The essential Jomo Kenyatta

Missionary teachers thought Jomo Kenyatta was only good enough to be a mason. But destiny had other plans for the dashing young man who had a taste for fine fashion and little time for religion. KAMAU MUTUNGA [[email protected]] explores the lesser-known details of the Kenyatta storyThis could be the last Kenyatta Day you ever celebrate. And then, again, maybe not. One of the proposed changes to the Constitution suggests that the October 20 public holiday be renamed Heroes Day — in honour of the multitude of Kenyans who fought for independence. 

But whether or not that ever comes to pass, Jomo Kenyatta will continue to capture the imagination of Kenyans born before independence and those who grew up under his rule.

Was he a man who just happened to be in the right place at the right time or was there something truly magical about the man with the fly whisk and glowing eyes?   

It is a question that has exercised the minds of both historians and ordinary Kenyans. There are those who are convinced that though the boy who survived bouts of a lung infection once common among thinly-clad Kikuyu herds boys to become a revered statesman was charismatic and full of political savvy, he was also just lucky.  

Kenya’s official history ignores the people, events and nuances that define the other Kenyatta — the towering figure whose no-nonsense approach to politics left no doubt as to who was in charge even as his health started failing in the 60s and 70s.

Kenyatta started life in Ng’enda, Gatundu, as Kamau wa Ngengi. It remains unclear whether he was born in the year of the jigger or the year of the sweet potato — both of them in the early 1890s.

Biographer Jeremy Murray-Brown notes in 'Kenyatta' that shortly after the birth of Kongo, his younger brother, his father Muigai died. "His mother Wambui passed to Muigai's younger brother Ngengi, according to Kikuyu custom. She bore him a son, Muigai, named after his dead father," writes Murray-Brown.

Into Kenyatta's shaky childhood came Musa Gitau, the father of Edith Matiba, politician Kenneth Matiba's wife. Gitau, several years Kenyatta's senior, was a church minister at the Thogoto Church of Scotland Mission station and persuaded Kenyatta to go school. 

Kenyatta obliged, with his younger brother Kongo in tow. Kongo disappeared at the height of World War I in 1917, never to be seen again, when he left Thogoto for his school holidays.

Murray-Brown writes that Kenyatta’s grades in Thogoto were unremarkable and, in 1912, he was urged to take up carpentry. "He evidently displayed no marked intelligence or aptitude for further skills... it may be that his talents didn't show themselves while under instructions," remarked Dr John Arthur, who took the famous picture of Kenyatta holding a carpenter's plane. 

"He stares at the world," Arthur observed further, "with a somewhat quizzical expression, as though he were struggling with an interior debate." 

Those debates shaped up in many forms. One was in 1914, during his baptism, when he defiantly added the suffix "stone" to his preferred name John Peter after the missionaries refused to hear of John Peter Kamau. He ended up as Johnstone Kamau.

At Thogoto, other students were taking up teaching, nursing or evangelical work as Johnstone Kamau was relegated to the even more drab masonry after the carpentry course. The rebel in the young Kenyatta played itself out when he refused to enrol for masonry. 

He hit the road to Nairobi, "that miserable scrap-heap of tin", as Ewart Grogan described it then. Young Africans were being rounded up then to fight in the World War I — which was how his brother probably disappeared.

Kenyatta avoided conscription into the Kings African Rifles by going to Narok, where one of his grandfather's wives and an aunt, who was married to a Maasai chief, lived. He got a job as a clerk in a ranch. It was while in Narok that he acquired the nickname Kenyatta, after kinyatta — the beaded Maasai belt that he so fancied and is to be seen in his photographs.

By 1920, he was a dashing young man living in Nairobi at a time when the Church of Scotland would not hear of romance and dancing. Church elders kept a sharp eye on Kenyatta and brought two charges against him. One was "committing sin with a girl whom he is buying as a wife, and as a result of which she is with child," writes Murray-Brown, quoting church documents. 

The charge was in reference to his marriage to Grace Wahu, then a student at the Church Missionary Society girls' school in Kabete. He had wished to wed her in "privacy" to avoid paying dowry, Murray-Brown contends. 

The second charge had to do with drinking. He pleaded guilty and was suspended from receiving the Holy Communion. He was also strongly advised to live with Wahu only after getting legally married. He agreed to a customary wedding but refused to stop drinking. The church excommunicated him, and Arthur refused to recommend him for a job.

This streak of defiance defined Kenyatta to the end of his life. He never bothered to shave his beard and kept long hair that was combed backwards, giving him the look of independence era revolutionaries and a commanding presence. Word has it that he occasionally held Cabinet meetings under a tree.

John Cook, a colonial water engineer in Thika, liked the young man and employed him in 1921 as a metre reader for the Nairobi Municipal Council Water Board. He later became a wage collection clerk, earning the princely sum of Sh250. Not even European clerks earned this much.  The well-paid young man bought trendy tweed jackets and a bicycle, then a status symbol. Still in the employ of Cook, Kenyatta was offered land at Dagoretti where he built a hut for Wahu and their first born son, Peter Muigai. Muigai, a former MP for Juja, died during an election campaign in 1979.

The hut doubled as a shop, which he called Kinyatta Stores. Murray-Brown describes the place as a "rickety place of fun never before seen in Kikuyuland". It was the port of call for Goans and broke Europeans who patronised it for shots of Nubian gin, music and women.

Kenyatta loaned money to his patrons and offered them free cigarettes, then a European indulgence, as he paid school fees for his brother James Muigai at Alliance High School. Muigai was the father of Dagoretti MP Beth Mugo and former Gatundu MP Ngengi Muigai.

Until 1926, Kenyatta showed no political ambitions and appeared content with being a man about town. But, as fate would have it, Joseph Kang'ethe, the then secretary-general of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), approached "Johnstoni" to join KCA because of his command of English.

The man politicians came to fear, love and respect was thus initiated into politics without trying very hard. KCA had been contracting him all along to translate and draft the association's letters. He would be paid not in cash but in the form of beer and pricey Goan spirits. It became expensive to hire him and a permanent job as a secretary was considered. Kenyatta obliged.

That put his job as a water meter-reader on the line. He was sacked once his activities came to light, enabling him to concentrate on KCA matters. He asked for an equivalent salary, a motorbike and other perks. He later became the editor of Muiguithania, (The Reconciler), the association's mouthpiece.

Detained in Kismayu

In 1928, Harry Thuku, then chairman of KCA, was arrested and detained in Kismayu. Once more, Lady Luck smiled on Kenyatta. KCA needed someone to represent it in London to present Kikuyu land grievances to the British secretary of state. Kang'ethe was the most likely choice, but his English was not good enough. And so Kenyatta came on board. 

That was also the year when Margaret Wambui, later to become the first female mayor of Nairobi, was born at Pumwani Maternity Hospital. The new dad sent greetings and two bunches of bananas to his wife before boarding the Bernadio de St Pierre, a French liner, to London where he took up residence at 57 Castletown Road in 1929.

He lived in London for 18 months and calls were made for his deportation since he wasn't making any headway in getting an appointment with Lord Passfield. He met instead with Sir Edward Grigg, former governor of Kenya. When Grigg sent Kenyatta's grievances to the secretary of state's offices, they were sent to Kenya, hence the delay.

In between, Kenyatta wrote several letters and articles on colonial injustice, one being "Give Back Our Land" published in the Sunday Worker that confirmed that the political bug had bitten the future president. 

"The natives of the colony are showing their determination not to submit to the outrageous tyranny which has been their lot since the British robbers stole their land and discontent will remain until they govern themselves," he wrote. 

But Kenyatta also lived life on the fast lane, got deeply in debt and could not afford rent. 

"Johnstone offers his cigarettes and lights one's smoke in quite the approved fashion," an ageing missionary, Arthur Barlow, who met Kenyatta in London, wrote back to the Thogoto Christians.

Handley Hooper, a missionary in England wrote of him, "...It’s tragic. He started fairly well, but his recent behaviour, if known, would discredit him with any British government and damn the association...I advise the association (KCA) to drop him and cut their losses."

McGregor Ross, the director of public works in Kenya in 1905, wrote: "He is ruining his pathetic landlady. When she gives him notice, he bursts into a flood of tears and sits tight as before. He must surely owe her £150 or £180 by now. Too bad."

Ross later offered him accommodation. In 2005, the house whose rent he couldn't afford was declared an English Heritage Monument by the British government.  Friends from the Anti-Slavery Society later arranged to advance Kenyatta £32.10 to clear his debts and pay his passage to Mombasa in 1931. 

While he was away, his wife Wahu worked in settler farms to bring home the bacon, although KCA had agreed to take care of Kenyatta's family. But, on his return, he again fell foul of the church when he refused to support a ban on female circumcision, maintaining that only universal education could kill the custom.

His brief sojourn home ended when he left for England with Parmenas Mackerie Githendu, a teacher, to represent the association's views to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on closer union of the East African Federation. The mission turned out to be another failure as the British government denied him an audience, preferring the views of some settlers and Senior Chief Koinange.

The government ordered him back to Kenya, but Kenyatta found his way to Germany in the company of his girlfriend, Connie McGregor, and the famous Marxist George Padmore, who was a high-ranking official of the Comintern, the Communist International Organisation and after whom a road in Nairobi is named.

In Germany, he escaped Adolf Hitler's anti-communist purge and found his way to Moscow, where he enrolled at the Revolutionary Institute. He also studied at Moscow University, the training ground for Marxist revolutionaries. But this particular phase of his life remains hazy. 

Curiously, Kenyatta never professed socialism. "I know about communism, I have seen it," Jules Archer quotes him as saying in African Firebrand: Kenyatta of Kenya. Clearly, Kenyatta was no communist. That would later create enmity with his first Vice-President, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, who publicly declared that communism was his staple diet.

Odinga had paved way for Kenyatta’s premiership and subsequent presidency. As the leader of Kanu, which had beaten the federalist Kadu after Kenya was granted internal self-government, Odinga refused to form the government until Kenyatta was released from detention, forcing the colonial government to free the man. 

In his second sojourn in Britain, lasting 15 years, Kenyatta continued writing fiery letters to the editor — one of them calling for self-government for Kenya. He also wrote the pamphlet Kenya: The Land of Conflict. But Githendu worried about his long disappearance and used the £100 sent by KCA for his passage back home, leaving Kenyatta penniless in Europe. Kenyatta would spend the next five years broke. He would sell stamps and walk to save on bus fare. "Girlfriends would treat him while his one shirt dried on the radiator," notes Murray-Brown.

To supplement what little income he earned, he acted as an extra in Alexander Korda's film Sanders of the River, where he played the minor character of a chief. He even toyed with the idea of becoming a musician. But, realising he had no future without advanced education, Kenyatta enrolled as a student of anthropology in 1934 at the University College, London, under the tutelage of Prof Bronislaw Malinowski who only accepted students with diplomas and degrees. 

Kenyatta had none but his knowledge of Kikuyu traditions impressed Malinowski. Elspeth Huxley, author of The Flame Trees of Thika wrote of him: "Kenyatta was one of Malinowski's brightest students... a showman to his finger tips, jovial, good companion, shrewd, devious, subtle..." 

The bright student successfully applied for a bursary at the International African Institute. With fees taken care of, he could afford to go clubbing at the Student Movement House. "Kenyatta's sensual mouth," notes Murray-Brown, "and yellow leopard-like eyes had a special appeal to women. They felt that he needed care. One regular date was Margaret Bryan, a postgraduate student who spoke Kiswahili.”

He grew his famous beard in 1936, when Italy bombed Ethiopia's Harrar area and the emperor sought refuge in England.  Kenyatta would join the Afro Negro Group that agitated against the emperor’s deportation. He painted his furniture in Ethiopian colours and grew a beard in solidarity with Ethiopia.

According to John Cook, his first real employer, "Kenyatta was not in the habit of attending any place of worship, but he often went to listen to atheist speakers in Hyde Park."

Back in his flat, he compiled his thesis into the book Facing Mount Kenya in 1938. He was then still called Johnstone Kenyatta but wanted an African name for its cover. Jomo was coined when Mbiyu Koinange, later a powerful minister of state who would become the second most powerful man in his government and a friend for life, came visiting.  The two played with the alphabet, and settled on Jomo — the closest alliteration of “guchomora”, which is Kikuyu for unsheathing a sword.

But only 517 copies of the book were sold and this was not enough to recover the £30 paid to Kenyatta as advance royalties. A woman called Donna Stoker, with whom he was living, edited the book. The sales would go up after he became president. Stoker, who sent Kenyatta books at Kapenguria, attended Independence Day celebrations as a guest of state.

Married at Chanctonbury

In 1939, World War II broke out and Kenyatta moved to Storrington, West Sussex, to avoid conscription. Besides farming, he supplemented his income by giving speeches on land issues. While he was seeing off a lady friend in 1940, he met a family in search of a house. He offered them his flat. With them was a governess called Edna Grace Clark, daughter of a marine engineer. She became his third wife when the two married at the Chanctonbury Registry Office in 1942.

Their son Peter Magana, a long serving director of programmes at the BBC in London, was born in 1943. Magana was named after Kenyatta's great grandfather. Their second child died two years later at birth. Edna died in 1995, aged 86. 

Early in the relationship, writes Murray-Brown, Kenyatta had told Edna that if matters came to a head, he would choose his country over the marriage. In 1946, he boarded the Alcantara and headed back home to a messianic return. By then his son Muigai was 25 and daughter Margaret was 18. "As soon as I set my eyes on Kenya I felt tears streaming out of my eyes," he said at the time.

Senior Chief Koinange, Mbiyu Koinange's father, offered his daughter Grace Wanjiku as Kenyatta’s third wife. She died while giving birth. Depressed, writes Murray-Brown, Kenyatta began hitting the bottle, provoking Joseph Otiende, then the treasurer of the Kenya African Union (KAU), to throw a cash box at him, accusing him of misusing the association's funds.

As he recovered from the depression, he acquired a Hudson car, an elephant headed walking stick, gold-rimmed signet ring, a gold wristwatch and European tweed jackets — the first three being the trappings of power he maintained throughout his life. Negley Parson wrote of him: "A big paunchy man, bearded, slightly bloodshot eyes, pleasant ingratiating and wary manner... he was a born actor, an evident leader and a man born for trouble."

That was in 1947. James Gichuru, whose father had been Kenyatta's teacher at Thogoto, was the head of KAU as KCA had been banned. Gichuru stepped down in Kenyatta’s favour during the KAU annual general meeting.  Kenyatta and KAU became popular, to the discomfort of the colonial government. It wanted him exiled. 

But 1948 saw the emergence of the Mau Mau, then perceived as an underground movement to kick out settlers out of Kenya. It was banned in 1950, the year Kenyatta married his fourth wife, Mama Ngina, then a student in Githunguri, at an independent school that he was running.

Although he had said that the "tree of liberty must be watered with blood" during KAU's annual general meeting, Kenyatta was not pro-Mau Mau. "Let Mau Mau perish. All people should search for Mau Mau and kill it," Murray-Brown quotes him telling a meeting in Kirigiti Stadium, Kiambu, in 1952.  Shortly after that meeting, Nairobi City Councillor Tom Mbotela and Senior Chief Waruhiu were murdered in cold blood.

Fearing more unrest, Governor Evelyn Barring declared a state of emergency on October 20, 1952, and Kenyatta, Paul Ngei, Kung'u Karumba, Achieng Oneko, Bildad Kaggia and Fred Kubai were arrested on trumped up charges of "managing the Mau Mau" — which Kenyatta had all along denounced.

Around that time, there was a resistance movement by the name The Forty Group, which was a precursor of Mau Mau. It comprised World War II veterans who had been conscripted to fight for the British in Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, and was embittered by their dishonourable discharge and the racial discrimination they had experienced. A series of strikes in Nairobi and Mombasa convinced the colonial government that Kenyatta was behind the "lawlessness" of the group and the Mau Mau. 

During the famous Kapenguria trial, Kenyatta denied any links with the Mau Mau. But the evidence of Rawson Macharia, who had been bribed by the colonists to testify that Kenyatta was a Mau Mau man, was used to sentence him to seven years and hard labour at Lokitaung and Kapenguria prisons. He was also to serve two more years under restriction in Maralal.

Prisoner Kenyatta was spared hard labour due to his advanced age and given kitchen duties. But fellow detainees would bully him and call him names. Paul Ngei was particularly nasty, making fun of Kenyatta’s university degrees, but Kenyatta included him in his Cabinet after independence.

In 1958, two new prisoners joined Kenyatta: Waruhiu Itote (General China), a Mau Mau commander who had sought Kenyatta's blessings before taking to the forests. The other was Kariuki Chotara. Chotara had been convicted of three murders by the British and moved to Hola. He could not be hanged since he was under 18.  Chotara, then 17, made two attempts on Kenyatta's life with a knife. Elizabeth Watkins writes in Jomo's Jailor: "During the last week of July 1958, the convict Karioki attacked Kenyatta in the compound. He was later convicted to solitary confinement and 12 strokes of the cane and transferred to Lodwar." 

In a letter to his daughter Margaret, Kenyatta wrote: “My dear child, envy and hatred have no mercy…now calm your heart, for although the attack was planned craftily, it did not achieve its aim...I have no doubt that you remember all the things that lead you into the light. This is all of God."

Kenyatta released Chotara in 1964. President Daniel arap Moi brought Chotara back into the fold by nominating him to Parliament, but he is best remembered as a dyed-in-the-wool Kanu supporter who reduced Nakuru District, where he was the Kanu chairman, to a personal fiefdom. Chotara died in 1988.

Kenyatta was released from prison in 1959 and lived in Maralal for two years under restriction. In 1962, an order barring him from the Legislative Council had been lifted and Kariuki Njiiri, then MP for Makuyu, resigned his seat for Kenyatta who had been elected Kanu president in absentia, thanks to Jaramogi’s position that there would be no independent government without Kenyatta. 

Kenyatta was a hero the world over and American Jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan composed Mr Kenyatta for his 1964 album, Search For the New Land in his honour. Governor Patrick Renison described him as "a leader unto death and darkness".  

But the man who feared lifts, chirping crickets, air travel and speeding cars went on to lead Kenya to independence — and a 15-year reign of sustained economic growth which was, however, marred by political assassinations, detention without trial and ethnic chauvinism. The terms “land grabbing” and “10 per cent (in reference to corruption)” also came into the national vocabulary during his time.

Most freedom fighters were also forgotten. Harry Thuku, for instance, was planting coffee trees in his farm and never attended Uhuru celebrations on December 12, 1963. It is such sidelining of the other freedom fighters that has led to calls for a Heroes Day as opposed to Kenyatta Day.