Progress to respectability
John Fletcher-Cooke
Kenyatta Jeremy Murray-Brown, (Allen and Unwin 0.50) Kenyatta — convicted of managing Mau Mau in 1953 and imprisoned, and then detained, for over eight years. Kenyatta — described in 1960 by the then Governor of Kenya as "the African leader to darkness and death." Mzee Kenyatta — who should next year be celebrating ten years of Kenyan independence under his wise and respected leadership.
The appearance of this excellent and well-documented biography is most timely; and Mr Murray-Brown has given us a penetrating and detailed account not only of the factors which shaped Kenyatta's personality and philosophy during his first half-century but also of the strength of character and inner resources which enabled him to endure a particularly uncomfortable incarceration. The author describes too how Kenyatta emerged from his confinement, without bitterness, to take up the onerous duties of a Head of State at an age when most men would regard their life's work as done; and how he was sustained in his captivity by a fervent belief in Almighty God — though it must be doubted whether Kenyatta's idea of God bears more than a passing resemblance to the God of whom he learned in the Scottish mission school he attended. As his biographer puts it, "He sought to benefit from the power of God but cared nothing for the commandments of men" — nor, apparently, of missionaries!
Even before going to the mission school the young Kenyatta had been brought face to face with the conflict between African traditions and the new ideas of the West, which was about to tear Africa apart. During a sojorn with his grandfather, a worker of magic who practised as a medicine-man, he saw his first white stranger, not far from where the new railway was being built to open up Uganda. Then a cleft stick containing the white man's magic, a piece of paper with writing on it, was left in his village. Even at the mission school this conflict was all round him. The missionaries wished to record the boys' real names and to count them; but such things would have offended against the tenets of the tribe and had, therefore, to be avoided at all costs. Later there were to be clashes about female circumcision and other sexual matters.
It was not until 1928 that Kenyatta, by then over thirty, first became involved in politics; and, except for a brief return visit to Kenya in 1930/31, he was absent from his homeland between 1929 and 1946.
Murray-Brown provides us with a richlycoloured kaleidoscopic view of Kenyatta's early experiences in England and elsewhere; contacts with West Africans already calling for independence, (in Kenya only the white settlers were then talking about self-government); visits to, and studies in, Moscow (not much joy for Kenyatta there — the Communists' only interest was in the class struggle while Kenyatta was more concerned with race relations); his encounter with Haile Selassie when the latter arrived at Waterloo Station as an exile in 1936; his vanity and showmanship (fortuitously given scope in the film, Sanders of the River); his unpaid debts, his girl-friends, his mysterious disappearances, his agricultural pursuits in Sussex during the War where he married Edna Clarke; and, perhaps, most important of all, his study of anthropology under Malinowski (surely a valuable discipline for a future African leader to choose and a far better one than the usual Western Law or Western Economics).
And then, after Kenyatta's return to Kenya, the trial — perhaps the most disturbing part of this fascinating story.
For the author argues most convincingly that the trial, the conviction and the treatment of the subsequent appeals all represented a travesty of British justice by any standards. Surely to detain a suspected person under the Emergency Powers in the grave emergency which existed in Kenya in the mid-'fifties, however distasteful, would have been more justifiable, and more courageous, than to distort and ignore the normal processes of law, rules of evidence and so on. • What of Kenyatta's political credo distilled from this wealth of experiences?
Malinowski is quoted as contending (rightly) that " The process of dis integration through the West's false idea of progress must not be repeated in Africa "; and Kenyatta not only accepted this but carried the thought a stage further by arguing that Africans ought to be able to take what they need of the West's technology while building on their own cultural traditions.
There would, however, seem to be a certain confusion of thought, or at least of language, another of Kenyatta's statements (in Nancy Cunard's Anthology, Negro, 1934,) referred to by his biographer as " a penetrating insight." Kenyatta asserted that only a detribalised native could effectively lead that new, twentiethcentury, phenomenon 'the Kenya African national liberation movement.' Now Ken yatta is certainly not ' a detribalised native'; his book, Facing Mount Kenya, disproves any such suggestion. Nor are any of the other successful African leaders, (with the possible exception of Dr Hastings Banda of Malawi where tribal considerations are quite different). What all these African leaders have realised is that, to build a new African state out of a number of different tribes, they must make use of the fundamental tribal concept which is common to virtually all Africa's tribes, however much their particular customs may vary in practice. Thus, the structure of the new African states is based on the (not a particular) tribal system, writ large on the new national canvas; and only a leader who understands this, as Kenyatta undoubtedly does, can possibly succeed.
Indeed, this was the task which Kenyatta successfully (for the time being at least) achieved between his release in August, 1961, and Independance in December, 1963, by encouraging members of Kenya's many other tribes to join the Kenya African National Union, a political party originally Kikiyu-inspired.
Murray-Brown succinctly sums up his subject's essential characteristics as follows: "In his real ancestry there mingled both the arrogance of the Masai [his grandfather and his aunt were married to Masai] and the cunning and resourcefulness of the Kikuyu. And to these were added the experiences of fifteen years in Europe. It was a formidable combination . . ."
The author of this comprehensive biography has quite properly given specific references for statements made in the main text, in Notes covering no fewer than thirty-seven pages — an invaluable guide for researchers — but, alas, he has also included in these Notes much of interest to the general reader. If this interesting material had been set out in the main text, the irritation of constant reference to the Notes would have been avoided. There is also an apparent misprint on page 66 were "the Ali Khan" should presumably read "the Aga Khan."
But these are minor blemishes in an otherwise most attractively produced publication, with a wealth of interesting photographs. This is an important book which no one interested in Africa, or in human nature, can afford to miss.
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