Authors: David Lamb
It is, of course, easy to deride the Bokassas and the Amins and the other second-generation leaders whose competence has no more depth than a drop of blood. Their misdeeds, however, obscure the fact that Africa has produced some remarkable presidents who helped change the course of not just their continent, but the world. Among those figures, none was more memorable than Jomo Kenyatta, who a British colonial governor once predicted would lead his country “to darkness and death.”
Gray-bearded and misty-eyed, Kenyatta would stand before the gathered masses in Nairobi’s Uhuru (Freedom) Park, his bulky frame swaying from side to side, his right hand clutching a silver-handled fly whisk with white wildebeest hairs. His voice was forceful, his oratory almost magical. Finally he would raise the whisk over his head and call out a single word,
“Harambee!”
—his voice stretching and amplifying each syllable until the final “bay” sound came like a clap of thunder. The rapt crowd would lean forward and respond in unison,
“Harambee!”
The Swahili word translates roughly as “Let’s all pull together.” For more than half a century—until his death in 1978—this was Kenyatta’s rallying cry. As much as any single man, he showed the world that the pursuit of human dignity and prosperity, the desire for unity and racial harmony were not alien concepts to Africa.
“We do not want to oust the Europeans from this country,” he said early in the struggle for independence. “But what we demand is to be treated like the white races. If we are to live here in peace and happiness, racial discrimination must be abolished.”
Kenyatta did not live to see the fulfillment of many of his dreams. The East African Community, consisting of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, to which he attached much significance, collapsed in 1977; his vision of African unity remained imperiled by demagogues, ideological differences and wars; ignorance, poverty and disease continued to bedevil much of the continent; and his own country was divided by tribal factions and the emergence of a black elite whose accumulation of wealth and power had the distinct overtones of neocolonialism. His own family and confidants became little more than white-collar thieves, overseeing everything from the poaching of elephants to the smuggling of coffee. But Kenyatta left Kenya a better place than he found it. His legacy was a country in which a generation grew up accepting stability, relative prosperity and good racial relations as a normal part of life.
Jomo Kenyatta, who once referred to himself as a “rebuilder of destroyed shrines,” was born about 1892—he was never sure of the precise year—in the fertile highlands north of Nairobi. He was then named Kamau wa Ngengi, the son of a peasant farmer. His grandfather was a sorcerer. As a herdboy, the youngster tended his father’s sheep near the sacred
mugumo-wa-njathi
tree around which fellow Kikuyu tribesmen gathered to lament their eviction by white settlers from the lands they had owned for centuries. “The Kikuyu are no longer where they used to be,” the people grieved in one song.
At the age of ten, young Kamau ran away to a nearby Church of Scotland mission, where doctors saved his life by operating to cure a spinal disease. Kamau learned to read and write at the mission and was baptized there with a new name—Johnstone. One of his chores each Sunday was to drape clean cloths over the pews when the Africans had left their service and the Europeans were about to arrive for theirs. Not surprisingly, Kenyatta later became critical of the church for perpetuating colonialism, once remarking, “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
In 1921 Kenyatta, then twenty-nine years old, drifted to Nairobi, where he worked as a court interpreter and a water-meter reader. He was fond of dancing and he charmed women easily, employing, he said, a love potion his grandfather had taught him. While in Nairobi, he assumed the name Kenyatta, a Masai word referring to the beaded belt he wore. Later, feeling that his Christian name was not African enough, he took the name Jomo, which means “burning
spear.” The making—and the selling—of the chieftain image had begun.
Racial barriers where high in Nairobi in the 1920s. Young men like Kenyatta were barred from hotels, restaurants and all but menial jobs. Kenyatta, though, blessed with a magnetic personality, natural inquisitiveness and skillful oratory, learned how to circumvent the obstacles and soon grew into a local political force. He became propaganda secretary of the East African Association, which advocated the use of constitutional means for land reform, better wages, education and medical care for the Africans. It also campaigned against forced labor and for abolition of the metal identification tags each African was required to carry.
In 1928 Kenyatta joined as secretary-general a new and more outspoken group, the Kikuyu Central Association, whose main concern was the return of the highlands to the Kikuyus, the largest and most financially aggressive of Kenya’s forty or so tribes. Kenyatta quit his government job as a water-meter reader and began a struggle that would not end until independence was achieved thirty-five years later. It is worth noting that at this point Kenyatta was concerned with the betterment of his tribe, not the broader issue of nationalism.
A group of Indians with Communist connections provided money and legal help in 1929, and Kenyatta went off to London to plead the Kikuyu case with Britain’s colonial-secretary. He never got to see the secretary. Instead, he fell in with a Communist group known as the League Against Imperialism. He made a quick trip to Moscow, visited Berlin and played a minor role at the Communist-sponsored international Negro Workers’ Congress in Hamburg. After eighteen months Kenyatta’s Indian backers tired of supporting him and he returned to Nairobi.
His stay in Nairobi was brief. He was back in London the next year, 1931, and this time he would remain away from home for fifteen years. Living on the generosity of friends, he besieged the Colonial Office with petitions, fired off letters to newspapers, and dressed in African leopard-skin garb he wore for its eye-catching appeal, addressed his grievances to anyone in Trafalgar Square who would listen. He was learning the art of public relations, something that would serve him well throughout his career, and he was searching for a political system applicable to Africa.
In 1933 he spent four months in Moscow studying the tactics of
revolution. Later he visited Denmark, Sweden and Norway to learn about cooperative farming. (Much later, after independence, he repudiated Communism and became one of Africa’s most staunchly pro-Western leaders. “Don’t be fooled into looking to Communism for food,” he would say.)
Meanwhile, what had taken Kenyatta to England in the first place—the reinstatement of Kikuyu rights—had grown into the issue of rights for all Africans. In London he joined forces with two other African exiles, Hastings Banda, the future president of Malawi, and Kwame Nkrumah, the future president of Ghana, to form the Pan-African Federation, which demanded equal rights for all Africans. By the time Kenyatta returned to Kenya in 1946 with an English wife and son, he was a recognized leader of the African liberation movement.
But Kenyatta found that little had changed at home. The colonial government was making no concessions. And while Kenyatta was talking about constitutional change, many of his Kikuyu colleagues were taking fearful secret oaths to kill and drive the white man from Kenya. The movement became known as Mau Mau—(the origin and meaning of the word remain secret and undefined)—and before the British could defeat it in 1956 with the help of troops and dive bombers, four years after its inception, about 13,500 Africans and 95 Europeans had died.
Most of the whites killed were in the security forces; the rest, thirty-seven, were civilian settlers whose gruesome mutilation made world news, obscuring the fact that, as always, the Africans suffered far more than the Europeans, but the Europeans got the headlines. Thousands of Africans were killed by the Mau Mau guerrillas for refusing to take the oath of loyalty or for refusing to turn against their white masters. The Mau Mau were almost exclusively Kikuyus, and their purpose, initially at least, was tribally, not nationally, inspired. The Mau Mau Emergency, as the British called it, was the first black African war of liberation against the colonial powers and the only one the Europeans were to win anywhere in Africa during the next two decades. But even though the Africans lost militarily, they received an important psychological boost. They had stood up to the white man and all across the continent one could feel the first stirrings of the wind of change.
Inevitably, Kenyatta had been singled out as the Mau Mau leader—a charge he denied—and in the predawn hours of October
20, 1952, a day that is now a national holiday in Kenya, black and white government security men swept down on his home, hoping to surprise him in his sleep. Instead they found Kenyatta fully dressed, awaiting his arrest. His trial lasted five months.
“Our activities have been against the injustices that have been suffered by the African people,” he said in court, “and if in trying to establish the rights of the African people we have turned out to be what you say, Mau Mau, we are very sorry that you have been misled in that direction.
“What we have done, and what we will continue to do, is to demand the rights of the African people as human beings that they may enjoy the facilities and privileges in the same way as other people.”
Kenyatta was convicted and sentenced to seven years at hard labor in a remote prison in the northern Kenyan desert. His trial was a setup and the evidence against him was unsubstantial at best; he may have been his people’s spiritual leader, but he was never a guerrilla and it is unlikely that he exerted any military influence over the Mau Mau. In 1959 Kenyatta was released from prison, only to be sent under house arrest to the isolated outpost of Lodwar, where he lived with a third wife.
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The independence movement meanwhile was gaining momentum—seventeen African countries were born in 1960 alone—and the British were forced, by political pressure from Kenyans, to allow Kenyatta to re-enter politics.
“Where there has been racial hatred, it must be ended,” Kenyatta said. “Where there has been tribal animosity, it will be finished. Let us not dwell upon the bitterness of the past. I would rather look to the future, to the good new Kenya, not to the bad old days. If we can create this sense of national direction and identity, we shall have gone a long way toward solving our economic problems.”
Kenyatta became prime minister at independence on December 12, 1963, and at his swearing-in ceremony he and his aides forsook the native dress and monkey-skin robes they had worn during the campaign in favor of Western business suits. On Kenyatta’s head was a cap widely worn by the Luo, another prominent Kenyan tribe. The symbol was a significant one of national unity. A year later Kenyatta was named president, and at his death he was, in effect, a
life-president, a saintlike figure whose authority was unchallenged, whose personal fortune was immense, whose country had truly lifted the dignity of the black man and accommodated the white man.
Kenyatta had two great failings: he failed to achieve a real national consensus because, in the final analysis, he cared more about his clan and tribe than about his nation, and he failed to listen to honest voices of opposition. Not long after his inauguration he stopped wearing the Luo cap, and the government and the economy remained in the hands of the Kikuyus, often to the social and financial detriment of other ethnic groups. Corruption grew to scandalous proportions. Kenyatta turned a blind eye.
Kenyatta’s image was further tarnished when, in 1969, he jailed his Luo vice president, Oginga Odinga, on nebulous charges, and a popular young Luo politician who did not toe the Kenyatta party line, Tom Mboya, was killed in Nairobi by a Kikuyu gunman. Mboya was a responsible and intelligent leader with experience in labor and political affairs; he was, in fact, the very type of man many people—in both Africa and the West—were looking toward to provide Africa’s second-generation leadership. In 1975 J. M. Kariuki, another immensely popular Kikuyu parliamentarian who had spoken out against the new “colonial” black elite, and who had once been jailed by the British as a suspected Mau Mau, was assassinated. Just before his death Kariuki was seen in the company of a senior police officer who reported directly to the president. Between 1975 and 1977, five parliamentarians who at least mildly opposed some aspect of Kenyatta’s one-party rule were jailed without trial under the Public Security Act.
Such excesses, though, were minor by African standards and after Kenyatta died in his sleep, royalty, presidents and dignitaries from more than sixty lands poured into Nairobi for the funeral of the former herdboy who had become a symbol of an oppressed people’s dreams. His silk-lined casket was borne through the streets on a British gun carriage pulled by forty-six soldiers. Kenyans by the hundreds of thousands lined the route and heard a twenty-one-gun artillery salute echo across Uhuru Park. Flags throughout Africa flew at half-staff. And the Very Rev. Charles M. Kareri warned the mourners in his sermon that Kenya must avoid the political and tribal infighting that usually marks the death of a president in Africa.
Daniel arap Moi, the man who succeeded Kenyatta, was a member of the small Tugen tribe. The tribal confrontation—even civil
war—that many observers believed would follow Kenyatta’s death never happened. Enough Kenyans had a stake in their country’s continued progress to make violence and instability unappealing. Even though the real power remained in Kikuyu hands—Moi was chosen by the Kikuyu as a nationally acceptable front man for Kikuyu interests—the country’s economic pie was big enough for the majority to share. The standard of living had improved for the average Kenyan, government services had extended beyond the cities and into the rural areas, a middle class had emerged that at least gave the less privileged a visible goal to aim for. That was Kenyatta’s greatest gift to Kenya. Under him a generation grew up accepting peace and possible economic gain as a normal part of life. Its members had only to look across Kenya’s borders to know what the alternatives were. Ethiopia and Uganda were wracked by bloody chaos, socialistic Tanzania was stagnating, Marxist Somalia was slipping backward. Only Kenya had come close to fulfilling the promises of independence.