KENYA: The Roots of the Fig Tree

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In the streets of Kitale, crowds cheered his every appearance, and Kenya's nationalist leaders, led by Tom Mboya, came to pay him homage. In Nairobi a nervous government seized 34 nationalists, banned an extremist white-settler newspaper as well as Tom Mboya's Uhuru (Freedom), which has been playing up Kenyatta as a national hero. The government insists that Kenyatta's simile was not meant to be innocent: the roots of the fig tree seem to disappear only because they go so deep.

* A captured Mau Mau document vowed that those who tried "our leader" should be tied with sinews taken from their own ribs, and that "who assists the whites he must be castrated. We must take out his eyes and then hold him for seven days and then we will cut his head off and see if the whites can bring him back to life."

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