Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, an African leader, led Kenya as its first Prime Minister and President from 1963 to 1978 after emerging from prison and house imprisonment.
Kamau wa Ngengi at Ng’enda near Gatundu, Kiambu, was the birthplace of Mzee Kenyatta in the 1890s. When he was a small boy, his parents Wambui and Muigai passed away.
Early cultural instruction was given to the orphaned Kenyatta by his traditional healer grandpa, Kung’u wa Magana, and subsequently by his paternal uncle, Ngengi.
Kenyatta became interested in Agikuyu culture and customs at a young age, learning about their kinship structure, administration, and stories. Kenyatta, who was then herding cattle and a little older than ten, joined the Scottish Mission Centre in Thogoto, Kikuyu, where he worked as a chef, leaving his paternal uncle’s animals in the field. He had received no direction from his parents at the time.
In August of 1914, the Rev. J. Soutter baptized him as Johnstone at the Church of Scotland Mission in Kikuyu. At first, he had undergone a leg surgery. There are rumors that Dr. J.W. Arthur, “who probably saved his life,” operated on him because of a spinal ailment.
His uncle would subsequently remark, “After schooling, he brought me some money, a blanket, and a piece of linen, and we reconciled.”
Kenyatta, who was still in his early teens, participated in the Kihiu Mwiri initiation group’s Gikuyu rites of passage.
Due to his fluency in English and his upbringing with missionaries in Thogoto, Kenyatta was able to overcome his lack of luxury. While still employed as a chef at the mission, he volunteered his assistance in the initial translation of the Bible into Gikuyu.
Later on, J. Cooke hired him to assist in the kitchen. Because Cooke could tell tales like an elderly Chinaman, he was given the moniker John Chinaman. In addition to working as a cook, Kenyatta completed basic schooling in Bible studies, English, and math as well as practical instruction in carpentry.
Kenyatta visited his family in Maasailand, close to Narok, during World War I in an attempt to avoid being drafted into the colonial army. However, he was hired by an Asian dealer in Narok as a clerk. He started working as a storekeeper for a European corporation after the war. He started wearing a beaded belt, called a kinyatta, at this point.
Kenyatta returned to Dagoretti shortly after the First World War in order to establish himself.
Peter Muigai and Margaret Wambui were the two children he had with Grace Wahu, whom he married in 1919. Born in 1920, Muigai Kenyatta served as the Juja MP and Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1974 to 1979. He passed away in 1979. Born in 1923, Margaret Kenyatta was a member of the old Kenyan Electoral Commission and a former mayor of Nairobi.
Kenyatta was paid a hefty Sh250 a month to work as a meter reader for the City Council of Nairobi’s Water Department between 1921 and 1926. He purchased a bicycle, and in one of his first photos, he is seen with his kid Muigai next to it—undoubtedly a remarkable sight for an African back then.
He had a home and a farm in Dagoretti, but he chose to live in a hut he had built in Kilimani, near the town. On weekends, he rode a bike home. He had not yet publicly entered the political arena since government workers were prohibited. However, it is thought that Kenyatta became a member of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) in 1924 after joining as early as 1922.
James Beauttah, a politician from central Kenya, was the driving force behind Kenyatta’s recruitment. He continued the political effort begun by Harry Thuku, a trailblazing trade unionist who had created the East African Association before being exiled from Kiambu to Kismayu, Somalia, by the colonial authority.
In 1924, followers of Kenyatta established the KCA. The association began publishing a journal in 1927 under the name Muiguithania (Reconciler), which represented the tensions that existed inside the KCA between activists, traditionalists, religious authorities, and local chiefs. It served as a venue for money-raising and recruiting new members in an effort to combat colonial injustices and uphold the African cultural unity.
When Kenyatta joined the KCA leadership in 1927, the organization was having trouble translating memos and bulletins into English. This marked a sea change in the organization. Due to his ability to speak, Kenyatta was appointed secretary-general of the KCA, tasked with drafting and delivering KCA petitions to the colonial government.
Muiguithania vigorously pushed the KCA manifesto, and its advocacy of equality alarmed the European church missions. However, the criticism on Christians for their stance on cultural values—particularly the practice of female circumcision in Gikuyuland—was overplayed outside. Kenyatta was to refine his political acumen in the KCA. He was selected to address the Hilton Young Commission about the land issues facing the Gikuyu people. To the dismay of the colonial authority, he departed the nation for England in February 1929.
The colonial administration considered the project unrealistic, therefore Governor Edward Grigg questioned the KCA about whether it was worth wasting money on. However, the KCA was adamant about continuing the investigation. Even though Kenyatta was unable to deliver his petition to the Colonial Secretary in person while in London, the trip opened his eyes, and he made some valuable connections, including William McGregor Ross, a former Director of Public Works and member of Kenya’s Legislative Council (Legco). Ross was compelled to resign because he believed the settlers were dishonest and greedy. They got along well and talked politics together.
During his brief stay in Europe, Kenyatta traveled to Moscow and attended the International Negro Workers Conference in Hamburg, Germany. It was there that he met George Padmore, a West Indian trade unionist and writer, who would become a lifelong friend and have a significant influence on Kenyatta’s transformation as a person.
After receiving a cordial welcome upon her return home in September 1930, Kenyatta persisted in questioning the Scottish Mission Church’s stance on female circumcision. In Githunguri, Kiambu, he began working for the Kikuyu Independent Schools. However, he went back to England in November 1931 to deliver a formal appeal to parliament. The occasion was so significant that he was accompanied to the Nairobi Railway Station by a number of KCA members, including its president, Joseph Kang’ethe, in order to take the rail to Mombasa and the ship to London. Parmenas Githendu Mukiri, a KCA official, and Isher Dass, who was to make a similar petition presentation on behalf of the Indian community, joined Kenyatta. The two nationalists were horrified by the prejudice they encountered while traveling from Mombasa to Europe.
Kenyatta got to know Indian Mahatma Gandhi, a man who avoided using force to seize political power. It’s unclear if this interaction affected Kenyatta and contributed to his eventual political moderation in contrast to the Mau Mau leaders. Kenyatta went to Moscow to study economics after testifying before the Morris Carter Commission, but he was compelled to return to Britain in 1932. He enrolled in Woodbrooke College, which is located close to Birmingham, and spent a short time staying with the Kenyan-born family of anthropologist Norman Ley.
Kenyatta began his activism career at Woodbrooke, where he wrote letters to the editor and pieces for his favorite daily, the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian newspaper), which was associated with left-wing liberals. It is unclear how Woodbrooke altered Kenyatta, but as a KCA representative afterward, he promoted political rights equality. Kenyatta claimed that the organization’s policies were primarily “those of cooperation between the Agikuyu and the government on the one hand, and the Agikuyu and the white settlers on the other.”
The KCA was not well understood at the time. Kenyatta was eager to refute whatever motives the group may have had beyond those stated in its official material, claiming that the association stood for negotiation.
Kenyatta left Woodbrooke to return to Moscow, where he studied for two years before returning to Britain in 1934. During this time, Paul Robeson—an African-American actor, lawyer, singer, athlete, and popular civil rights activist—and South African writer Peter Abrahams shared an apartment, which led to the British intelligence watching him closely, particularly after he returned from Moscow. In order to learn Kiswahili and other African languages, Kenyatta enrolled in the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) at London University in 1933. Robeson met Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) around this time and persuaded them to adopt communism.
Kenyatta’s intimate association with American shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, a proponent of black civil rights, was observed by the British MI5. Cunard “has recently been associating — apparently with considerable satisfaction to herself — with Johnstone Kenyatta,” according to one of the December 1933 MI5 files. He appeared to be “a harmless individual if left alone, but apparently susceptible to outside influences,” according to the British Foreign Office. Kenyatta was well-known among his acquaintances, who called him “Jumbo” and saw him as nothing more than a dapper guy.
Through his connections in the motion picture industry, Kenyatta and his companion Robeson were able to secure a small role in the 1935 Alexander Korda film Sanders of the River. Nonetheless, politics remained his primary concern. In 1936, when the Italians invaded Ethiopia, Kenyatta was so furious that he stepped over a police line to greet the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie at the Waterloo Station. By that time, Kenyatta had become employed at University College London in the Department of African Phonetics, where he met prominent African-interested journalists and pundits. Under the guidance of renowned Polish anthropologist Prof. Bronislaw Malinowski, he became interested in writing about Gikuyu customs and culture.
The book included a picture of a bearded Kenyatta holding a spear and a blue monkey robe over his shoulder. Malinowski wanted the image to resemble a tribal elder rather than a student from the West. Kenyatta quickly rose to prominence as an activist, and British audiences could frequently see him speaking to them about African causes and criticizing colonial policies in London’s Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square. Two other works, My People of Kikuyu and The Life of Chief Wang’ombe, were released by him in 1942. He wed 32-year-old Englishwoman Edna Clarke in the same year, and the two of them produced a son, Peter Magana Kenyatta.
He participated in the planning of the Fifth Pan-African Congress, which Nkrumah and other notable African leaders attended in Manchester in 1945. After KAU requested Kenyatta’s return shortly after Manchester, he returned to Kenya in September 1946. He married Wanjiku shortly after, the daughter of Kiambu Senior Chief Koinange, who passed away while giving birth to Jane Wambui.
Peter Mbiyu Koinange, Wanjiku’s brother, rose to prominence in the Kenyatta administration.
James Gichuru, a former Alliance High School teacher, was the KAU president upon Kenyatta’s return. He gave up his position to Kenyatta in June 1947 as the latter began to press for the restoration of Kikuyu territory that white immigrants had appropriated.
For Kenyatta, 1951 was a pivotal year. He wed Chief Muhoho’s daughter Ngina Muhoho in September.
He began setting up KAU meetings that year, contacted James Griffiths, the British Secretary of State for Colonies, and suggested holding a constitutional convention before May 1953. With the advent of the Mau Mau movement, which initiated an armed battle, politics in KAU reached a fever pitch and the country was split between radicals and moderates.
The war council came up with what it saw as the ultimate answer in 1952 when the colonial government was unable to contain the violence and unrest that was engulfing Kenya.
During a conference on August 17, 1952, concerning emergency powers, the fate of notable politicians who were believed to have been fostering the “malevolent” wind of freedom over the previous eighteen months was decided. Even though the officers knew they could not prove any allegations against the leaders, they notified the top security gathering that a list had been produced and that they were to be detained, including Jomo Kenyatta.
Top secret documents that the British government was recently compelled to make public in London show that the colonial government was aware that the evidence it had against the politicians was inconclusive and that it was not strong enough to sustain charges in a “quasi-judicial proceeding.”
Despite this, Native Council member E.R. Davies declared at the 1952 meeting that he was committed to “putting Kenyatta away by some means or other under the present law.”
One Nairobi magistrate, cited in a September 12, 1952, circular, expressed frustration with the administration’s slow pace of justice delivery, claiming that some witnesses were even sent on vacation to unidentified locations when they were supposed to appear in court, which prevented them from testifying.
Prior to this, local District Commissioner N.F. Kennaway had conceived a plan to host a large-scale anti-Mau Mau gathering in Kiambu on August 24, 1952, which church leaders and elders were expected to attend.
The top government officials were informed that Kenyatta had already been brought in by David Waruhiu and Eliud Mathu, and that he had committed to denouncing Mau Mau at the meeting.
Because witnesses consistently refused to testify, even after recording statements with the police, the government was becoming more frustrated with its lack of success in convicting suspected Mau Mau believers and sympathisers.
The lack of collaboration also upset the Criminal Investigations Department. It mentions the instance of Moris Mwai Koigi, who boasted in front of 300 people that he had given the Mau Mau oath, but no one was able to get him to testify against him.
On the day of the hearing, Chief Nderi Wang’ombe of Nyeri, who wished to testify, got a letter informing him that betraying his people and nation would have grave repercussions. Later, the chief was assassinated.
In order to save the Government the disgrace of losing a case due to flawed charges, the judiciary also changed the rules to permit modifications to charge sheets at any point throughout the trial process.
Meanwhile, on October 9, 1952, Kiambu Senior Chief Kung’u Waruhiu was shot and killed in broad daylight while Evelyn Baring, the freshly appointed governor, was touring Central Province. This incident brought the simmering anger in the nation to a head.
Despite threats to his life from White settlers, Kenyatta and Governor Baring attended the burial together.
The assassination of Chief Waruhiu altered the political landscape and provided the government with the justification it needed to apprehend all political dissidents. The “Jock Stock” operation occurred late on October 20, 1952.
As thousands were detained and arrested following the declaration of a state of emergency, Kenyatta and five other politicians—Kung’u Karumba, Achieng Oneko, Fred Kubai, Paul Ngei, and Bildad Kaggia—famously known as the Kapenguria six—were apprehended during the crackdown that began a state of terror in Kenya. Even former regime friends suffered consequences. In connection with the death of Waruhiu, government security agents detained former Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu and his son John Mbiyu. Additionally, the government began implementing a plan to deprive the leaders of their country of their inheritance.
Days before Kenya’s State of Emergency was declared, Britain was confronted with the problem of political repression. Oliver Lyttelton, the Secretary of State for Colonies, informed Parliament on October 16, 1952, that measures were required to scare the Mau Mau.
Lyttelton, cited in the Hansard, said that the Mau Mau was a secret society exclusive to the Kikuyu, a KCA branch that had been outlawed in the 1940s.
The task of overseeing Mau Mau fell to the Kapenguria Six. The six were sentenced to seven years of hard labor and indefinite restriction in April 1953, despite the legal defense provided by Denis N. Pritt, Kenyan-Indian lawyers F. R. S. De Souza and A. R. Kapila, Nigerian advocate H.O. Davies, and Indian MP Diwan Chaman Lall, who was sent by Prime Minister Nehru. In 1954, the Privy Council likewise rejected their appeal. After serving out his term in 1959 at Lokitaung, which is around 800 kilometers north of Nairobi, Kenyatta was placed under restrictions to Lodwar, which is 430 kilometers from Nairobi, where his wife Ngina joined him.
A fresh demand for Kenyatta’s release from restrictions began in April 1960 when Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda was released from prison in Malawi; however, Oginga Odinga had initiated the campaign in 1958 on the Legislative Council (Legco) floor. Ian Macleod, the Colonial Secretary, was considering all of his options back in London, even though Nairobi Governor Patrick Renison was reluctant to free Kenyatta—a man he would later refer to as a “leader unto darkness and death.”
The African leadership, led by Odinga and Tom Mboya, wanted Kenyatta back to lead the independence period, while the colonial authority sought to expedite developments without him. A devotee of Mahatma Gandhi, Ambu Patel established the Release Jomo Committee in 1960 to galvanize popular support. He gathered a lot of signatures by April to send the Nairobi People’s Convention Party a letter pleading for Kenyatta’s release. The formation of Kadu, which united the so-called tiny tribal groups, and Kenyatta’s election as Kanu president in absentia changed the political scene.
As a result of the ongoing “No Kenyatta, No Legco” campaign, Kenyatta was relocated from Lodwar in northern Kenya to Maralal, which is around 90 km away, in April 1961. There, he gave his first news conference speech in eight years. He returned to Gatundu on August 14, 1961, four months later, and was sworn in as Kanu’s president in October. Kenyatta had to be voted to the Legco when Kigumo MP Kariuki Njiiri resigned from office. Kenyatta subsequently led the Kanu delegates to the Lancaster Constitutional Conference in London in 1961 and 1962.
Under Kenyatta’s direction, Kanu surpassed all expectations and developed into a popular party. Kenyatta led the party to an electoral victory in May 1963, and on June 1 of that year, he took office as prime minister and constituted the government. We commemorate this as Madaraka Day. The word “madaraka” in Kiswahili refers to self-management. Kenya’s economy was reliant on colonial farming, thus Kenyatta had to choose between maintaining economic growth and winning over his followers. Under his rule, the land issue was going to be a hot potato. Developing a clear strategy for the landless was one of Kenyatta’s first challenges as prime minister. Land transfers were thought to need to happen in a controlled manner in order to prevent panic and economic collapse.
After Kenya gained independence in December 1963 and became a republic in 1964, Kenyatta was able to strike a compromise between the various interests, and he took over as President, succeeding Governor-General Malcolm McDonald.
Kenyatta persuaded the leaders of the opposition party Kadu to switch sides and support the government without calling for by-elections by using his political savvy.
Kenyatta gained complete control over the State’s organs and consolidated his authority through the merging of Kanu and Kadu. He rose to the position of chief of the governing party Kanu, leader of the sole political party, head of state and government, and supreme commander of the armed forces.
To strike a compromise between the divergent viewpoints within the government, a policy statement titled Kenya African Socialism: Its Application to Planning in Kenya (better known as Sessional Paper No. 10 of 1965) was also passed.
Kenyatta, affectionately called Mzee (old man) and revered as Baba wa Taifa (Father of the Nation), kept the nation united in spite of the many internal and external obstacles he had to overcome. Between 1963 and 1970, the economy expanded at an average annual rate of 5%, and between 1970 and 1978, it grew at an average annual rate of 8%.
The expansion was a result of policies that were implemented to provide small-scale farmers with access to productive land, encourage the growth of dairy farming, and support the production of cash crops like tea, coffee, and hybrid maize.
As a result, smallholders’ share in coffee and tea output increased to 40% and 70%, respectively, by 1978, and rural incomes increased by 5% yearly between 1974 and 1982.
State parastatals and organizations served as substitute engines of development under Kenyatta. On August 22, 1978, he passed away in the State House in Mombasa.
