BRITAIN'S BLACK ARMY.

Putaruru Press, Volume IV, Issue 115, 7 January 1926, Page 3

BRITAIN'S BLACK ARMY.

SAVAGE AFRICAN TRIBES. By accepting t'he colonelcy-in-chief of the King’s African Rifles, the King has conferred a signal honour on Britain’s little known black array in East Africa. Commanded by white officers and NjCjO.’s, the pick of famous home regiments, the native soldiers of the K.A.R. are recruited from the savage tribes of Kenya, writes “Fulahin” in the Daily Mail. To mark the auspicious day when he is signed on the strength, the African changes his wife, his religion, and his name for a brand new outfit. Back in the kraal he wore goatskins and brass wire, and was known by some such name as Mboga Mbaya, or Mr Bad Vegetable. But on the parade ground, dapper in the khaki shorts and tunic, blue puttees, and blacktasselled scarlet tarboosh of the K.A.R., he becomes, for example, Askari Risasi Sawasawa, or Private Crackshot. His savage wife, in strings of beads and calfskin skirt, with her naked piccaninis, would be out of place among the silken-clad, gold-earringed Mahommedan women of the barracks, so Private Crackshot marries a second wife, a smart Swahili woman of the coast. But he sends his hackblock wife half his pay of 32s a month, and as soon as she has learned to dress in cotton cloth she joins him and his second wife. The two women live amicably in barracks or go with their husband on outpost duty, cheerfully sharing the perils of camp life in the wilds.

It takes two years to turn a savage into an askari, or full-blown private. Spe'aking his tribal dialect, he learns Kiswahili, the African lingua franca, in which all instruction is given and enough English to understand orders and commands. His great trouble is uniform, for puttees, bandoliers, and khaki dress are puzzles to a man who has always gone naked. As a rifleman he excels. -Guns fascinate a native, and the recruit loves his rifle like a brother. His one ambition is to use it on an enemy, and the trouble is not to make him fight but to stop him when he starts. Every KjA.R. unit is selfequipped. Barracks contain tailors’ shops, blacksmiths’ forges, wheelwrights’ yards, signal, ambulance, hospital, and transport units, Maxim, field, and mountain gun detachments, and there is a mule and camel corps detachment for the Abyssinian border.