Jomo Kenyatta

Jomo Kenyatta was the leading figure of Kenya's struggle against British colonial rule and the country's first leader after independence, serving as prime minister from 1963 and as president from 1964 until his death in 1978. Imprisoned by the British for nearly nine years as the supposed organiser of the Mau Mau rebellion, he emerged to preach reconciliation with the white settlers he had once opposed. His rule brought stability and economic growth, but also a one-party state, ethnic favouritism and the concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a small elite.

He was born Kamau, son of Muigai, among the Kikuyu people of the Kiambu district in the central highlands of what was then British East Africa. The year is unknown; he gave various dates, and historians usually suggest the early to mid 1890s, with about 1897 often cited. Orphaned young, he was raised by relatives, and around 1909 he went to a Church of Scotland mission at Thogoto, near Nairobi, where he learned to read and write and trained as a carpenter. He was baptised in 1914 as John Peter, later Johnstone Kamau.

In the years after the First World War he worked as a clerk and meter reader for Nairobi's water department and became known around the town for his flamboyant dress, including a beaded belt, kinyata in Kikuyu, from which he later took his surname. The colony was being shaped around European settlers, who held the best farmland in the "White Highlands", while Africans faced land loss, forced labour, high taxes and the hated identity pass known as the kipande.

In the mid-1920s Kenyatta joined the Kikuyu Central Association, which campaigned for the return of Kikuyu land, and became its general secretary in 1928, editing its Kikuyu-language newspaper. In 1929 the association sent him to London to present its grievances to the Colonial Office. He returned home briefly in 1930, then left again in 1931 and stayed in Europe for fifteen years.

During that time he moved in radical and anti-colonial circles. With help from communist contacts, he studied in Moscow in 1932 and 1933, though he never became a committed communist. In London he befriended the Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore and campaigned against Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, welcoming Haile Selassie when the emperor arrived in exile. From 1935 he studied anthropology at the London School of Economics under Bronisław Malinowski, and in 1938 he published Facing Mount Kenya, a study of Kikuyu society written from the inside that defended African institutions against colonial contempt. It was the first book he published as Jomo Kenyatta. During the Second World War he worked on a farm in Sussex and married an Englishwoman, Edna Clarke. In 1945 he joined Kwame Nkrumah and others in organising the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester.

Kenyatta went back to Kenya in September 1946 and in 1947 became president of the Kenya African Union, the main nationalist party. He toured the country calling for land reform, equal rights and eventually self-government, while urging discipline and hard work. At the same time, a more militant movement was growing among landless Kikuyu, squatters and Nairobi's poor, bound together by secret oaths. The British called it Mau Mau.

As killings of loyalist Africans and some settlers increased, the colonial government declared a state of emergency on 20 October 1952 and arrested Kenyatta and other leaders that night. The war that followed was savage. Mau Mau fighters killed about 32 European civilians and around 1,800 African civilians, many of them Kikuyu loyalists. British and colonial forces killed more than 11,000 rebels, by official count, hanged over a thousand people, and held tens of thousands of Kikuyu, by some estimates many more, in detention camps where torture and abuse were widespread. In 2013 the British government expressed regret and paid compensation to over 5,000 surviving victims.

Kenyatta and five others, the "Kapenguria Six", were tried at the remote town of Kapenguria for managing Mau Mau. In April 1953 he was convicted and sentenced to seven years' hard labour. The evidence was weak, and the chief prosecution witness later admitted he had been bribed. Kenyatta always denied leading Mau Mau, and historians generally agree he did not direct it, though he had sympathy with its aims if not its methods. He served his sentence at Lokitaung in the far north-west and in 1959 was moved under restriction to Lodwar.

The rebellion was militarily defeated by 1956, but it convinced Britain that settler rule could not last. In 1960 the British accepted the principle of African majority rule. Kenyatta's imprisonment had made him a national hero, and the new Kenya African National Union chose him as its president even while he was in detention. He was released in August 1961.

KANU won the elections of May 1963, and Kenyatta became prime minister of a self-governing Kenya, which became independent on 12 December 1963 and a republic with him as president a year later. To the surprise of many settlers, he called on all races to "forgive and forget" and work together under the slogan harambee, "let us all pull together". He kept close ties with Britain and the West during the Cold War, welcomed foreign investment and tourism, and the economy grew strongly in his first decade.

Land was the central question. With British funding, many European farms were bought and resettled, but on a "willing buyer, willing seller" basis that favoured those with money, and much of the best land passed to Kenyatta's family and a Kikuyu elite rather than to the landless. His government fought a bitter war in the north-east from 1963 to 1967 against Somali secessionists who wanted to join Somalia (see History of Somalia).

Kenyatta governed in an increasingly autocratic way. Regional autonomy was abolished, presidential power was expanded, and the rival party KADU merged into KANU in 1964. When his vice-president, the Luo leader Oginga Odinga, broke away to form the leftist Kenya People's Union in 1966, it was harassed and then banned in 1969, and Odinga was detained, leaving Kenya a one-party state in practice. The assassinations of the politicians Pio Gama Pinto in 1965, Tom Mboya in 1969 and J. M. Kariuki in 1975 deepened suspicion that people close to the government were responsible for silencing rivals. Kenyatta's health declined after strokes in the late 1960s, and by the 1970s much of the day-to-day work was done by those around him.

Kenyatta died of a heart attack at State House in Mombasa on 22 August 1978 and was succeeded by his vice-president, Daniel arap Moi. He is honoured in Kenya as Mzee, "the elder", the father of the nation, who achieved independence and kept the country stable and united while many neighbours fell into coups and civil war. Critics point to the authoritarian state, ethnic patronage and inequality of land and wealth that he left behind, which shaped Kenyan politics for decades; his son Uhuru Kenyatta was president from 2013 to 2022. For the wider context, see the decolonisation of Africa, the British Empire and the History of Kenya.