Roots of Outrage

‘Well,’ Sheila said. She got onto her hobby horse. ‘Well, it’s that superstitiousness that the Mau Mau oath plays on. The oaths were dreamed up by Jomo Kenyatta and his Russian friends – our future president. Anyway, the Mau Mau oath has its strength in the fact that it desecrates all the Kikuyu believes in, all his taboos. It’s as if you, a Christian, broke all your principles and taboos by taking an oath to the Forces of Darkness. So the person who takes the oath becomes an outcast from his people, which means that the only brotherhood he belongs to which can protect him is the Mau Mau – the Devil. And they believe that the oath will kill him – and his family – if he breaks it, or disobeys orders. And of course the Mau Mau will kill him. So, we are fighting completely degenerate, desperate blood-soaked savages.’

George said: ‘And the Mau Mau work on a secret-cell system, don’t they?’

‘Yes. Devised by the Russians. The oath-administrators initiate the members of a cell — for example, the labour force on a particular shamba. He charges ninety shillings per person – and if they refuse to take the oath they’re hideously killed, as an example to the rest. The administrator keeps thirty shillings, and the rest goes to Mau Mau funds. The oath administrator gets rich and has every incentive to keep initiating people, so it’s spread across the colony until now over a million Kikuyu have taken the oath. They started with initiating a few bandits in the forests, then it spread to the shambas, the farms, and then into the towns. Now it’s spreading into Tanganyika. The Russians’ plan is that it will spread right the way down through South Africa to Gape Town, right across the continent.’

‘Do they make human sacrifices when they do the oath?’ Jill demanded.

‘Please …’ Mrs Mahoney said.

‘Much worse than that,’ Aunt Sheila murmured.

Much worse than that, Luke knew: he had read the book. The purpose was to shock, to horrify, to degrade, to defy all taboos. So the oath had to be disgusting. Each oath administrator was instructed to dream up more horrifying oaths with which to terrify the people, to pass on his new ideas to the other administrators. Human sacrifice was always one ingredient. And animal sacrifice. Blood and body-parts mixed in the ground into a kind of soup. Brains of the persons sacrificed mixed in. Woman’s menstrual blood. Urine. Semen. Human shit. Maggots. Putrefied human flesh exhumed from graves. Pus from running sores. Eyeballs gouged out, intestines cut open. Drinking the vile brew while you repeat the oath. Public intercourse with sheep and adolescent girls. And all the time the dancing and the drums and the bloodcurdling mumbo-jumbo, all at dead of night in the spooky forest, all the oath-takers in a trance. All with the purpose of irrevocably committing the oath-taker to killing Europeans, burning their crops, killing their cattle, stealing their firearms, killing to order even if the victim is your own father or brother – and always to mutilate, cut off the heads, extract the eyeballs and drink the liquid. ‘If I am ordered to bring my brother’s head and I disobey, this oath will kill me. If I am ordered to bring the finger or ear of my mother and I disobey, this oath will kill me. If I am ordered to bring the head, hair or fingernail of a European and I disobey, this oath will kill me. If I rise against the Mau Mau, this oath will kill me. If I betray the whereabouts of arms or ammunition or the hiding place of my brothers, this oath will kill me. When the reed-buck horn is blown, if I leave the European farm before killing the owner, may this oath kill me. If I worship any leader but Jomo Kenyatta, may this oath kill me …’

The Mau Mau had completely shattered the average African’s spiritual equilibrium, absolute sin had created a new barbarism, a fanatic who massacred whole villages, decapitating and mutilating, cutting babies in half in front of their mothers, hanging people, slitting pregnant women open, hacking heads off with pangas, cutting the ears off people so they can be easily identified later. And now cannibalism had been introduced. The victim’s head chopped open, the brains dried in the sun, the heart cut out and dried, steaks cut for food when the Mau Mau gang was on the move. In each gang there was an executioner who acted as butcher. The Batuni Oath, by breaking every tribal taboo, ostracised the oath-taker from all hope, in this world and the next. The result was a terrorist organization composed not of humans fighting for a cause, but of primitive beasts.

‘Your cook-boy tried to kill you, didn’t he, Aunt Sheila?’ Jill said proudly.

‘No, darling.’ Aunt Sheila smiled. ‘It was my houseboy. Old Moses, my cook, he’s loyal, and he’s a devout Christian. Not that that’s any guarantee these days,’ she added. ‘The Mau Mau modus operandi is to kill Moses’s family if he refuses to kill me. So, I’m well armed at all times. If this was Kenya, we’d all be sitting with our pistols on the table. And your servants would be locked in the stockade at this hour.’

‘So you have to serve your own dinner?’ Jill demanded, perturbed.

‘No, Moses and the new houseboy sleep in the kitchen, but the rest are locked in the stockade, which has a high fence around it, and a deep wide trench with sharpened bamboo stakes. We muster them at six o’clock, roll call, then shepherd them in.’

‘Don’t they mind?’ Jill demanded.

‘No. The stockade is to protect them from the Mau Mau. They have their huts and families inside. And their own armed guards. And of course our homestead is also surrounded by a security fence now. With two high towers where our Masai guards sit all night with searchlights and machine guns. With rope ladders, so the Masai can pull it up after them. The searchlights can reach the labour stockade and the new cattle pens where we have to lock up our animals at night now, or the Mau Mau cut the udders off, and hamstring them, slash their hind legs. Terrible.’

‘Oh!’ Jill was wide-eyed.

Mrs Mahoney said: ‘Your Masai are reliable?’

‘Oh yes, they’re the traditional enemies of the Kikuyu, they hate the Mau Mau. In one operation, the police and army sent the Masai into the forest to ambush a huge band of Mau Mau they were flushing out. The Masai attacked in full regalia and killed them all, the army just watched. The Masai went home very happy – because, of course, the government had put a stop to tribal warfare long ago.’

‘Divide and rule,’ George Mahoney murmured. ‘Works every time in Africa.’

‘Tell us about when you were attacked, Aunt Sheila.’ Jill pleaded.

Mrs Mahoney raised her eyebrows, but George said, ‘She’s old enough.’

‘Well,’ Sheila said, ‘it was before we’d put up the security fence and the watchtowers. Fred and I were having dinner. The houseboy – our last houseboy – brings in the soup. Fred tells him to taste it, in case it’s poisoned. The houseboy starts trembling and tries to run to the kitchen. Same moment the door to the kitchen opens and in burst three Mau Mau with pangas. The dogs fly at them and Fred opens up with his pistol and kills the first two dead, but the third comes at me with his panga. I shoot him in the chest but he keeps coming and one of the dogs gets him in the … er, groin. Fred shoots him dead, then charges to the kitchen and there’s the cookboy with his skull split open, and there’s the houseboy standing with a panga and he swipes at Fred’s collarbone. I burst into the kitchen and shoot the houseboy in the heart. Lucky shot.’ She closed her eyes and sighed. ‘Oh, what a mess. Blood and brains and bodies everywhere …’

‘Please …’ Mrs Mahoney said. ‘That’s enough.’

‘What happened to Uncle Fred?’ Jill was wide-eyed.

‘Well, I loaded him into the Land-Rover and rushed him to hospital in Nyeri. He was okay. Tough old bugger, Fred. But when he came out a few days later, with his arm stuck out in plaster like a Heil Hitler salute, the swines struck again. We were still erecting our security fence and watchtowers – our labour had just knocked off for the night. Fred and I were sitting having our well-earned sundowners. Suddenly – bang bang bang – windows smashing, and the bastards are attacking with firearms this time, from all sides. And Fred and I dive for cover and grab the rifles and start blasting out the windows, bullets flying everywhere, and there’s poor old Fred firing with one arm, the other stuck out, and these two great brutes come charging through the front door and luckily I mowed them down with the new Sten gun the police had given me.’

‘Wow!’ Jill whispered.

‘Anyway,’ Sheila ended, ‘after that we finished the fence and watchtowers quick-smart. And bought new dogs. The Mau Mau mutilated all our other dogs. Stuck them on spikes. Alive. Now we’ve got four new ones – Dobermans. Trained. Accept food from nobody but me. Only let out at night. And,’ she added, ‘now we’ve got the Masai guards. We’re pretty safe. But the swines still come down out of the forests to maim our cattle.’

‘And how’s Fred now?’ Mr Mahoney said.

Sheila smiled wearily. She took a sip of wine and her glass trembled. ‘Tough as nails, my Fred. I haven’t seen him for three weeks. He’s up in Aberdere Forests – in freezing mist, ten thousand feet above sea level. On patrol, looking for Mau Mau hideouts. Comes back after weeks, wild and woolly and reeking and exhausted, gets roaring drunk, then off he goes to join another patrol.’

Jill demanded: ‘What does he do when he finds Mau Mau hideouts in the forest?’

Sheila looked at George Mahoney. He said: ‘This is her Africa.’

Sheila sighed. ‘To cut a long story short, they spend days, weeks, tracking down their hideouts. Then they ambush. And kill them.’

‘How? Machine guns and hand grenades and all that?’

‘Yes.’ Sheila turned to George. ‘And? Do you think the same could happen in South Africa?’

‘Guaranteed,’ George sighed. ‘This government will drive the blacks to bloody revolution. And be ruthless in trying to stamp it out. So it’s going to be a much worse bloodbath than Kenya. But that’ll be some time coming, the government has got an iron grip at the moment.’ He added: ‘The tragedy is that the bloody excesses of the Mau Mau create the impression that the South African government is right. The man on the street looks at Kenya and says, hell, the blacks are savages, so the South Africans are right.’

Sheila said: ‘And who’ll start it? This African National Congress? What do you make of them?’

George nodded pensively. ‘I like them,’ he said. ‘They’ve been around a long time, since 1912 you know, ever since the British gave them a raw deal at the end of the Boer War. They’re reasonable people. Indeed, they even supported the Smuts and Hertzog governments for a while, because they thought the Natives Land Act may give them a fair deal. Then they seemed to give up. Then apartheid seemed to revitalise them. Now they’ve issued their Freedom Charter, but they’re nonviolent. For the moment – this government will probably drive them to violence soon. But right now they’re the very opposite of the Mau Mau. The people to worry about are the PAC, the Pan-Africanist Congress, under Robert Sobukwe, who split away from the ANC over the multi-racialism of the Freedom Charter – they’re the people who want. “Africa for the Africans”. The only problem with the ANC is they’re clearly socialists. The “commanding heights of industry” must be nationalised, they say. That would be disastrous. And that, unfortunately, is the influence of the communists in their ranks. The South African Communist Party has been banned since 1950 and gone underground, and it’s no secret their policy is to ride to power on the back of the ANC. And their orders come direct from Moscow. So the ANC is in danger of becoming a communist organization unless their leadership is careful.’

‘And, how good is that leadership?’

‘Pretty good,’ George nodded. ‘I like this guy Nelson Mandela – he’s head of the ANC Youth League, a potentially powerful branch of the movement. He’s very intelligent, and he’s a lawyer. My firm has had some dealings with his firm in Johannesburg. Sensible chap, he’s a Xhosa, comes from this neck of the woods –’ he waved a finger over his shoulder – ‘I believe he’s of “royal blood” in that he’s heir to the chieftancy of the clan. And he’s recently married a very nice lass from these parts who’s a fully qualified social worker. The leadership impresses me as reasonable, totally unlike the sort of people you’re dealing with in the Mau Mau.’ He added: ‘Nelson Mandela’s law partner is the acting president of the ANC, a chap called Oliver Tambo, also a Xhosa. Or a Pondo, they’re the sort of poor country cousins of the Xhosa –’

Mrs Mahoney said to Sheila, ‘The Pondos are the ones who wear the blue blankets, whereas the Xhosa wear the red blankets –’

‘Except, of course,’ George Mahoney smiled, ‘neither Mandela nor Tambo wear blankets now, they wear pin-striped suits!’

Everybody laughed; then Mrs Mahoney said to Sheila: ‘And is the Mau Mau crisis affecting Harker-Mahoney?’

Sheila sighed. ‘Terrible labour shortage. The Kikuyu who haven’t taken the oath have fled back to the reserves in terror. HM Shipping is still going strong. And most of the stores, because Kenya is swarming with the British Army and Air Force now, fighting the Mau Mau. But our coffee plantations are virtually at a standstill. No labour.’

‘And how’s business in West Africa?’ George said.

‘Well, I’m not au fait with HM’s offices in Ghana and Nigeria. But Fred says things are looking shaky there too, with independence.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Kwame Nkrumah, the Great Redeemer.’

‘Why?’ Mrs Mahoney groaned. ‘Why is the British government hell-bent on giving these people independence, willy-nilly?’

Sheila said: ‘The Tories have lost their nerve … the government’s full of pinkoes.’

‘They must know they’re not ready to govern themselves yet.’

‘I wonder if they do know,’ Sheila said. ‘They meet a few smart ones, like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, and think the whole of Africa is composed of charming black Englishmen. They don’t realize that the rest have only recently dropped out of the trees. Independence will be the biggest failure since the Groundnut Scheme.’

Luke glanced at his father and the old man gave him a conspiratorial wink. ‘What’s the Groundnut Scheme?’ Jill demanded.

Sheila began to speak but George Mahoney said, ‘Luke, explain to your sister.’