The Oath Takers

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 ("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" with European witchcraft.

By 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 of a revival of Mau Mau oathtaking, a Kikuyu chief loyal to the government was slain, and in the old Mau Mau fashion his son and teen-age daughter were smeared with his blood and forced to take the oath.

For the 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."

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