Jomo Kenyatta

Jomo Kenyatta was born Kamau wa Ngengi around 1897 in Gatundu, British East Africa, in the Kikuyu highlands later renamed Kenya. He took the name Jomo Kenyatta in the 1930s and went to London, where he studied anthropology under Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics. His 1938 monograph *Facing Mount Kenya* — written in English by a Kikuyu about the Kikuyu — was the first comprehensive ethnography of an African people by a member of that people, and the foundational text of African anthropology by Africans.

He returned to Kenya in 1946 to lead the Kenya African Union and then, after independence-era detention by the British colonial authorities, the Kenya African National Union. The Mau Mau uprising of 1952 to 1960 — the most brutal anti-colonial war the British fought in Africa — was suppressed at the cost of perhaps eleven thousand Kenyan lives. Kenyatta was tried on charges of leading Mau Mau (almost certainly false), convicted in a colonial court, and held for nine years.

He emerged in 1961 as the unmistakable leader of the independence movement. Kenya became independent on the twelfth of December 1963 with Kenyatta as Prime Minister. He became President a year later and ruled until his death.

His rule was authoritarian by the standards of his successors but transformative by the standards of his predecessors: he built a national education system from a colonial fragment; established the foreign-investment framework that made Kenya the commercial center of East Africa for two generations; and held the country together through the difficult first decade after independence, when ethnic fault-lines could easily have produced what they later produced elsewhere on the continent.

He died in Mombasa on the twenty-second of August 1978, age approximately eighty-one. His son Uhuru Kenyatta would, four decades later, become President in his own right.

He is honored here as the first President of Kenya, and the founder of African ethnography from the inside.