Death of the Lion

From the tangled, blue fastness of the Aberdare Mountains, a Mau Mau leader named Simba ("The Lion") wrote last week to a white settler: "I have just returned from a course for brigadiers in Abyssinia, and have under my command one division of 12,000 men, 400 machine guns, 300 Bren guns, 100 Sten guns, 10,000 rifles and 40 mortars . . . I could wipe out 50 battalions . . ." Next day, with a band of hand-picked warriors, he struck hard at the settler's estate.

In the dark context of Kenya's bushfire "emergency," this was a mere border skirmish. But Simba, a wily, war-scarred veteran with at least one shattered police post to his credit, chose to lead the raid in person.

First, the Mau Mau overran a Somali outpost on the estate. They cut off the head of a Somali cattle herdsman, presumably to terrorize the Somali tribesmen who are trickling south to help the British against the Mau Mau. As the raiders withdrew, they were closely harassed by a patrol of the regular Negro King's African Rifles. When the gunsmoke cleared, three Mau Mau lay dead. One of them, in a stolen, red-tabbed British colonel's uniform, was Simba, the Lion.

At week's end, acting with the militancy the local settlers have long demanded, the British Colonial Office 1) sealed off Central Kenya, including the three Kikuyu tribal reserves, from the rest of the colony; 2) created "special areas" in three sections of the Great Rift Valley, where anyone moving about may be shot at sight; 3) sent in General Sir George Erskine, 53, a famed terrorist-buster who last left his angry mark upon Egyptian Ismailia (TIME, Feb. 4,1952), to clean up the mess.

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