Kenya: De-Oathing the Kilcuyu

In a sparkling meadow at the edge of Kenya’s Elburgon Forest, a husky African district officer named Eliud Mahihu asked one of the 200 assembled Kikuyu tribesmen to close his eyes, then led him through the crowd with a broom handle. “He is like a blind man because he has shut his eyes,” shouted Mahihu. “If you have taken an oath with the Land Freedom Army, you have shut your eyes too!” By sundown, 130 men and women had stepped forward to renounce their membership in the shadowy army. Suspected members who held back faced arrest and imprisonment.

Such “de-oathing” ceremonies are the British government’s answer to the L.F.A., which since its first appearance 18 months ago has enrolled thousands of land-hungry Kikuyu tribesmen as members and threatened to plunge Kenya into a fresh round of Mau Mau-style terror. What gives the campaign a sense of urgency is the timetable of independence. Within a year Kenya may be on its own, and if the L.F.A.’s black terrorists make good their pledge to seize the white settlers’ land, the country could find itself in the same shape the Congo was in when independence came.

Magic Rites. Among the superstitious Kikuyu, the British have learned, very little can be accomplished without magic rites. The Mau Mau forced horror-struck natives to violate tribal taboos, and so bound them to the movement by cutting them off from all else. Some of the grisly Mau Mau oath-taking rites called for copulation with sheep, eating the flesh of exhumed corpses or drinking the “Kaberi-chia cocktail,” a blend of semen, menstrual blood and sheep’s blood.

Before the seven-year Mau Mau scourge was eliminated in 1959, the British colonial government decided that it must counter witchcraft with witchcraft, and devised elaborate de-oathing rites, but they were not always successful. Once, when authorities persuaded tribesmen to abjure their bonds to the Mau Mau by sacrificing a goat, a Mau Mau agent slaughtered two dogs, nullifying the “goat oath” with the more potent magic of the “dog oath.”

Saturday Sport. The L.F.A. has produced nothing so depraved as the bestial Mau Mau rites. Such traces of relatively mild oathing ceremonies as banana leaf arches and the entrails of animals have been discovered deep in Kenya’s forests, but most L.F.A. members are inducted with a simple pledge of allegiance that has even been administered on Nairobi buses.

Accordingly, the government is now also using a far milder de-oathing rite. In fact, it often is more like a civil;,service exam than something out of The’-Golden Bough. Along with a Kikuyu district officer, the de-oathing teams comprise several recorders, who write down confessions, and a court of five tribal elders. Those who come forward to renounce the L.F.A. are asked eleven questions (“When did you take the oath?” “Who are the leaders?”), then are fined an average of 5 or 10 shillings by the elders.

Though some key L.F.A. officers remain on the loose, the teams draw big crowds throughout the Rift Valley, where Mau Mau was born. This month, 2,000 Kikuyu have been de-oathed. Said one European official hopefully: “I think we’ve caught this one in time.” But there were those who wondered whether the de-oathing would take. “Other tribes play football on Saturday afternoons,” said one skeptical white magistrate, “but the Kikuyu take oaths.”