Twilight of a Terrorist

Day after day, in the shade of the great jacaranda tree outside the courthouse at Nyeri, an old woman squatted, moodily scratching the vermin beneath her filthy rags. Inside, on trial for his life before a British judge and a jury of three Kikuyu elders from his native village, was her son, Dedan Kimathi, 36, self-styled Field Marshal, Knight Commander of the African Empire, President of the Parliament of Kenya and Commander in Chief of the Land Liberation Army, the man once feared through all Kenya as the leader of some 10,000 Mau Mau terrorists.

Riddled with venereal disease, still crippled from a bullet wound sustained at his capture in the jungle last month, a leader without an army, betrayed even by his mistress, Kimathi had only the memory of past power to sustain him. Despite the fact that it carried the death penalty, even the charge against him--carrying a loaded revolver--was a humiliation to a chieftain who had once ordained life and death for hundreds. His defense was a meeching plea that he was coming out of the forest to surrender when he was captured. "But he could have surrendered to a police post nearer home," one of the Kikuyu elders at the trial pointed out, and the other two agreed. "Kimathi did not come out of the forest as a man of peace," they said, making the court's verdict of guilty unanimous. "The witnesses lie," sneered Dedan Kimathi, but Chief Justice Sir Kenneth O'Connor thought not. His sentence: Kimathi to be hung by the neck until dead. As an ambulance carried Kimathi away from the courthouse, a crowd of impassive Kikuyu natives watched in stony silence.

From the shade beneath the jacaranda tree the old woman in rags stared at her son's Kikuyu judges and spat in the dust.

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