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The years that turned Johnstone Kamau into Jomo Kenyatta: his 1929 arrival in London as the Kikuyu Central Association's envoy, his study in Moscow and his place in George Padmore's Pan-African circle...
The years that turned Johnstone Kamau into Jomo Kenyatta: his 1929 arrival in London as the Kikuyu Central Association's envoy, his study in Moscow and his place in George Padmore's Pan-African circle, his anthropology under Malinowski and 'Facing Mount Kenya,' and the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress.
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The Secretary of State for the Colonies declined to receive Kenyatta or hear the KCA case in person. Shut out of official channels, he lodged near the West African Students' Union in west London and moved among students, radicals, and anti-colonial circles. The snub pushed him toward the press and the political left to make the Kikuyu case heard.
The Kikuyu Central Association raised the fare to send Kamau wa Ngengi, then known as Johnstone Kenyatta, to Britain to press Kikuyu grievances over land taken by white settlers. He left Mombasa in February 1929 and reached London as the association's official representative. It began fifteen years abroad that would remake him.
Kenyatta sailed back to Kenya in 1930 to report to the KCA, then returned to Britain in 1931 for what became a fifteen-year stay. He would not see Kenya again until 1946. The second stay turned a delegate on a fixed errand into a long-term exile and student.
Kenyatta pressed the KCA petition on Kikuyu land in memoranda and meetings, centered on the loss of land in the White Highlands and the demand for individual title. The core claim was that the Kikuyu had been dispossessed of land that was rightfully theirs. The land question stayed at the heart of his politics for the rest of his life.
In March 1930 Kenyatta published a measured letter in The Times laying out five KCA demands: secure land tenure and the return of alienated land, more schools, repeal of the hut tax on women, African seats on the Legislative Council, and no interference with Kikuyu custom. He wrote to the Manchester Guardian in similar terms. The letters showed a colonial subject arguing his people's case in Britain's own newspapers.
Cut off from official sympathy, Kenyatta was drawn into the anti-colonial left around the League Against Imperialism and met the Trinidadian communist George Padmore, then the senior Black official in the Communist International. Padmore befriended him and helped fund his travels across Europe. These contacts opened a world of Pan-African and communist networks far beyond the KCA's original errand.
From August 1932 Kenyatta studied for about a year at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), the Comintern's training school for colonial revolutionaries. He enrolled under a cover name, recorded in Soviet files as James Joken. Historians such as Hakim Adi note that his instructors came to see him as hostile to Marxism and unsuitable as an agent.
With Padmore's backing Kenyatta travelled through France, the Netherlands, Germany, and on to the Soviet Union. He saw European capitals and their radical movements at first hand. The journeys widened his politics well past the single land question that had brought him over.
Kenyatta contributed to the Negro Worker, the paper of the Comintern-linked International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers that Padmore ran. Some pieces appeared under aliases. It placed the Kikuyu land grievance inside a wider communist argument against empire.
The Comintern dissolved the ITUC-NW and Padmore resigned from the Communist Party in protest, later attacked in the Soviet press. Kenyatta left the Soviet Union and returned to London in August 1933. Biographers read his Moscow period as more tactical than doctrinaire, and he never joined the Communist Party; how deep his communism ever ran is still debated.
Short of money, Kenyatta took a small part as an extra in the 1935 film Sanders of the River, whose leads were played by the American singer Paul Robeson and Nina Mae McKinney. The film was a celebration of benign British rule in Africa that Robeson later disowned. For Kenyatta it was one of many odd jobs that kept him afloat in London.
Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 galvanised Black activists in Britain, and Kenyatta joined the campaigns defending the one African state that had kept its independence. The cause bound the London Pan-Africanists together and sharpened their anti-colonial edge. It was a formative moment for the movement that met again in 1945.
Kenyatta entered the London School of Economics to study social anthropology under Bronislaw Malinowski, a founder of the field. Malinowski's seminar taught that a culture had to be understood on its own terms. For Kenyatta it offered a scholarly language in which to defend Kikuyu life against colonial contempt.
Through the later 1930s Kenyatta moved in a tight Pan-African network with C.L.R. James, the Guyanese organiser Ras Makonnen, the young Kwame Nkrumah, the writer Peter Abrahams, and the elder statesman W.E.B. Du Bois. Many worked through Padmore's International African Service Bureau. These friendships, more than Moscow, shaped the politics he carried home.
In the seminar Kenyatta was the rare thing of an African writing anthropology about his own people rather than being the object of study. He turned his thesis toward the Kikuyu, drawing on his own upbringing as evidence. Malinowski championed him as proof that an insider could produce serious ethnography.
Kenyatta lived close to the edge for years, scraping by on lecture fees, small stipends, and casual work. He became a well-known figure in London, sociable and vivid, given to elaborate dress and long stories about Africa. The performance drew people to him and to the cause of Kenya.
Kenyatta earned part of his living lecturing on Africa for the Workers' Educational Association and, during the war, to British troops. Speaking to ordinary British audiences honed him as a public advocate for Africa. It was steady work that also spread his argument well beyond radical circles.
In 1938 his LSE work appeared as Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu, with an introduction by Malinowski. The cover carried the name Jomo Kenyatta, the persona he had built in London, and a photograph of the author in a skin cloak holding a spear. It was one of the first full ethnographies of an African people written by one of its own.
The book presented Kikuyu society as a coherent, self-governing order with its own religion, land system, and law, wrecked by European settlement rather than uplifted by it. Its heart was the claim that land was held communally and stolen by the settlers. Under the anthropology sat a plain political case for Kikuyu land rights and eventual self-rule.
One chapter defended irua, the initiation rite that included female circumcision, a practice missionaries were then trying to stamp out. Kenyatta argued it was central to Kikuyu identity and law and should not be judged by outside standards. The defence made the book contentious then and remains one of its most criticised passages today.
The book sold modestly at first and was read mainly by scholars, but it won respect as serious ethnography. In later years it became a foundational nationalist text, cited as evidence of a dignified African civilisation and of the land the settlers had taken. Its author's name, Jomo Kenyatta, became the name of a nation's leader.
also in Jomo Kenyatta: from Johnstone Kamau to the verdict on independence
Through the Second World War Kenyatta lived in the English countryside, working as an agricultural labourer on a farm at Storrington in Sussex and lecturing on Africa for the Workers' Educational Association and to British troops. The years among ordinary English working people, far from colonial officialdom, deepened his ease in Britain. He kept up his political writing and contacts with other anti-colonial activists throughout.
On 11 May 1942 Kenyatta married Edna Grace Clarke, an Englishwoman, at a register office in Sussex. It was during the war and he was working as a farm labourer. He already had a Kikuyu wife and children in Kenya, a fact that shaped how the marriage is remembered.
Kenyatta and Edna Clarke had a son, Peter Magana Kenyatta, born in August 1943 at Worthing. He grew up in England with his mother. Kenyatta would leave both behind when he returned to Kenya in 1946.
In October 1945 Kenyatta served as a joint secretary of the Fifth Pan-African Congress at Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall in Manchester, alongside Kwame Nkrumah, with George Padmore organising and W.E.B. Du Bois in the chair. Around ninety delegates from Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora attended. Three future presidents were in the room: Kenyatta, Nkrumah, and Hastings Banda.
The 1945 congress broke with polite petitioning and demanded autonomy and independence for the African colonies, backed by the threat of mass action, strikes, and organised labour. It turned Pan-Africanism from a debating movement into a plan for decolonisation. The men who signed its resolutions went home to lead the independence movements of the next twenty years.
Around the end of the war Kenyatta wrote the short book Kenya: The Land of Conflict, a plain nationalist statement of the settler-versus-African struggle over land. It distilled fifteen years of argument into a call to organise. It marked his shift from scholar and delegate to political leader in waiting.
In September 1946 Kenyatta sailed home after fifteen years away, leaving his English wife Edna and their son Peter in Sussex. He soon took over the Kenya African Union and became the country's leading nationalist. Whether he abandoned Edna or simply could not bring her into colonial Kenya is still argued; the two never lived together again.
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