleeping daughter. When the police arrived, the Mau Mau had thrust a knife into his own chest, and was desperately trying to electrocute himself at the household fuse box. ¶In Wakamba territory, southeast of Nairobi, a gang of screaming tribesmen, shooting pistols and poisoned arrows, attacked a veterinary inspector at Machakos. "We want your head!"they screamed, but Dick McCausland, with an arrow in his arm, valiantly fought them off and retained his head. The Wakamba, 600,000 strong, supply one-third of the rank & file, perhaps half the NCOs in both the Kenya police and the King's African Rifles. "If the Wakamba have now gone Mau Mau," gloomed one weary settler, "the position of Kenya may become desperate."