Return to Kenya of Jomo Kenyatta

Kenyatta returned to Kenya in September 1946 to take up leadership of the newly formed Kenya African Union, of which he was elected president in June 1947. From the Kenya African Teachers College, which he directed as an alternative to government educational institutions, Kenyatta organized a mass nationalist party. But he had to produce tangible results in return for the allegiance of his followers, and the colonial government in Kenya was still dominated by unyielding settler interests. The “dangerous explosion” among the Kikuyu that he had predicted in 1930 erupted as the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952, which was directed against the presence of European settlers in Kenya and their ownership of land. On October 21, 1952, Kenyatta was arrested on charges of having directed the Mau Mau movement. Despite government efforts to portray Kenyatta’s trial as a criminal case, it received worldwide publicity as a political proceeding. In April 1953 Kenyatta was sentenced to a seven-year imprisonment for “managing the Mau Mau terrorist organization.” He denied the charge then and afterward, maintaining that the Kenya African Union’s political activities were not directly associated with Mau Mau violence.

The British government responded to African demands by gradually steering the country toward African majority rule. In 1960 the principle of one man, one vote was conceded. Kenyan nationalist leaders such as Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga organized the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and elected Kenyatta (still in detention despite having completed his sentence) president in absentia; they refused to cooperate with the British while Kenyatta was detained. In a press conference Kenyatta promised that “Europeans would find a place in the future Kenya provided they took their place as ordinary citizens.”

Kenyatta was released in August 1961, and, at the London Conference early in 1962, he negotiated the constitutional terms leading to Kenya’s independence. KANU won the preindependence election in May 1963, forming a provisional government, and Kenya celebrated its independence on December 12, 1963, with Kenyatta as prime minister. A year later Kenya became a one-party republic when the main opposition party went into voluntary liquidation. At the same time, Kenyatta became the first president of Kenya under a new constitutional amendment. In this office he headed a strong central government, and successive constitutional amendments increased his authority, giving him, for instance, the power to arrest political opponents and detain them without trial if he considered them dangerous to public order—a power he used effectively though infrequently. To forestall any tribally based opposition, Kenyatta consistently appointed members of different ethnic groups to his government, though he relied most heavily on his fellow Kikuyu. In general, Kenya enjoyed remarkable political stability under Kenyatta’s rule, though conflicts within KANU’s political leadership did occasionally break out because of ideological differences and tribal rivalries.

Kenyatta early on rejected socialist calls for the nationalization of property and instead preached a doctrine of personal and entrepreneurial effort, symbolized by his slogan “Harambee,” or “Pulling together.” Besides relying heavily on a free-market economy, he encouraged foreign investment from Western and other countries. Largely as a result of his policies, Kenya’s gross national product grew almost fivefold from 1971 to 1981, and its rate of economic growth was among the highest on the continent in the first two decades after independence. But though economic growth benefited large numbers of people, it also led to tremendous disparities of wealth, much of which was in the hands of Kenyatta’s family and close associates. This concentration of wealth, along with an extremely high rate of population growth, meant that most Kenyans did not realize a correspondingly large increase in their living standards under Kenyatta’s leadership.

In foreign policy, Kenyatta’s government was consistently friendly toward the West. Always—in spite of his imprisonment by the British authorities—one of the more pro-British of African leaders, Kenyatta made Kenya the most stable black African country and one of the most economically dynamic. After his death at Mombasa in 1978, Kenyatta was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi, who continued most of his policies.