A Return to Terror

Last week a white farmer in Kenya's great Rift Valley found the body of a lost calf he had been searching for. Its front legs had been cut off and placed in its mouth; its belly had been ripped and its entrails festooned about its neck and head.

The carcass was grim warning of trouble ahead, for such butchery was the traditional sign of the Mau Mau. From the hills came reports of obscene Mau Mau oath-takings in Kikuyuland villages, and that the savage rituals were beginning again in the sleazy native "locations" of bustling Nairobi. Most whites on isolated farms were again carrying guns at all times. At mealtime, doors were unlocked only to let servants in and locked again after they had served the food. Barbed-wire barriers were strung across garden paths and floodlights left on throughout the night. Alarm sirens and clusters of distress rockets topped every farmhouse.

But there was a difference between the old days and the new: in the past, oaths were often forcibly administered to unwilling Kikuyu tribesmen; today, they are being taken by an elite guard that forms the shadowy K.L.F.A.--the Kenya Land Freedom Army.

As yet, there seems to be no central direction for the K.L.F.A. With an estimated 2,000 members, it is a loosely organized group of hard-core terrorists reportedly masterminded by a member of the former Mau Mau hierarchy. But its purpose is clear from captured documents: to rid Kenya of the white man forever, and to dominate the black leadership when the nation finally wins independence. Already a K.L.F.A. plot to kill Ronald Ngala, moderate leader of a prominent African political party, has been unearthed and nipped in the bud. By all reports, the new movement hoped to recruit Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta as its leader once he is permitted to re-enter politics. So far, the movement is too small to force its will on the rising black politicians, but British authorities fear real trouble if the Russians and Chinese, who now have big diplomatic missions in neighboring Somalia, begin pumping clandestine Communist arms across the long, almost unguarded Kenya frontier.

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