Mau Mau days

The role Tracker Teams (and I) played in defeating the Mau Mau 1955/56

In case you’d like to read a lurid tale from my Africa days a long long time ago, the UK mass-market tabloid Mail on Sunday February 7 2010 published a two-page photo-feature on my time fighting the Mau Mau in the Mt Kenya Crown Forest in 1955/56. I assume it’s accessible online. The copywriters and sub-editors have skilfully turned my original copy into real Boys Own Paper stuff.

It was a remarkable experience writing for the MoS – I sent them a piece about 2500 words in length describing various events which formed my principal memories of fighting the Mau Mau, and their copy-writers and sub-editors reconstructed it as ‘a jolly good read’. For example, I wrote how I had hardly led my patrol across the Forbidden Zone into the forest at the start of my very first 14-day patrol when I came across a Mau Mau look-out who must have fallen asleep. I immediately set about trying to get information from him before the other members of the Mau Mau gang realised they had a problem. This is how the feature starts, after Mail on Sunday surgeons got at it: “Talk!” I hissed, pointing my Belgian FN assault rifle at his forehead… “Kill him, kill him!” my Askaris implored. “He’s Kikuyu. He’s Mau Mau.”

What really is clever is the way they have written it so convincingly from the point of view of the seventeen-year-old I was at the time.