Jomo Kenyatta
| Jomo Kenyatta | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Born | 1889 | ||||
| Died | 1978 | ||||
| Residence |
95 Cambridge Street, London SW1 15 Cranleigh Houses, Cranleigh Street, NW1 [1937] | ||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
1934.10.23 proposed by R.S. Rattray, seconded by E.W. Smith
first President, Republic of Kenya
Notes From Elsewhere
Jomo Kenyatta[a] (c. 1897 – 22 August 1978) was a Kenyan anti-colonial activist and politician who governed Kenya as its Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964 and then as its first President from 1964 to his death in 1978. He was the country's first indigenous head of government and played a significant role in the transformation of Kenya from a colony of the British Empire into an independent republic. Ideologically an African nationalist and conservative, he led the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party from 1961 until his death.
Kenyatta was born to Kikuyu farmers in Kiambu, British East Africa. Educated at a mission school, he worked in various jobs before becoming politically engaged through the Kikuyu Central Association. In 1929, he travelled to London to lobby for Kikuyu land affairs. During the 1930s, he studied at Moscow's Communist University of the Toilers of the East, University College London, and the London School of Economics. In 1938, he published an anthropological study of Kikuyu life before working as a farm labourer in Sussex during the Second World War. Influenced by his friend George Padmore, he embraced anti-colonialist and Pan-African ideas, co-organising the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. In 1946, he returned to Kenya and became a school principal. In 1947, he was elected President of the Kenya African Union, through which he lobbied for independence from British colonial rule, attracting widespread indigenous support yet animosity from white settlers. In 1952, he was among the Kapenguria Six arrested and charged with masterminding the anti-colonial Mau Mau Uprising. Although protesting his innocence—a view shared by later historians—he was convicted. He remained imprisoned at Lokitaung until 1959 and then exiled in Lodwar until 1961.
On his release, Kenyatta became President of KANU and led the party to victory in the 1963 general election. As Prime Minister, he oversaw the transition of the Kenya Colony into an independent republic, of which he became President in 1964. Desiring a one-party state, he transferred regional powers to his central government, suppressed political dissent, and prohibited KANU's only rival—Oginga Odinga's leftist Kenya People's Union—from competing in elections. He promoted reconciliation between the country's indigenous ethnic groups and its European minority, although his relations with the Kenyan Indians were strained and Kenya's army clashed with Somali separatists in the North Eastern Province during the Shifta War. His government pursued capitalist economic policies and the "Africanisation" of the economy, prohibiting non-citizens from controlling key industries. Education and healthcare were expanded, while UK-funded land redistribution favoured KANU loyalists and exacerbated ethnic tensions. Under Kenyatta, Kenya joined the Organisation of African Unity and the Commonwealth of Nations, espousing a pro-Western and anti-communist foreign policy amid the Cold War. Kenyatta died in office and was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi.
Kenyatta was a controversial figure. Prior to Kenyan independence, many of its white settlers regarded him as an agitator and malcontent, although across Africa he gained widespread respect as an anti-colonialist. During his presidency, he was given the honorary title of Mzee and lauded as the Father of the Nation, securing support from both the black majority and white minority with his message of reconciliation. Conversely, his rule was criticised as dictatorial, authoritarian, and neo-colonial, of favouring Kikuyu over other ethnic groups, and of facilitating the growth of widespread corruption. .....
In May 1931, Kenyatta and Parmenas Mockerie sailed for Britain, intent on representing the KCA at a joint select committee of parliament on the future of East Africa.[88] Kenyatta would not return to Kenya for fifteen years.[89] In Britain, he spent the summer attending an Independent Labour Party summer school and Fabian Society gatherings.[90] In June, he visited Geneva, Switzerland to attend a Save the Children conference on African children.[91] In November, he met the Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi while in London.[92] That month, he enrolled in the Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham, where he remained until the spring of 1932, attaining a certificate in English writing.[93]
In Britain, Kenyatta befriended an Afro-Caribbean Marxist, George Padmore, who was working for the Soviet-run Comintern.[94] Over time, he became Padmore's protégé.[95] In late 1932, he joined Padmore in Germany.[96] Before the end of the year, the duo relocated to Moscow, where Kenyatta studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East.[97] There he was taught various subjects, including arithmetic, geography, natural science, and political economy, as well as Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the history of the Marxist-Leninist movement.[98] Many Africans and members of the African diaspora were attracted to the institution because it offered free education and the opportunity to study in an environment where they were treated with dignity, free from the institutionalised racism present in the U.S. and British Empire.[99] However, Kenyatta complained about the food, accommodation, and poor quality of English instruction.[72] There is no evidence that he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,[100] and one of his fellow students later characterised him as "the biggest reactionary I have ever met."[101] During his time in the country, Kenyatta also visited Siberia, probably as part of an official guided tour.[102]
The emergence of Germany's Nazi government shifted political allegiances in Europe; the Soviet Union pursued formal alliances with France and Czechoslovakia,[103] and thus reduced its support for the movement against British and French colonial rule in Africa.[104] As a result, Comintern disbanded the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, with which both Padmore and Kenyatta were affiliated. Padmore resigned from the Soviet Communist Party in protest, and was subsequently vilified in the Soviet press.[105] Both Padmore and Kenyatta left the Soviet Union, with the latter returning to London in August 1933.[106] The British authorities were highly suspicious of Kenyatta's time in the Soviet Union, suspecting that he was a Marxist-Leninist, and following his return the MI5 intelligence service intercepted and read all of his mail.[107]
Kenyatta continued writing articles, reflecting Padmore's influence.[108] Between 1931 and 1937 he wrote several articles for the Negro Worker and joined the newspaper's editorial board in 1933.[109] He also produced an article for a November 1933 issue of Labour Monthly,[110] and in May 1934 had a letter published in The Manchester Guardian.[111] He also wrote the entry on Kenya for Negro, an anthology edited by Nancy Cunard and published in 1934.[112] In these, he took a more radical position than he had in the past, calling for complete self-rule in Kenya.[113] In doing so he was virtually alone among political Kenyans; figures like Thuku and Jesse Kariuki were far more moderate in their demands.[114] The pro-independence sentiments that he was able to express in Britain would not have been permitted in Kenya itself.
Between 1935 and 1937, Kenyatta worked as a linguistic informant for the Phonetics Department at University College London (UCL); his Kikuyu voice recordings assisted Lilias Armstrong's production of The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu.[115] The book was published under Armstrong's name, although Kenyatta claimed he should have been listed as co-author.[116] He enrolled at UCL as a student, studying an English course between January and July 1935 and then a phonetics course from October 1935 to June 1936.[117] Enabled by a grant from the International African Institute,[118] he also took a social anthropology course under Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics (LSE). Kenyatta lacked the qualifications normally required to join the course, but Malinowski was keen to support the participation of indigenous peoples in anthropological research.[119] For Kenyatta, acquiring an advanced degree would bolster his status among Kenyans and display his intellectual equality with white Europeans.[120] Over the course of his studies, Kenyatta and Malinowski became close friends.[121] Fellow course-mates included the anthropologists Audrey Richards, Lucy Mair, and Elspeth Huxley.[122] Another of his fellow LSE students was Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, who invited Kenyatta to stay with him and his mother, Princess Marie Bonaparte, in Paris during the spring of 1936.[123]
Kenyatta returned to his former dwellings at 95 Cambridge Street,[124] but did not pay his landlady for over a year, owing over £100 in rent.[125] This angered Ross and contributed to the breakdown of their friendship.[126] He then rented a Camden Town flat with his friend Dinah Snock, whom he met at an anti-imperialist rally in Trafalgar Square.[127] Kenyatta socialised at the Student Movement House in Russell Square, which he had joined in the spring of 1934,[128] and befriended various Africans in the city.[129] To earn money, he worked as one of 250 black extras in the film Sanders of the River, filmed at Shepperton Studios in Autumn 1934.[129] Several other Africans in London criticised him for doing so, arguing that the film degraded black people.[130] Appearing in the film also allowed him to meet and befriend its star, the African-American Paul Robeson.[1
In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia), incensing Kenyatta and other Africans in London; he became the honorary secretary of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, a group established by Padmore and C. L. R. James.[132] When Ethiopia's monarch Haile Selassie fled to London in exile, Kenyatta personally welcomed him at Waterloo station.[133] This group developed into a wider pan-Africanist organisation, the International African Service Bureau (IASB), of which Kenyatta became one of the vice chairs.[134] Kenyatta began giving anti-colonial lectures across Britain for groups like the IASB, the Workers' Educational Association, Indian National Congress of Great Britain, and the League of Coloured Peoples.[135] In October 1938, he gave a talk to the Manchester Fabian Society in which he described British colonial policy as fascism and compared the treatment of indigenous people in East Africa to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.[136] In response to these activities, the British Colonial Office reopened their file on him, although could not find any evidence that he was engaged in anything sufficiently seditious to warrant prosecution.[137]
Kenyatta assembled the essays on Kikuyu society written for Malinowski's class and published them as Facing Mount Kenya in 1938.[138] Featuring an introduction written by Malinowski,[139] the book reflected Kenyatta's desire to use anthropology as a weapon against colonialism.[122] In it, Kenyatta challenged the Eurocentric view of history by presenting an image of a golden African past by emphasising the perceived order, virtue, and self-sufficiency of Kikuyu society.[140] Utilising a functionalist framework,[141] he promoted the idea that traditional Kikuyu society had a cohesion and integrity that was better than anything offered by European colonialism.[142] In this book, Kenyatta made clear his belief that the rights of the individual should be downgraded in favour of the interests of the group.[143] The book also reflected his changing views on female genital mutilation; where once he opposed it, he now unequivocally supported the practice, downplaying the medical dangers that it posed to women.[144]
The book's jacket cover featured an image of Kenyatta in traditional dress, wearing a skin cloak over one shoulder and carrying a spear.[145] The book was published under the name "Jomo Kenyatta", the first time that he had done so; the term Jomo was close to a Kikuyu word describing the removal of a sword from its scabbard.[146] Facing Mount Kenya was a commercial failure, selling only 517 copies, but was generally well received;[147] an exception was among white Kenyans, whose assumptions about the Kikuyu it challenged.[148] Murray-Brown later described it as "a propaganda tour de force. No other African had made such an uncompromising stand for tribal integrity."[149] Bodil Folke Frederiksen, a scholar of development studies, referred to it as "probably the most well-known and influential African scholarly work of its time",[150] while for fellow scholar Simon Gikandi, it was "one of the major texts in what has come to be known as the invention of tradition in colonial Africa".[151] ....
Publications
External Publications
1938 Facing Mount Kenya Secker and Warburg
1944 My People of Kikuyu and the Life of Chief Wangombe United Society for Christian Literature
1944 Kenya: The Land of Conflict International African Service Bureau
1968 Suffering Without Bitterness East African Publishing House
1971 The Challenge of Uhuru: The Progress of Kenya, 1968 to 1970 East African Publishing House
House Publications
Related Material Details
RAI Material