Jomo Kenyatta

Jomo Kenyatta was born Kamau wa Ngengi around 1897 in the village of Ngenda, in the Kiambu district of British East Africa, among the Kikuyu people of the highlands later gathered into the colony of Kenya. Birth years were not recorded in the Kikuyu manner of his childhood, where age was reckoned by initiation cohorts rather than by the calendar, and so the year is remembered only as an estimate. He was raised to the land and to the customs of his people, and educated at a Church of Scotland mission.

In the 1920s he entered public life through the Kikuyu Central Association, taking up the cause of Kikuyu land and rights, and by that decade had adopted the name Kenyatta. In 1929 he traveled to London to press his people's grievances, and he remained abroad for long stretches through the 1930s. At the London School of Economics he studied social anthropology under Bronisław Malinowski, turning the tools of the discipline back upon his own community.

The fruit of that study was Facing Mount Kenya (1938), a dignified account of Kikuyu life written from within, presenting an African society whole and self-possessed rather than seen through colonial eyes. It stands among the first major anthropological works authored by an African about his own people, and it carried the name Jomo Kenyatta to the world.

Returning home, he led the movement that carried Kenya out of empire, serving as Prime Minister from 1963 and as the nation's first President from 1964 until his death on 22 August 1978. Father of a free Kenya and chronicler of his own people, he is honored as a founder whose pen and whose leadership both bore witness to the dignity of his nation.