BRITAIN’S BLACK ARMY.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVI, Issue 14, 30 December 1925, Page 5

BRITAIN’S BLACK ARMY.

A LITTLE-KNOWN FORCE. By accepting the colonelcy-in-chiel’ of the King’s African Rifles, the King has conferred a signal honour on Britain ’s little-known black army in East Africa. Commanded by white officers and N.C.O.’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 tho 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, ami was known by some such name as Alboga Mbaya, or Mr Bab Vegetable, but on the parade ground, dapper in the khaki shorts an-1 tunic, blue puttees, and black-tassell-ed scarlet taboosh of the A.K.R., ho becomes, for example, Askari Risasi Sawasawa, or Private Crackshot. His savage wife, in strings of beads and calf-skin skirt, with her naked piceanins, would be out of place among the silken-clad, gold-carringed Mahommcdan women of the barracks, so Private Crackshot marries a second wife, a smart Swahili woman of the coast. But he sends his backblock wife half his pay of 32s a month, and as soon as she has learned to dross in cotton cloth she joins him and his second ivifc. The two women live amicably in barracks er go with their husband on outpost duty, cheerfully sharing the jjeri'ls of camp life in the wilds. It takes two years to turn a savage into an askari, or full-blown private. Speaking his tribal dialect, he learns Kiswahili, the African lingua franca, in which all instructions arc given ano 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 K.,A.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 de tachmeht for the Abyssinian border.