Word: corfield
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...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...
...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...
...Expert. Personally responsible for the "general pattern" of this horror, charges the Corfield report, was Jomo ("Burning Spear") 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...
...publishing the Corfield report now, British colonial authorities obviously hoped to head off a welling movement among Kenyan nationalists to force Kenyatta's release. In mid-May African leaders elected Kenyatta head of the new Kenyan African National Union, gave the government in Nairobi a month to release him or face civil disobedience. In rebuttal, the British argue that Kenyatta's release would put a bloody end to Colonial Office plans for Kenya's peaceful transition to independence, and point to the fact that already, fear of the Mau Mau is returning. Last week, following mounting reports...
...time being, at least, the government's maneuver has failed. One by one, Kenya's African leaders denounced the Corfield report as a rehash of "European prejudices." In the week's prize example of nationalism gone berserk, Kenya Legislator S. A. Ayodo declared that when the Mau Mau movement is properly appraised, it will rank in history with the "French Revolution or the War of American Independence...