What does jomo kenyatta mean

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As I conducted research among the distant cousins of the Kikuyu, the Meru of Kenya Peatrik , , I realized that they occupied an ethnographic void — just like, as I later realized, other peoples in Kenya. This led to a desire to understand why the societies and peoples of these regions had been so little studied.

In particular, their distinct political institutions, based on generational classes, had been misunderstood, distorted, or only understood too late. What, then, were we to make of Facing Mount Kenya , which protruded like some incongruous inselberg from this ethnographic desert? In the context of settler colonialism, what was the nature of the lasting confusion into which anthropology, as operator of knowledge, had fallen?

It retains a particular connection with Facing Mount Kenya — one laced with controversy, since Jomo Kenyatta was criticized for drawing on this text or being inspired by it to make his own contribution without ever referring to it. Details of his life are given in this text and in a ten-page autobiography, The story of Parmenas Mockerie of the Kikuyu Tribe, Kenya, written by himself.

The Life of an African Teacher. Written at the same time, this life story appeared in in a collection of ten stories of Africans compiled by Margery Perham, a historian and political writer on the British Empire, and a student of Bronislaw Malinowski Goody A member of the Kikuyu Central Association, he accompanied Kenyatta on his second trip to London in the spring of The KCA activists, believing that Kenyatta had not maintained sufficient contact with them during his first stay, thought it wise to increase the size of the delegation.

They thus offered this teacher the possibility of additional training and paid for his journey. Travelling companions they may have been, but the temperaments and expectations of these two protagonists differed too greatly for them to remain allies after arriving in Europe. After engaging in various studies and making a series of trips around the continent, Mockerie decided to return to Kenya.

As Kenyatta, who had been absent for some time no one knew then that he had gone to Moscow , had not yet returned to London, Mockerie spent all the money for the return journey on a first-class ticket. Details are scarce but it appears that Mockerie, whose writings reveal a strong belief in the importance of education, went on to occupy positions of responsibility in school administration or even the colonial apparatus Murray-Brown n.

Published by the Hogarth Press, which was founded by spouses Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and prefaced by Professor Julian Huxley, this testimony is of indisputable documentary value. The actual text by Mockerie is 65 pages, followed by a page appendix entitled Memorandum from the Kikuyu Land Board Association. In the same limpid style used to describe his early years before joining the missionaries, where he evokes, among other things, his exploits as a hunter , [ 2 ] 1 Mockerie describes in very simple terms, as if it were self-evident, the itwika system of transmitting power between political generations, together with its democratic aspects; the debt owed by the incoming generation to the outgoing generation and the importance of ritual performances; and finally, the ways in which the activities of the generation currently in power had been impeded since the colonial conquest.

Mockerie, it is true, was from the area where the central ritual of transmission was held every thirty to forty years, in Gathanga. The general tone of this text is reminiscent of the international reportage in vogue in those years, with the difference that this reporter was giving an account of his own people, as emphasized by the indefinite article of the title.

In the same spirit, and in order to supply additional perspectives, Mockerie takes the approach of comparing Kenya with Uganda, a kingdom and protectorate under indirect British administration where he had continued his studies at Makerere College; with Senegal whose elected officials, as he discovered in Europe, sat in the French Parliament; and finally with the situation in the London metropolis.

This is in keeping with the frontispiece photograph, which shows this African Teacher in a suit and tie, sitting at a table and absorbed in his reading. A biologist and evolutionist as well as key figure of the progressive intelligentsia, Julian Huxley had travelled to Kenya in the s to assess the areas that might constitute the first natural parks. The Hogarth Press, which was run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, members of the progressive Bloomsbury circle that had been meeting since and with links to the Labour Party and the reformist socialism of the Fabians, published committed and avant-garde texts.

In , for example, it had published the most anti-colonial work about Kenya to date, written by the Scottish doctor Norman Leys who had served there, which became a landmark text on the question of anti-imperialism. An acquaintance of Norman Leys presented Mockerie to Leonard Woolf, who agreed to publish An African speaks for his people , albeit reluctantly because he believed the book to be too limited in interest.

Books on Kenya were known to sell well, but information is scarce on the dissemination and reception of this text, published in Willis ; Calder ; Dubino Portrait of Parmenas Githendu Mockerie, frontispiece to An African speaks for his people , [].

Collection A. These readings may, in a sense, have strengthened his desire to write something more than another recycled report or to lapse into an account that was too directly biographical and therefore limited. Of course, Kenyatta could have at least mentioned this text but, in addition to the fact that he included almost no references anyway the exceptions were Aristotle, Lord Lugard and a few administrative reports , an academic work such as this was hardly the place for the type of journalistic writing produced by Mockerie.

The texts produced by these compatriotic partner-rivals also reveal a tension over the choice of language used to describe Kikuyu customs and affairs. At the urging of Protestant missionaries, the Kikuyu language was written early, in order to facilitate the dissemination of the New Testament in the vernacular Peterson Kikuyu customaries, also containing reflections on ancestral practices, had already been written in the Kikuyu language.

Kenyatta himself had engaged in such work as early as with his journal Mwigwithania cf. Once in London, he began to write journalistic articles in English as soon as he could as in in the Negro Anthology , see below , seeking not only to make himself heard by the metropolitan public but also to take his marks in a race among Kikuyu literati to produce the first significant writing in English.

Johnstone Kenyatta and Bronislaw Malinowski did not meet each other by chance. Their ambitions were complementary, and they are said to have enjoyed an immediate rapport. By December , Kenyatta had already lived in London for a long time and been on several trips around Europe.

Malinowski, meanwhile, had just returned from a three-month trip that he had finally been able to organize in South and East Africa. He gained a literate informant who could enlighten him on the controversy surrounding female circumcision among the Kikuyu, and Kenyatta, a professor to supervise him on a university degree about his people, whom he wished to make more widely known. What is immediately striking about the text is its density.

A monograph rich in previously unpublished data, Facing Mount Kenya makes one regret that work of this quality was not carried out for other peoples of Kenya during these years, so rare or mediocre are the ethnographies concerning them. After prefaces from Malinowski and Kenyatta xv-xxi , this page text consists of thirteen chapters of unequal size, followed by a glossary and an index of themes and the names of the various peoples.

By way of bibliography, as was already mentioned, there are occasional references given in footnotes. The work covers, in turn, the presentation of the origin stories of the Kikuyu people and the kinship system ch. I: 20 p. V: 30 p. VII : 28 p. VIII : 22 p. A final section deals with ancestral religion ch. X: 35 p. XII : 28 p. The final chapter 9 p. To illustrate the quality of the research, from this vast tableau, let us focus only on the sections on the institutions of age and generation ch.

It should be borne in mind that Kenyatta was trying to set out the details of a political system that was hitherto almost completely unknown with the exception of Mauss Through its very existence, this scientific text produced by an African is anti-colonialist; this much is clear from the methodical description he gives of Kikuyu society, in contrast to the belief shared by almost all the colonists that these primitive peoples were anarchic and barbarous.

Published in September , Facing Mount Kenya was a commercial failure, particularly for Kenyatta who had hoped to profit from the royalties. Penniless and forced by the declaration of war to stay in England, Kenyatta moved to the countryside where he found a job as a farm worker.

He married an Englishwoman, Edna G. This fictionalized auto- biography of an African named Kenjimoo a diminutive of Kenyatta never saw the light of day Murray-Brown , n. Kenyatta did, however, write two short works that were very different in style: My People of Kikuyu and the Life of Chief Wangombe 60 pages in ; and Kenya: The Land of Conflict , a page pamphlet, in The first of these works was a response to a request from the United Society for Christian Literature , which wanted to publish pamphlets on African countries written by Africans themselves Murray-Brown n.

Written in a more accessible style than Facing Mount Kenya , the story is divided into two parts: an overview of the political institutions, and the biography of an exemplary man, Wangombe, from the northern frontier of Kikuyuland, whose life offers a window onto the society as a whole. To Jomo Kenyatta, this was now a bygone practice, and he treats it in a more condensed and distant way than in Facing Mount Kenya indeed, in the manner of Mockerie with several comments betraying a degree of irritation.

In this overview, Jomo Kenyatta gets to the heart of a crucial question of political anthropology, but one which he is no longer addressing as an anthropologist but as a practitioner. In this discreetly but deliberately controversial text, Kenyatta delivers nothing less than a mini-treatise on Kikuyu politics in the form of a narrative. The origin of the second text is very different, being directly linked to the end of the war and the colonial crises that were erupting with increasing energy.

Founded in in response to the Ethiopian crisis, this association brought together activists for Pan-Africanism, a movement which sought to bring together all Africans regardless of their origins and was led in those years by George Padmore, one of the key figures of Afro-Caribbean and Anglophone anti-colonialism Boukari-Yabara Padmore asked Kenyatta to write a pamphlet on the situation in Kenya.

This became the 26 tightly printed pages of Kenya: The Land of Conflict which the IASB published in October on the occasion of the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester where, as befitted his reputation, Kenyatta was given pride of place. That article, written when Kenyatta was still going by the first name Johnstone, had a clearly anti-capitalist tone backed up by precise data on large firms in colonial Kenya Peatrik that had disappeared in the text, but the anti-colonial message was now much more pronounced.

The brochure is enriched by historical details taken from Facing Mount Kenya and provides an update on the various conflicts: the gold rush in Kakamega in western Kenya and the expropriation of Africans; conflicts linked to overgrazing in the Kamba region; land-related tensions among the Taita; the conscription of Africans into British armies, forced labour and famine — all this was contrasted with the preferential treatment given to Whites in economic life and within political bodies.

After this vigorous and wide-ranging indictment of the injustices committed against Africans, the conclusion is surprisingly moderate: where one would expect a call for something bordering on revolution, the text proposes reform and autonomy. But this was , when the complete independence of the colonies was unthinkable.

What are we to make of these publications and their effects on the status of Facing Mount Kenya and the position of anthropology? In particular, a comparison of these two or three short texts with the monograph sheds light on certain mechanisms involved in the production of anthropological knowledge in these years. Unless, of course, these various texts represent various fashionable or competing approaches to writing in these years: academic, political and literary writing as a triple translation of the same anthropological content.

Kenyatta, let us remember, was for some time drawn to writing literature and romantic fiction. The athomi had also acquired a taste for writing. This experimentation with different registers may also explain a degree of suspicion towards Kenyatta the ethnographer. In these two texts, particularly the first, Kenyatta achieves effective results by mingling registers.

He skilfully combines fantasy with highly precise data that is captured even more effectively than in Facing Mount Kenya , but the average reader does not possess the tools to separate the ethnographic wheat from the rhetorical chaff, and this mixing of genres casts doubt on the text as a whole.

This is especially true since the size, tone and lower cost of these two texts meant they were more widely circulated and read than Facing Mount Kenya , a dense and less accessible work that was ultimately reserved for an intellectual elite.

These two complex personalities, thrust into the limelight by the Mau Mau crisis, developed a curious binary relationship through their ethnographic rivalry and practice of anthropology. The two Kenyans knew each other from avoiding or confronting each other in London circles. Their early antagonism, which Leakey later brought to a head, is illustrative of the tragedy of the colonial situation.

Before becoming the renowned palaeontologist of the s who triggered the race to discover ancient humans and hominids, Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey led a rather eventful existence. After the Great War, forced to abandon this untrammelled rural existence, Leakey left for England to pursue his studies. The story of the elephant, for instance, goes on to tell how the man attempts taking the elephant to court to resolve the dispute.

The larger context in which this question arose, however, was around the rights of native Africans to practise their traditions. The debate on female circumcision known locally as irua became heated in , when the mission Church of Scotland in Kenya banned the practice, and furthermore required all of its members to pledge the same.

The Kikuyu Central Association retaliated by taking a stand in favour of circumcision. Kenyatta had entered politics through the Kikuyu Central Association, shortly after the protectorate of British East Africa was made into a colony and Kikuyu lands were seized He later became their general secretary, and it was in that capacity that he made his first trip to London to lobby for the return of Kikuyu lands.

His stance on circumcision was therefore informed by a political allegiance and a position against dominance by church and Crown. It may be that, to Professor Malinowski, calling Kenyatta depoliticised was a way of observing that they shared the same politics. The European bias was no accident. Kenyatta may have had several audiences in mind, but chief among them was the British, particularly those shaping the views of parliamentarians.

Studying at LSE enabled him to master the language of the oppressor so as better to fight it. Long life and health to them to go on with the good work! After publishing the book which initially sold only copies, although sales have now caught up with history , Kenyatta went on to continue lobbying on behalf of the Kikuyu in London. He spent the war years in the UK working as a farm-hand, and lecturing on the side. He also became involved with a group of pan-Africanists, including Padmore, Banda future president of Malawi and Nkrumah another LSE graduate and future president of Ghana.

Together, they organised the 5 th Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Kenyatta returned to his native British East Africa in , where he quickly re-entered local politics, joining and ultimately presiding over the Kenya Africa Union, focused on campaigning for independence.