Not knowing that Okello had given orders to kill no whites, the Americans living in Stone Town fled to the English Club, where the point for evacuation was. Those travelling in the car convoy to the English Club were shocked to see the battered bodies of Arab men lying out on the streets of Stone Town with their severed penises and testicles shoved into their mouths. As part of Okello's carefully laid out plans, all over the island, gangs of Africans armed with knives, spears and "pangas" (machetes) went about systematically killing all the Arabs and South Asians they could find. The American diplomat Don Petterson described his horror as he watched from his house as he saw a gang of African men storm the house of an Arab, behead him in public with a "panga", followed by screams from within his house as his wife and three children were raped and killed, followed by the same scene being repeated at the next house of an Arab, followed by yet another and another. After taking control of Stone Town on the first day, the revolutionaries continued to fight the Manga for control of the countryside for at least two days afterwards with whole families of Arabs being massacred after their homes had been stormed.