Kenyatta, Jomo 1891(?)–1978

Jomo Kenyatta 1891(?)–1978

Former President of Kenya

At a Glance…

Political Awareness Awakened

His Mission in England

Facing Mount Kenya

Returned to Kenya

Ideas of Independence Take Root

Terror Stalked the Land

Imprisoned as Mau Mau Organizer

The Cell Door Opened

Kenyan Independence

Cracks in the Facade

The 1970s: Money and Murder

Selected writings

Sources

On December 12, 1963, the flag of independent Kenya billowed over the capital city of Nairobi for the first time. Flanked by thousands of other Kenyans, Jomo Kenyatta watched the unfolding of a 50-year-old dream that had sent him overseas to Europe, landed him in jail, and earned him the hushed admiration of his fellow-Kikuyu tribesmen. An astute politician known to his people as “Mzee,” or “The Wise Elder,” Kenyatta became the country’s first president in 1964. History remembers him as a brilliant communicator who stressed the importance of black African rule in Kenya and conveyed his message with stunning effectiveness to both his supporters and his opponents.

Jomo Kenyatta never knew the exact year of his birth—only that he was born sometime in the 1890s into a tribe that had always counted people’s ages according to their initiation groups. This custom, part of a long tradition, had kept the group members loyal to each other even after the burgeoning Kikuyu population expanded into new territory during the nineteenth century. However, unchanging tradition could not barricade the people against outside events; it was powerless against both the drought of 1889-1890 and the evils of smallpox and cattle disease that sent Kikuyu fleeing back to their ancestral stronghold in the fertile highlands around Mount Kenya. On their homecoming, they met yet another disaster: foreigners had claimed their vacant land after Kenya became the British East Africa Protectorate in 1895. Furthermore, these foreigners could support their claims with 99-year Crown leases that virtually turned the Kikuyu into squatters on their own land, tolerated only as a source of cheap labor.

By 1902 Kikuyu lands were divided again, this time by the Uganda Railway built by the British to connect the Kenyan port of Mombasa with Lake Victoria. The railroad shattered tribal isolation forever, enticing the people into the new era with trading posts and introducing them to European missionaries bearing the messages of Christianity and education for their children.

The future president of Kenya enrolled in a Scottish-run mission school in Kenya’s Central province around the year 1909. Naked except for three wire bracelets plus a strip of cloth around his neck, he is said to have given his name as Kamau wa Ngengi. There was little about him to hint at his future role as Jomo Kenyatta: he abandoned academic life for a carpentry apprenticeship in 1912, though he stayed at the mission long enough to undergo both the traditional Kikuyu initiation into manhood and entry into Christianity, taking the

At a Glance…

Born Kamau wa Ngengi, c. October 20, 1891 (birth date is uncertain; some sources say 1890, 1893, or 1897), in Ngenda, Kiambu District, British East Africa Protectorate (now Kenya); took the name Johnstone Kamau, 1914; later known as Jomo Kenyatta; died August 22, 1978, on Mombasa, Kenya; son of Muigai (a farmer and herdsman) and Wambui; married Grace Wahu, Edna Clarke, Jane (daughter of Chief Koinange), and Ngina (four wives; no divorces, since Kikuyu society was polygamous); children: eight. Education: Attended University College, London; studied in Moscow, 1932; postgraduate study in anthropology, London School of Economics, 1937. Politics: Conservative Pan-Africanist. Religion: Christian.

Store clerk and water works maintenance employee for Nairobi Municipality, 1921-26; Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), secretary, beginning 1928 (organization banned in May 1940), KCA representative in England intermittently between 1929 and 1945; also worked as a teacher, farm laborer, and lecturer while abroad; co-organizer of 5th Pan-African Congress, 1945; Independent Teachers’ College, Githunguri, Kenya, vice principal, beginning 1946, became principal; president, Kenya African Union (KAU; political party), 1947-52 (also president in absentia, beginning 1944); imprisoned by British Government for alleged role in Mau Mau terrorism, 1953-61; president, Kenya African National Union (KANU; political party), 1960-78 (first year in absentia); Government of Kenya, minister for Internal Security, Defense and Foreign Affairs, 1963-64; prime minister of Kenya, December 12, 1963-December 12, 1964; president of Kenya, December 12, 1964-August 22, 1978.

Awards: Knight of Grace, Order of St. John of Jerusalem, 1972; LL.D. from University of East Africa; Order of the Golden Ark, bestowed by the World Wildlife Fund, 1974.

baptismal name of Johnstone.

The end of World War I found Johnstone Kamau settled in Nairobi, attending evening mission classes and working as a water meter reader. Generously paid, he was able to build a hut for his new wife and baby in his native Kiambu district. Johnstone is said to have made his hut big enough to accommodate a small general store, which he called “Kinyata” after the bead-strung leather strips he often wore as a belt.

Political Awareness Awakened

A social center as well as a place of business, the shop was an ideal place for customers to air grievances over the laws that were instituted after Kenya was declared a British colony in 1920. Several topics came up for discussion. A 1915 law extending white-held land leases from 99 to 999 years and placing all black-held land under the British Crown was hotly opposed, as was a registration act stating that all black males had to carry a kipande, or document listing their employment history and references. Taken together, these laws increased the squatter problem, especially when combined with a ban on profitable sisal (hemp) and coffee crops for black farmers. The Kikuyu resented this almost as much as they resented the hut tax now payable for each wife, complaining that tax money would be better spent on government-run schools.

Discontented rumblings found expression in a rash of government-opposed societies. Kenyatta joined the fledgling Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) in 1925, later becoming secretary. Successful at increasing member support in rural areas, he soon earned himself an official reputation as a troublemaker by helping to shape a petition to the British government, asking, among other things, for permission to grow coffee and for publication of all laws in the Kikuyu language.

By 1929 the KCA had not received a response from local government about either these grievances or the issues of land rights and the hut tax. Disregarding the local authorities’ assurances that they would have no success as an unofficial organization that did not represent all the Kikuyu, the KCA scraped together the funds to send Johnstone to England to consult the Colonial Office.

His Mission in England

From London, Johnstone wrote to the British Colonial Office frequently. While he waited for a response, he took the opportunity to visit Europe and Russia, despite a shortage of money so acute that his landlord impounded his possessions in lieu of rent. Ignored by the authorities, he returned to Kenya in 1930 but was soon sent back by the KCA to protest a threatened federation of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Uganda, and Kenya that would tighten Britain’s colonial grip. Johnstone ventured back to England eagerly, lingering only to send his wife two bunches of bananas by way of acknowledging the birth of his second baby. Once in England, however, neither frequent letters to the Colonial Office nor impassioned pleas to several parliamentary committees brought any response on the federation question.

Nevertheless, he gained a chance to make himself heard, for the Kikuyu land loss complaint had at last found a British response. In 1932 the government appointed the Carter Commission to walk the precarious claims tightrope teetering between the powerful, wealthy settlers and the impoverished, aggrieved Kikuyu. Sir Morris Carter took statements from Kenyatta and others, then went to Kenya to inspect the lands. Finding that the ancestral territory around Mount Kenya had indeed been cut, he compromised by ruling that the Kikuyu be moved and compensated with less desirable land reclaimed from the thin strip of forest separating them from the Masai tribes. The white settlers were permitted to remain in the fertile area that would henceforth be known as the White Highlands.

Having infuriated the Kikuyu by removing them from their ancestral stronghold, the might of the law moved on to the neighboring Wakamba. Outraged by the devastating effects of Carter’s dictums on their cattle-raising tradition, 3,000 Wakamba tribesmen marched to see the governor in Nairobi. Denied entry, they protested by swelling KCA membership rolls, which reached 10,000 by 1938.

These explosive events were faithfully relayed to Johnstone in England. In turn, he publicized the Wakamba and Kikuyu complaints both in lectures given all over England and in articles published in the Manchester Guardian. The Colonial Office, however, refused to acknowledge him, though they had begun to keep a list of all his activities. Meticulously documented were Johnstone’s 1932 visit to Moscow, where he attended an institute for revolutionaries; his job teaching Kikuyu language at London University’s School of African and Oriental Languages; and a bit part he played in a movie called Sanders of the River, which brought him a friendship with the world-renowned singer and activist Paul Robeson. Also noted were details of Johnstone’s association with left-wing intellectuals who introduced him to the possibilities of Kenyan independence and black majority rule.

Facing Mount Kenya

In 1936, despite the fact that he lacked a college degree, Johnstone went to the London School of Economics to take a postgraduate level class in anthropology from the distinguished Bronislaw Malinowski. Around the same time, he wrote a study of Kikuyu life called Facing Mount Kenya, depicting a complex African society that had developed free from European influence. To illustrate his pride in the uncorrupted Kikuyu culture, he was photographed for the book’s cover in tribal dress consisting of a borrowed monkey-fur cloak and a spear made from a sharpened plank. He also rejected the missionary-given name of Johnstone, deciding that “Jomo,” meaning “burning spear,” might be more appropriate. By way of a last name, he adopted “Kenyatta,” reminiscent of his little store in Kiambu. His book sold only 517 copies but was well received in academic circles.

The outbreak of World War II prevented Kenyatta’s return to Kenya but did not leave his Colonial Office dossier incomplete. The list now included his job as a farm laborer in an English town, his 1942 marriage (Kenyan family notwithstanding) to an Englishwoman named Edna Clarke, and the birth of a son the following year. The record ended in 1946, when he finally returned to Kenya, leaving Edna behind.

Returned to Kenya

Sixteen years abroad had changed both Kenyatta and his country. Fiftyish, highly educated, and well-traveled, he received an ecstatic welcome from his supporters. Kenya now had a booming economy, fueled mainly by exports of food to a hungry, wartorn Europe. Wealth, in turn, had brought thousands of settlers streaming from India on the eve of its partition from Britain. By 1948, the white population in Kenya stood at around 30,000, many of whom needed cheap labor to work their growing lands.

But Kenyatta’s keen eye saw that the country’s labor force would not be easy to manage. Blacks who had spent the war years in Kenya had learned about free education and territorial security from British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news bulletins. Those who had gone overseas with the 75,000-strong fighting forces had left the racial discrimination of their colonial-run homeland behind, only to return at war’s end to the usual problems of work documents and confiscated land. With no means of livelihood, these highly trained veterans had drifted into the rapidly swelling new slums of Kenya’s cities, where the crime rate had begun to soar.

Kenyatta was dismayed to see the traditional honor of the Kikuyu besmirched by dishonesty and violence. Despite government restrictions that made meetings difficult to arrange, he harangued his huge audiences with pep talks on the necessities for hard work, fair trade in the cities, and an immediate end to tribal violence.

Ideas of Independence Take Root

Kenyatta was a staunch opponent of white rule for Africans, and he introduced the idea of independence for his country’s people through the Kenya African Union (KAU). Formed in 1944, the multitribal organization declared him its president in absentia and rallied for racial equality by law, voting privileges for blacks, and the restoration of land ownership rights to native Kenyans. Noting that urban blacks were more comfortable with the move towards independence than their conservative rural counterparts, Kenyatta made a decision that led to disaster: he chose to spur black allegiance with traditional oath-taking.

Oaths had always been part of the Kikuyu moral code. Underscoring loyalty to initiation groups, they were also a familiar part of each land sale, proving the seller’s ownership before new boundaries were marked by the stomach contents of a ceremonially-slaughtered ram. But Kikuyu acceptance did not automatically guarantee backing for oaths from tribes unfamiliar with the practice. Distrustful of the unknown, they withdrew their support. White Kenyans, citing Kenyatta’s enormous following and his familiarity with Communism, demanded that he be followed constantly by the Special Branch Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Kenyatta proceeded to reject oathing as a rural canvassing measure, but not soon enough to stop it from spreading in a perverted and most virulent form.

Terror Stalked the Land

In 1948 Kenya began to experience a terrorist threat called Mau Mau. Its architects, both Kikuyus, were British army veteran Bildad Kaggia and trade unionist Fred Kubai. Like Kenyatta, they were bent on Kenyan independence; unlike him, they were committed to using any means necessary—no matter how forceful—to achieve it. Determined to force the whites out of Kenya, the men swiftly organized fighting cells in the Kikuyu-held forests girdling Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Range of mountains. Mau Mau raiders left behind them trails of strangled dogs and cats, disembowelled cattle with amputated legs, and human victims who had been burned alive or hacked to pieces with machetes. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Mau Mau is believed to have murdered a small number of white settlers and more than 11,000 blacks suspected of collaborating with the white regime.

Many political observers agree that Kenyatta knew about Mau Mau. However, he always disclaimed connection with it on the simple grounds that he opposed its brutality. Asked by the British government to denounce Mau Mau in his home district of Kiambu, he gladly did so, thereby bringing Mau Mau assassination threats down on his head. Still, the government banned the KAU in 1952 as a suspected Mau Mau front and then declared a state of national emergency.

Imprisoned as Mau Mau Organizer

Kenyatta and several Mau Mau committee members were arrested in October of 1952 and tried in a remote little town called Kapenguria. Found guilty of organizing the terrorist group, Kenyatta spent the following six years in Laukitaung Prison, cooking for the other convicts, reading books on comparative religion sent to him by his daughter, and piecing together news of his home district, where his farm had been destroyed on government orders.

Kenyatta completed his prison sentence in April of 1959. Opposition to colonialism in Kenya continued, and the government was reluctant to release him immediately. The turning point came after eleven hardcore Mau Mau supporters were slaughtered in an alleged disciplinary action that embarrassed the British government and caused the resignation of the colonial secretary.

The Cell Door Opened

The new colonial secretary was Iain MacLeod, a man firmly committed to Kenyan independence and black majority rule. Moving briskly, by mid-1960 MacLeod had encouraged the formation of two political parties: the Kenya African National Union (KANU) was a coalition between the dominant Kikuyu and runner-up Luo tribes, while the Kenya African Democratic Union was made up of smaller tribes fearing Kikuyu domination. Once again in absentia, Kenyatta was nominated the president of KANU.

MacLeod also authorized a press conference for Kenyatta, who had been transferred to another town. Now about 70, Kenyatta appeared before selected journalists fit and alert, and armed with a crisp three-point statement: he declared that he had not been the organizer of Mau Mau; he expressed his belief that black Kenyans must rule their country; and he emphatically denied any Communist connections, assuring the journalists that he had merely been to the former Soviet Union for educational purposes. Kenyatta went back to Kiambu in August of 1961 to a rebuilt farm packed with 10,000 well-wishers. The greeting was a triumphant boost to the beginning of his successful KANU campaign.

Kenyan Independence

Kenya became Africa’s 34th independent state at the end of 1963. Honored guests at the celebration included Britain’s Prince Philip, actor Sidney Poitier, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Also present were several truckloads of Mau Mau, all of whom had been promised feasts of oxen, jobs, and generous loans for land purchase. (Their euphoria, however, was shortlived. On learning that the loans would have to be repaid, many of them returned to lives of crime in the forests.)

Kenyatta was now the country’s prime minister, and “Harambee!” (“Let us all pull together!”) was the motto of new independence. By December of 1964, Kenyatta had become the first president of Kenya, with business in the one-party state getting off to a brisk and pragmatic start. The new order swept away tribal rivalries in favor of nationalism for the benefit of all Kenyans.

Kenyanization became the new economic watchword. A British-financed Land Transfer Program eased government efforts to buy out white farmers so that blacks could purchase their land; reluctant sellers, especially if they were noncitizens, were warned of “severe action” if they refused to comply. As a result, despite the doctrine of forgiveness and nonviolence that had always been Kenyatta’s creed, 5,000 of the 45,000 white farmers in Kenya had already left the country by the time it became a republic at the end of 1964.

Still, Kenyanization was progressing more slowly than Kenyatta had expected. Nearly six dozen American companies, including Union Carbide, Colgate-Palmolive, and Caltex, had established ties with Kenya, but the president was troubled by and determined to curb the considerable economic influence of Asians who gained prominence in Kenya since the days of the Uganda Railway.

Cracks in the Facade

Anxious to avoid claims of Kikuyu favoritism, Kenyatta had carefully selected his first cabinet from each population group. Nevertheless, cracks in party loyalty began to appear early. Vice President Oginga Odinga, a self-confessed Communist, was later shown to have campaigned for anti-government support among the Mau Mau. Odinga resigned from Kenyatta’s government in 1966 and formed a new party called the Kenya People’s Union, which gained considerable support in the late 1960s. Kenyatta’s aura of invincibility was threatened by the opposition of Odinga and the Kenya People’s Union. He met the challenge with a grim warning later published in Time magazine’s November 7, 1969 issue: “We will crush you into flour. Anyone who toys with our progress will be crushed like locusts.” His first example was Odinga, who was placed under immediate house arrest.

The 1970s: Money and Murder

As the 1970s advanced, the Kenyatta ranks split further. Rumors of government-sanctioned corruption abounded, with officials of the Kenyatta regime—and even members of the president’s family—implicated as key players in incidents of poaching, deforestation, ivory exportation, and land grabbing.

A courageous and popular politician named Josiah Kariuki began to speak out against the corruption surrounding the aged president. “Kenya does not need ten millionaires and ten million beggars,” he declared in a speech quoted by the London Times in 1975. Soon afterwards, Kariuki was abducted from the Nairobi Hilton, tortured, and murdered, his body lying unclaimed in a mortuary for more than a week before one of his wives identified it. Kenyatta made his position on the murder clear: he warned that further opposition would bring further bloodshed.

When Jomo Kenyatta died in his sleep on August 22, 1978, Vice President Daniel arap Moi, a handpicked successor, assumed smooth control of the government. In spite of the controversy and charges of corruption that surrounded him during his lifetime, Kenyatta remains in death the father of Kenyan independence and a key figure in the struggle to promote black rule and economic autonomy throughout Africa.

Selected writings

Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu, Secker & Warburg, 1938.

My People of Kikuyu and the Life of Chief Wangombe, United Society for Christian Literature, 1942.

Harambee! (speeches), Oxford University Press, 1964.

The Challenge of Uhuru (speeches), East African Publishing House, 1971.

Sources

Books

Cox, Richard, Kenyatta’s Country, Hutchinson, 1965.

Delf, George, Jomo Kenyatta, Doubleday, 1961.

Edgerton, Robert B., Mau Mau: An African Crucible, Free Press, 1989.

Farson, Negley, Last Chance in Africa, Gollancz, 1950.

Kenyatta, Jomo, Facing Mount Kenya, Vintage Books, 1965.

Lineberry, William P., editor, East Africa: The Reference Shelf, volume 40, number 2, 1968.

Murray-Brown, Jeremy, Kenyatta, Dutton, 1973.

Nelson, Harold D., editor, Kenya: A Country Study, American University, 1983.

Periodicals

Nation, August 11, 1969.

Newsweek, September 4, 1978.

New York Times, October 29, 1952; June 9, 1953; July 2, 1953; May 13, 1963; December 11, 1963; July 16, 1964; April 3, 1965; April 15, 1966; May 2, 1966; January 11, 1970; February 11, 1970; October 17,1975.

Phylon, volume 14, number 4, 1953.

Time, June 11, 1965; November 7, 1969; September 4, 1978.

Times (London), August 10, 1975; August 17, 1975; August 24, 1975.

—Gillian Wolf