In that strange combination of exhaustion and euphoria which followed the end of the Great War, the voices of the missionary societies were at last listened to and it was decided that more humane ways could be found to gather rubber, and the N’Kuru were ordered to stop disfiguring their charges. But because they had tried to help, and so had seemed to condone, the missionaries had lost the good will of the Kyoga. Their churches were burned and the last few of them slaughtered. But the Kyoga had learned about white-skin education — the most important lesson of all although it availed them little in the face of their N’Kuru overseers.
Only after the likes of Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement had been up the river to the Leopold Falls and then up into the jungle beyond did the European world begin to learn of the atrocities their representatives had caused, and the injunction was rigidly enforced. In any case, the rubber market was easing and there were other areas which could supply it. So the jungle was left to the crippled Kyogas and attention was turned once more to the N’Kuru’s plains. Farmers arrived, fresh-faced and hopeful, ready to colonise the vast pasture lands. This time they arrived in large numbers, in motorised caravans armed to the teeth with the kind of weapons which can only be perfected in a war. The N’Kuru watched their farmland being split among white skins and their grazing land surrender to the plough. They watched fences chop the bush into ugly, pointless squares, and they saw the elephant chopped down like trees because they too failed to understand the fences. The bottom fell out of the ivory market because of the massive over-supply. The lordly, arrogant herdsmen became mere farm hands employed to cultivate land which had been theirs for all time. Men who had never deigned to bow their heads were forced to bend their backs or starve. Princes were paid pennies for their pride.
Mawanga, however, prospered. As the farms began to flourish, so their produce had to be shipped. The port, deep beyond measuring but sheltered by those welcoming harbour horns, was filled with an increasing bustle of shipping as tobacco, meat and grain went out and a range of new fertilisers and supplies came in. White hunters arrived, expecting to clear the plains of game for the farmers but instead they rediscovered the escarpment. Jungle safaris were arranged and tourists arrived expecting to be able to shoot antelope, elephant, wildebeest and lion on the plains one day and mountain gorillas up the escarpment on the next. The N’Kuru, understandably uncertain of these developments, were soon characterised as sullen and lazy. The Kyoga, discovered anew in the jungle, were immediately recognised as excellent bushmen, mighty hunters and natural askaris. A few intrepid film directors arrived from Hollywood. The yodelling cries of Tarzan echoed from the high edge of the escarpment. Some Hollywood stars arrived. Conrad Hilton thought he’d better put up a hotel. With a keen eye for a good location, the Hilton Organisation raised their tall hotel on the northern inland outskirts of the town, where the lower coastal slopes of the tectonic cliff overlooked the city and the harbour from a safe, exclusive distance. Where the air was cooler and sweeter. It was a suburb which soon attracted many others who could afford to leave the hot, malodorous bustle of the busy port. Mawanga grew and grew.
And then, just as the political sky to the north began to darken once again, somebody discovered copper, cobalt and uranium upcountry. Heavy industry arrived and engineering plant passed through Mawanga and up the Mau to the Leopold Falls. A powerful funicular railway was built to move equipment, ore and metal up and down the tectonic cliff. The mines were all on Kyoga land. The Kyoga were recognised as hard workers, bright and trustworthy. They took responsibility. In return they were given education. With that they earned money and, most precious of all, power. The N’Kuru were treated as sullen children and their resentment simmered towards boiling point.
The Second World War, when it came, touched the country of Mau hardly at all. It was physically removed from large theatres of conflict and all that was noticed was that the demands for supplies were more strident and the European managers fewer. The Kyoga took over. They were the educated class, the businessmen with the proud history as hunters. The N’Kuru continued to grub in the red dirt of their land, ordered to grow unsuitable crops by inefficient farmers required to meet more and more impossible targets. At least they didn’t lop off hands and feet this time. The Kyoga watched and waited.
The resentment of the N’Kuru nation overflowed soon after the end of the war. A new wave of settlers, sent out as soon as they were demobbed, settled into areas hitherto considered unfarmable and began to fight the land in their efforts to produce coffee, cocoa, groundnuts and cotton. The N’Kuru’s patience ran out. In camps and what was left of the old villages, young men began to band together in the night carving again the old war clubs and arming them with lions’ claws.
When the farmers and their families began to be found clawed to death by lions in their beds, it took very little time for the local government to realise what was going on. Neither the white skins with their hearts in Europe nor the Kyoga government ministers could control the uprising. They called to Europe for help and Europe sent troops in. Within six months of the first death, there was a dirty little bush war going on. No obvious leader emerged from the ranks of the N’Kuru Lion fighters, and the reason for this soon became obvious. The liberation army was receiving advice on the best way to organise themselves — in little cadres, each member of which knew only his immediate associates. It was a format which the intelligence officers with the European troops recognised all too well. Communist advisers had arrived in the ranks of the N’Kuru secret army.
The men in Brussels shook their heads. It was nearly 1960. The English Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had observed that a wind of change was blowing over Africa. A gust of that wind arrived in Mau. The point of colonisation was to make money. As soon as the army of occupation required to control the communist-inspired insurgents began to cost more than the country was earning for its imperial overlords, it was granted independence. Power was simply handed to the Kyoga politicians who had been running their own puppet parliament since the end of the war. The white-skin Governor shook the small-boned, black-skinned hand of the new Premier and Mau was on its own. The European civil servants left. Many of the farmers on the plains, who had been hanging on only because of the protection afforded by the European army, left with them. Up in the highlands, the mines remained viable and to begin with it looked as if there were enough foreign businesses interested in supporting the economy — enough European banks willing to offer loans — to enable Mau to stand on its own feet. But the guerrilla war went on. The army and the police force conscripted from the Kyoga youth, trained and paid through foreign loans, swung into brutal action. They had no trouble with the communist-style organisation of the N’Kuru Lions; they assumed all N’Kuru were communist terrorists and took it from there. They had no trouble with white-skin sensitivities in questioning suspects; they remembered how their grandparents had been forced to collect rubber and applied the same techniques. A brief and bloody war swept over the farmlands. When it was over, the leaders of the Lions were in hiding in Angola and neighbouring Congo Libre. Their power was destroyed. But so was half the country’s economic base. The army was victorious. But it was incredibly expensive and had no further reason to exist. It soon became obvious that Mau was not such a good investment as had been thought in the white-skin market places. Companies began to pull out. The copper mines closed. Banks began to ask that loans be repaid. The Maui franc crashed on the international money market. Inflation hit one thousand per cent. The economy collapsed.