Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya

Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making ofFacing Mount KenyaAuthor(s): Bruce BermanSource: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol.30, No. 3 (1996), pp. 313-344Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485804 .

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Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya

Bruce Berman

Resume

Des son premier voyage en Grande Bretagne, en 1929, Jomo Kenyatta a suivi un chemin complexe, passant d'un groupe de patrons politiques et intellectuels a un autre, allant des missionnaires et imperialistes a tendance liberale aux communistes et autres elements de la gauche britannique, s'acharnant a decouvrir le moyen le plus efficace de representer (de decrire et de ddfendre) les interets des Kikuyu, gens de sa tribu, aupres des autorites

imperiales. Sa quite de "l'argument irrevocable" semble avoir pris fin quand il a rencontre Bronislaw Malinowski et commence des etudes

d'anthropologie sociale a la London School of Economics. L'anthropologie fonctionnaliste a donne 'L Kenyatta le moyen de decrire le Kikuyu, en

s'appuyant sur l'autorite de la science; les Kikuyu sont alors apparus comme une socidtd homogene et integree, digne de recevoir le respect des

Anglais et de faire entendre leurs griefs. Sa these a servi de fondement a' Fac-

ing Mount Kenya, monographie classique, ouvrage politique autant

qu'anthropologique. Dans cet ouvrage, Kenyatta a essaye sans succes de resoudre la contradiction entre sa description fonctionnaliste des Kikuyu, sa condamnation du colonialisme and sa defense d'un processus de moder- nisation conservatrice. Il reste cependant l'expression significative des dilemmes politiques, intellectuels, et personnels profonds des intellectuels

africains pendant la periode coloniale.

An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference, "Out of Africa: Texts for Understanding the African Past," at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, July 1995. This paper forms part of a continuing project in which I am engaged with John Lonsdale. The text has been written in constant consultation with him. I would also like to thank Greet Kershaw, Eunice Njiri Sahle, the anony- mous reviewers for the Canadian Journal of African Studies, as well as Gareth Grif- fiths, Angela Cheater, and other participants at the ANU conference for their helpful comments and suggestions.

313



314 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

Introduction Jomo Kenyatta and Bronislaw Malinowski met in December 1934, a few

days after Malinowski wrote to his friend, Princess Marie Bonaparte, a noted

psychoanalyst, that he would soon meet some "real experts on the Kikuyu people." I For several years, Malinowski had been trying, without success, to

organize a fieldwork program in Kenya. He had returned in September from his first and only visit to Africa for a conference in South Africa, managing to

squeeze in a hurried visit to Kenya of less than a month on his way home, during which he had spent a week with the Kikuyu. His and Princess Marie's interest in the Kikuyu was stimulated by Kikuyu resistance to missionary efforts to suppress the practice of clitoridectomy, which formed an integral part of the Kikuyu initiation customs, and by their publicized grievances over their loss of land to white settlers.

Kenyatta, except for a brief trip home between September 1930 and March 193 1, had been away from Kenya for more than five years in his role as the London representative of the Kikuyu Central Association, ostensibly presenting the grievances and defending the interests of the Kikuyu people directly to the imperial authorities in Britain. For most of that period, he had

struggled to find a way to address the Colonial Office officials, members of

Parliament, interest groups, and publications that comprised the small com-

munity in British intellectual and political circles with an interest in the affairs of the African colonies. This search for an authoritative voice, for the "unanswerable argument" that would make the British attend to Kikuyu grievances and recognize them as a people worthy of respect, had taken him on a lonely odyssey through a variety of patrons and potential mentors, from

Presbyterian missionaries and Quaker pacifists to Stalinist Communists, Trotskyists, and independent Marxists. His search now appeared to be

finally at an end.

Kenyatta and Malinowski hit it off immediately. By the spring of 1935, he was Malinowski's personal student, and in the autumn, without the benefit of a first degree or even a secondary school diploma, he enrolled as a full-time

post-graduate student in the department of social anthropology at the Lon- don School of Economics. Kenyatta not only held his own in seminars with some of the outstanding social scientists of the era, but was also favored and

constantly encouraged by his mentor. Less than three years later, with Mali- nowski's support and advice, he published his revised thesis as Facing Mount Kenya, one of the first modern anthropological monographs by an African.

In the proliferating histories of British anthropology, the Malinowski- Kenyatta relationship usually merits little more than a brief mention, and then primarily to illustrate either the remarkably cosmopolitan character of Malinowski's graduate students, or how Malinowski used Kenyatta to advance his own agenda for functionalist social anthropology (Stocking



315 Berman: Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography

I992a, 264, 267-68; 1995, 412-I5; Kuper 1996, 114; Goody 1995, 27, 84, 192). While Facing Mount Kenya remains an enduring classic of African studies, seldom out of print in either Britain or North America and often used in

undergraduate courses to present an authentically African view of an indigenous society, it is, at best, a footnote in histories of anthropology. Only a few writers note in passing that Kenyatta had his own political agenda for writ-

ing his book and that "he saw in social anthropology something that could be turned to use as part of the growing nationalist challenge to colonial rule"

(James 1973, 61-63). What that agenda might be, how it was related to the

political economy and cultural politics of the Kikuyu, how it led Kenyatta to social anthropology, and how it actually shaped his account of his people are left unexplained. By analyzing the origin and creation of his book, however, we can understand how it both developed out of Malinowski's project for social anthropology (ethnography as politics) and, more importantly, expressed Kenyatta's attempt to resolve the dilemmas of representing the

Kikuyu (politics as ethnography).

Representing the Kikuyu When Johnstone Kenyatta 2 boarded an Italian liner in Mombasa in February 1929 to make his first trip to Britain, he traveled as the representative of an autonomous African organization that sought a redress of grievances directly from the imperial authorities in London on behalf of the whole

Kikuyu people. This involved accomplishing both dimensions of representation - depiction and advocacy: for his advocacy of Kikuyu interests to be

effective, his depiction of Kikuyu society and its grievances had to be

accepted as authoritative. To do so, he had to satisfy two skeptical and biased

audiences, Kikuyu and British, among both of whom his authority was open to challenge.

He faced, in effect, the contradiction between the internal politics of cultural community and the external politics of group interests - moral ethni-

city versus political tribalism. The former involved the enlarged discursive arena of political debate within which Africans attempted to negotiate the bounds of moral community and the bases of social status in response to the

changes brought by alien rule, Christianity, capitalist production, and the invention of print vernaculars. The closely related external dimension dealt with the setting of boundaries and exercise of collective leadership against the competitive interest of rival emergent ethnicities and the intrusion of alien power in the colonial context (Lonsdale 1994). To bridge it, he had to invent both his own authority to speak and the Kikuyu as a unified people who spoke with one voice, his own.

Less than a year earlier, he had added to his position as general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association that of editor of its new monthly journal,



316 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

Muigwithania. Translated into English as "the reconciler," no other title could more crisply state the double agenda of Kenyatta and his KCA associates, the first generation of Christian converts known as athomi, "the readers." This was to resolve both their own ambiguities and those of

Kikuyu society by advancing the general good through a project of conservative modernization. In the columns of Muigwithania, he and the other new men of colonial Kenya had sought to overcome their marginality to both Kikuyu and European society by asserting a claim to a clearer and more effective articulation of custom that could both defend Kikuyu kar-

ing'a (authenticity) and reconcile it with modernity. 3 Moreover, getting the notoriously fractious and divided Kikuyu to agree on a single and con- sistent depiction of their history and key grievances over the alienation of land to white settlers by the colonial regime was crucial to the KCA's attempt to represent them.

The failure of the KCA to get the British in Kenya to accept their defini- tion of Kikuyu interests had led them to send Kenyatta to Britain. There, he was supposed to establish his authority and credibility as a spokesman to an audience of highly educated white men from political and intellectual circles of the British dominant class who were extremely skeptical of any attempt to present the "native point of view," a radical deafness to native ideas being characteristic of those who shouldered the burden of trusteeship for the immature races of the Empire.

Kenyatta thus needed to find the basis for the "unanswerable argument" that would convince the British of the justice of Kikuyu grievances and attend to their demands. He was looking for a way to address a Western public and its men of power in an idiom they respected, but which was also his own. Kenyatta and the KCA were acutely aware of the problem and addressed it directly in the memorandum which sent Kenyatta back to Lon- don in 193 I, in an unsuccessful effort to present it to the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Closer Union in East Africa, and which he presented unchanged to the Kenya Land Commission the following year. The language of the memorandum is compelling testimony of the colonial relationship and the struggle of Africans to understand and be heard by Europeans:

We are a primitive race having come in contact with what is called civilization for not more than half-a-century and yet we are confronted with the task of having to prepare a case in a manner which should be worth the consideration of a body composed entirely of gentlemen whose methods of thinking, experience based on books or years of government service are entirely alien to the community on whom they are sitting in judgment. We therefore have to borrow means and methods and ape the manner in which the case may appeal to you from your point of view and according to your standards of measuring the requirements of




a people who from the alien point of view are a species of living being which was

hardly known to them about fifty years ago. 4

The report of the Kenya Land Commission, issued in 1934, dismissed

Kenyatta's and the KCA's representative role. Before a group of three dubious whites - a judge, a retired colonial official, and a settler - they found their

testimony and memorandum undermined by the numerous inconsistencies and outright contradictions in the testimony of other Kikuyu witnesses and members of other groups, and ultimately ignored as representing only the biased interests of certain segments of a contentious and faction-ridden

people. The failure before the KLC, which remained a live issue several years after 1934, was the immediate political context for the production of Facing Mount Kenya.

Meanwhile, Kenyatta made no further attempt to address appeals to several other investigating commissions sent to Kenya during the remainder of the decade. Instead, he remained in Britain and Europe, trying out new modes of discourse that might compel the British to recognize him as a legit- imate spokesman for his people and attend to the Kikuyu. The task was as much personal as it was intellectual and political; he had to establish his own credibility and qualifications to speak, as well as to find a mode of discourse that the British would accept as authoritative. From his first trip to

Britain, he was acutely aware of his limited command of English, oral and

written, as well as his unfashionable clothing and awkward manners. The

flashy man-about-town in Nairobi was an uncouth bumpkin in London, dependent upon white patrons to help write his letters and gain appointments with men of power.

But he quickly understood the solution to his problems, writing to the readers of Muigwithania:

... if you want us to become of consequence and to become the counselors of our country, busy yourselves with EDUCATION. But do not think that the education I refer to is that which we are given a lick of; no, it is a methodical education to open up a man's head.

The Kikuyu could afford to send people overseas; they had money "lying idle," when it could be used for providing for "i. THE KIKUYU LAWYER. 2.

THE KIKUYU TEACHER. 3. THE KIKUYU DOCTOR." They must not be

dismayed by the challenge. Many black people were already receiving such

training in London, and they did "not belong to a people who are further advanced than the Kikuyu in knowledge." 5 This search for education that would "open up a man's head" shaped the next decade of his sojourn in Brit- ain and his travels in Europe as much as did his quest for political support and patronage.



318 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

Searching for a Voice: Missionaries and the Liberal Imperialists From the start of his first visit in the spring of 1929, Kenyatta was in touch with several members of the African affairs community in Britain. Over the next decade he would be involved with almost all of its elements, from missionaries and liberal imperialists to diverse elements of the left and Britain's small black intelligentsia. He moved through these associations, leaving the friends and patrons of one period for a new set of friends and organizations, that were, in turn, abandoned for yet others. His immediate contacts were

through the mission societies, including both the Presbyterian Church of Scotland Mission (in whose establishment at Thogoto he had been baptized and educated) and the Anglican Church Mission Society, which knew of his visit and tried to monitor and guide his activities, as well as the liberal imperialist and former Kenya official, William McGregor Ross. 6 Meanwhile, Isher Dass, the Indian lawyer from Nairobi who was Kenyatta's traveling companion on the ship from Mombasa, probably helped him contact repre- sentatives of the British left, notably Fenner Brockway, an MP of the Inde-

pendent Labour Party (ILP); Norman Leys, another former Kenya official and critic of colonialism; Kingsley Martin of the Manchester Guardian and later editor of The New Statesman; and Reginald Bridgeman, secretary of the Communist-led League Against Imperialism (Murray-Brown 1973, 134-35).7

Kenyatta's first break came with the missionaries. The Special Branch of Scotland Yard kept him under surveillance and collected information about his enjoyment of the pleasures of London, including his relations with white women and his left wing contacts. During his first months in Britain he

apparently also met the West Indian Communist, George Padmore, then the

highest ranking black official of the Comintern, who took him on a trip to the Soviet Union from August to early October 1929. His progress was observed with considerable unease by the missionary societies that received the rumours about his private life and political associations, including police reports that he had been photographed with naked white women. 8 The Africa Secretary of the CMS, a former missionary in Kenya, reacted strongly and wrote to a colleague in Kenya that Kenyatta was "out of his depth" and

"making a fool of himself," with his dubious morals and wild spending, while his trip to the USSR discredited both him and the KCA with the Brit- ish authorities. He concluded: "to send a boy [sic] like Kenyatta is worse than

sending anyone, and just makes the friends of Africa in this country sad." 9 The paternalistic and patronizing tone is characteristic.

After his return from the USSR, Kenyatta's relations with the missionaries were dominated by the crisis in Kenya that erupted when the mission societies attempted to suppress the important Kikuyu custom of female circumcision or clitoridectomy. The Kikuyu Central Association, in




Kenyatta's absence, had taken a leading role in defense of the custom. While

Kenyatta wanted to enlist the mission societies in support of the KCA's petition of grievances, the missionaries basically demanded his obedience and

support of their efforts to suppress the mutilations that were part of female initiation ceremonies. Presented with the medical arguments against the

practice by missionaries and officials in Britain, Kenyatta displayed modera- tion and flexibility on the issue, explaining the importance of the custom in

Kikuyu life and stressing that education and patience would be more effective than headlong assault and prohibition. Returning to Kenya in late Sep- tember 1930, he sought to arrange a compromise, but found the missions

unyielding and his colleagues in the KCA equally intransigent. When the

negotiations ultimately failed, Reverend Arthur, head of the CSM in Kenya and the principal figure in the missions' campaign, denounced Kenyatta as "a man of guile" and concluded that "if these forces of evil are allowed to have their way, they will ruin the country." 1

Kenyatta had reached the end of the road with the missionaries. He would soon be expelled from the church and, for the rest of his life, would seldom

participate in religious ceremonies. For a man as politically sensitive and as concerned with the reconciliation of Kikuyu and European cultures as

Kenyatta, the rigidity of many of the missionaries, as well as their tendency to characterize all conflicts as clashes between good and evil and to regard everything African as evil, had become simply intolerable. In Kenya, Chris-

tianity had appeared to be an integral part of modernity, but in his travels to Britain and Europe, Kenyatta had been exposed to a much wider range of the discordant voices of modernity, many of which, particularly on the left, were not only not Christian, but also openly hostile to religion as such. In pursuing his goal of enabling the Kikuyu to choose what they wanted from the

West, he became aware that there were many more possible choices than he had imagined, and muigwithania did not necessarily require remaining a member of a mission church. A change in his attitude was apparent after his return from his trip to Russia. In March 1930, Reverend Handley Hooper of the CMS wrote to the Chief Native Commissioner in Nairobi:

... the change in the boy [sic] during these last months has been remarkable.... Many of us have seen rapid development in his powers of thought and in the

depth of his desire to serve his people. His whole personality has grown, and he is now something much bigger than an untutored Kikuyu at the mercy of any sharp who looks to exploit him. I I

Kenyatta persisted for several more years in trying to work with the liberal

imperialists. Men like Ross, Leys, Lord Olivier, and C.R. Buxton, MP helped him put his views before the educated public in Britain through letters to the

"quality" press and, during the Labour government of 1929-31, arranged



320 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

appointments with sympathetic officials like Drummond Shiels, the under- secretary to Sidney Webb at the Colonial Office. In March 1930, for example, as Reverend Hooper was writing to Kenya, Ross helped Kenyatta compose a lengthy letter to the Manchester Guardian and The Times that stated, as clearly as possible, his political project:

The Kikuyu Central Association, of which I am the general secretary, is not a subversive organization. Its object is to help the Kikuyu to improve himself as a better Mu-Kikuyu, not to "ape" the foreigner.

He went on to explain Kikuyu grievances over land, education, women's hut tax, African representation in the Kenya Legislative Council, and the preservation of tribal customs. About the latter he stated forthrightly the position of muigwithania, noting that the Kikuyu wanted "to be permitted to retain our many good tribal customs, and by means of education to elevate the minds of our people to the willing rejection of bad customs." 12

The liberals also made it possible for him to go back to school and satisfy his desire for education. In the fall of i93I, after the failure of his effort to present the KCA petition and testify before the Joint Select Committee, and with his funds running low, Leys and Ross, with Buxton paying the fees, arranged for Kenyatta to enroll at the Quaker Woodbrooke College in Selly Oak, near Birmingham. For the first time Kenyatta was able to study and reflect on his work in an atmosphere of academic calm and earnest Quaker idealism. He received special daily English lessons and was free to attend any of the other lectures or classes that interested him, or just read in the library. In what was probably the least racist institution he had encountered in Brit- ain, he was received by faculty and students with warmth and interest. He made rapid progress, and at the end of two terms, in March 1932, he passed a certificate in English composition. Although it was a Quaker institution, no religious demands were made of him. He was clearly touched, however, by the college's high-minded values, and before he left, wrote a gushing testimo- nial in the college record book full of the stilted phrases and elevated sentiments characteristic of the institution and unlike anything else he had ever written (Delf 1954, 91-96).

Ultimately, however, the liberal imperialists of the Labour Party and the various groups of the native rights lobby could neither understand nor sym- pathize with Kenyatta's political agenda. They made no systematic critical analysis of the colonial situation in the African colonies or of their indigenous societies, seeking instead reforms that would make the Empire live up to its supposed "ideals" and insure to native peoples fair and just treatment with due regard to their welfare and future development. Their perspective, especially that of former colonial officials like Leys, Ross, Olivier, and Leo- nard Woolf, who chaired the Labour Party's advisory committee on imperial




affairs, was paternalistic and based on stereotypes of Africans similar to those of more conservative imperialists. The major issue in Kenya, for them, was the extension of white settler power and the creation of another segre- gated society based on the exploitation of black labour like those in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa (Woolf 1920, 357-58, 362; Rich 1990, 70-77). They treated Africans as victims of white greed, too primitive to either protect themselves or act as agents of their own future. The Labour government's major statement on policy in Kenya, the Memorandum on Native Policy in East Africa of June 1930, made no mention of African grievances or aspira- tions, asserting instead the "paramountcy of native interests," as interpreted by the imperial trustees of the colonial administration and denying the settlers any share of that trusteeship. 3

Most of the liberals had difficulty dealing with expressions of African political consciousness and organizations that challenged the colonial authorities, or with "educated natives" like Kenyatta who were their authors and leaders. This first generation of educated Africans was seen as having rejected the savage primitivism of indigenous societies and detached themselves from their tribal roots. However, while they were prevented by colonial racism from fully participating on equal terms with whites in colonial institutions, these men in pants could not be considered leaders and spokesmen for the mass of uneducated tribesmen, the men in blankets. They and their associations, like the KCA, were routinely dismissed as "unrepresentative" groups of hot-headed and impatient young men.

Unlike the more conservative imperialists, however, the liberals were at least willing to meet with people like Kenyatta and help them get access to the press and government officials. Letting them talk as a "safety valve" and coopting them into politically harmless "talking shops" represented the pre- ferred strategy; liberals had little real interest in giving effect to African demands or directly resolving their grievances. The relationship they sought with Kenyatta was not one of dialogue and negotiation among equals, but instead tutelage between teacher and pupil.

They were unable to "hear" through their muffling stereotypes what men like Kenyatta were saying to them. As George Delf put it, "imaginative insight was at a discount in the European character of the time" (1954, 80). Even the best informed members of the African affairs community in interwar Britain understood virtually nothing about the relationship of a man like Kenyatta to Kikuyu culture, and they would have been astonished by its depth and complexity. But then, they understood little enough about indigenous African societies in the first place, or about the political, economic, and cultural impact of colonialism. The latter were understood through relatively shallow concepts such as "exploitation," "segregation," "acculturation," (to European culture, of course) and "detribalization."



322 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

When Kenyatta expressed his interest in Kikuyu culture, he risked accusations of backsliding and of being only "half-civilized." Even more radical democrats like Norman Leys and the members of the ILP, who pressed for

equal rights for Africans in the colonies, believed implicitly that the basis of future development for Africans was to fully share in, and be assimilated to, Western modernity. Little wonder that Kenyatta learned to be careful about

expressing his ideas to Europeans and sought a more authoritative form of

expression. By the summer of 1932, he was looking for new patrons and mod- els and headed back to Moscow.

Searching for a Voice: The Communists From the very start of his first visit to Britain, Kenyatta had pursued a paral- lel line of contacts with the more radical groups to the left of the Labour

Party, the Communists in particular. There were several reasons why he found this intellectual and political scene attractive. The Marxists offered what appeared to be a far more systematic and rigorous analysis of the colonial situation in the context of their theories of capitalist imperialism, and their political line on colonialism was not reformist, but revolutionary. The far left organizations were also militantly egalitarian and anti-racist, approaching Kenyatta with far less of the patronizing paternalism of the liberals. Moreover, in the deepening political and economic crisis of capitalism during the 1930s, the Soviet Union still appeared to many Communists and non-Communists alike to be in the vanguard of progressive change and the

only effective opponent to the rising threat of fascism. Finally, left organizations in Britain were eager to open the pages of their publications to a man like Kenyatta and were ready to print, and helpfully insert where they thought necessary, far angrier and more critical and abusive language than the mainstream press or British officials would accept.

On 27 October 1929, three weeks after his return from Russia, the Sunday Worker carried a long article in the form of an interview with Kenyatta, under the headline, "Give Back Our Land." The language was far harsher, and the political claims were more extensive than anything that could have been used in petitions or memoranda:

The present situation means that once again natives of the colony are showing their determination not to submit to outrageous tyranny which has been their lot since the British robbers stole their land.., there is agitation ... that meets a hearty response from robbed and maltreated Africans, and will not cease until we are our own rulers again. 14

There was little of the spirit of muigwithania here. In January 1930, two further articles with equally strident language appeared in the Daily Worker under Kenyatta's own byline as General Secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association, although, given his limited ability in English at the time, the




rhetoric was probably added by the editors. This was enough to both upset his patrons among the missionaries and liberal imperialists and convince the authorities that he was under dangerous Communist influence, if not a Communist himself.

After his return to London in 1931, Kenyatta clearly received some financial support and traveled to international conferences through the offices of his friend, George Padmore. It was the promise of higher education that led

Kenyatta to return to Moscow with Padmore in the fall of 1932. Nothing in

Kenyatta's life has been more distorted by myth and rumour, red-baiting, and Cold War paranoia than his second sojourn in Russia, whether it was the fan-

tasy of British intelligence that he attended the "Lenin School of Subver- sion" I 5 or some of Kenyatta's own colorful anecdotes to friends like C.L.R.

James and Ras Makkonen (1973, 159). The reality, recently clarified by Woodford McClellan, was that Kenyatta spent the academic year of 1932-33 as a student at KUTVU (an acronym for "The University of the Toilers of the

East"), the Comintern school for students from Asian and African colonies. The curriculum was later described by Padmore as a three year program in

"history, foreign languages, economics, political science, sociology, party and trade union organization, techniques of propaganda and agitation, public speaking and journalism ... from a Marxist point of view" (1956, 318). The facilities were primitive and the experience probably a real disappointment for Kenyatta. He appears in the Comintern archives as one of the spokesman for a delegation of the African, West Indian, and African American students at KUTVU who complained bitterly about the poor food, bad accommoda-

tion, and low standard of English of the instructors. In any case, the Comin- tern considered him a poor prospect for either recruitment to the Party, because of his openly anti-Marxist views, or training as an agent, because

they thought him already too well known to the British authorities. A black South African Communist at the school reported arguing with Kenyatta and

calling him a petty-bourgeois nationalist, to which Kenyatta indignantly retorted, "why petty?" (McClellan 1993).

Kenyatta left Russia sometime in the spring of 1933, following Padmore, after the rise to power of Hitler in January led to a reassessment of Comin- tern policy. From support for colonial revolutions against the capitalist powers, the focus now shifted to popular front support of all liberal and left democratic forces in Britain and France, turning against men like Kenyatta and organizations like the KCA, which were now routinely denounced as "bourgeois national reformists." Returning to London in August 1933, Kenyatta was stranded without money or regular income. Until the middle of the next year, he remained in close touch with a variety of Communist

organizations, some of which may have provided him with money. He con- tinued to contribute to Communist journals, most prominently a series of articles for Labour Monthly, the first dealing with the gold rush in the



324 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

Kakamega location of Western Kenya, which was the first time he had written about the affairs of another people beside the Kikuyu.

His most interesting and important publication of this period, however, was his essay in the landmark anthology, Negro, published in early 1934 under the editorship of Nancy Cunard, a friend of Padmore, who was one of the most important collaborators on the project. This book put Kenyatta in company with some of the most distinguished literary and intellectual fig- ures of the time. 6 His essay of just over four pages, entitled simply "Kenya," demonstrated his skill not only in using characteristically Com- munist invective, but also in analysing Kenya within the Marxist critique of

capitalist imperialism. He started, however, with a few words on "detribalization" as a consequence of the alienation of African land. The British were accused of supporting the "backward form of social relationships in Kenya," of denying political representation to "detribalized natives," and of "operat- ing on tribal differences to effect 'divide and rule,' while the Kenya national liberation movement is arrested." These few lines convey matters of immediate personal concern to Kenyatta, as well as an apparent broadening and radicalization of his political objectives; he was writing here for the first time of "national liberation."

He then went on to attack the position of the settlers and their mas-

ter/servant relations with Africans, the inequities of the Kenya tax system, the use of forced labour by the Kenya government, and the position of "finance capital" in Kenya in the form of investments in mines and planta- tions. He also included some direct jibes at colonial officials and missionaries, but devoted the largest part of the essay to an account of the 1922 disturbances, when Africans rose against "this policy of British imperialist robbery and oppression." He then excoriated the Kenya government for violating both the 1930 White Paper on native policy and the guarantees of the Native Lands Trust Ordinance of 1930, in order to make room for white gold prospectors in Kakamega. He concluded with a warning that promises by the British government "are nothing but a decoy to keep us sleeping while the imperialists are planning further robberies and exploitation in order to satisfy their own ends," and to remember the imperial policy of divide and rule through which "they have been able to create hatred between various tribes, and thereby they have been able to rob and oppress us separately. Therefore let us unite and demand our birthright" (Kenyatta 1934, 803-07).

At no point in his essay, however, does he directly discuss specifically Kikuyu grievances, and this reveals some of the underlying tensions and conflicts that ultimately led Kenyatta away from a commitment to Marxism or Communism. The Communists and, indeed, other left groups all had their own strong, ideological reasons for being interested in Kenyatta and using him to advance their political agendas. They needed a man like Kenyatta, whom they saw as a representative of the oppressed colonial masses, to write




for their publications and speak at their conferences, thereby displaying international proletarian solidarity. Any suggestion of African cultural dis- tinctiveness or insistence on the value of indigenous society smacked of ret-

rograde "feudalism" or "tribalism," however, and threatened the solidarity of the "toiling masses" of Africa with their brethren elsewhere, as well as the socialist world revolution. And this was strongly reinforced by the Popular Front strategy from the mid-1930s, which no longer supported anti-colonial movements.

The Communists provided Kenyatta with new intellectual and political resources, as well as financial support and travel. They taught him, in particular, that the problems of the Kikuyu required not a limited reformism, but a direct attack on the colonial situation in general. Colonialism should be des-

troyed and transcended, not ameliorated, but this could be accomplished only in concert with other peoples in the colony, not by the Kikuyu alone.

Thus, he spoke in his essay for the first time of the "Kenya national liberation struggle." Here, however, was the central contradiction and tension in his relationship with Communism. How could Kenyatta assert, as he

wanted, the distinctive identity of the Kikuyu and the value of their traditional institutions and values, as well as their right to define their own future and draw selectively from European culture, and at the same time, forge a transethnic "national" movement to overthrow colonialism, necessarily comprised of numerous peoples, each of whom might contain men aspiring to do for their people what he was attempting to do for his? To focus exclu-

sively on Kikuyu issues would bring accusations that he was a "parochial tribalist." Indeed, Reginald Bridgeman, secretary of the League Against Imperialism, complained that Kenyatta "knew nothing about any other col-

ony, and seemed uninterested in widening his views beyond the narrow perspective of his tribe" (Delf 1954, 70). The Marxist left and the Communists, in particular, required a turn away from the Kikuyu in favor of an as yet non- existent Kenyan nationality, proletariat, and history. They demanded, in

effect, the dissolution of a Kikuyu consciousness and existence into the undifferentiated African "masses" pursuing a socialist future antithetic to the Kikuyu notions of property, community, and moral responsibility that

Kenyatta struggled to preserve. In the end, Kenyatta found the Communists in Russia and Britain as ethnocentric and European-dominated as he had found the liberal imperialists. The contradictory demands of modernity and a preserved Kikuyu custom would remain unresolved, however, in all his later writings.

The ambiguities and conflicts of Kenyatta's own role and identity directly reproduced those of the social, cultural, and political context. Marxism, it seemed, could not supply the "unanswerable argument" he needed to advance his Kikuyu agenda. By the end of 1934, he appears to have been fin- ished with the Communists and moved into Britsh political and intellectual



326 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

life increasingly as his own man, rather than as a representative African, sponsored and used by others. The next five years were a period of significant political activity and intellectual achievement, during which he became a well-known and respected figure in two different, but linked, worlds, that of Britain's black intelligentsia, particularly those associated with the Interna- tional African Service Bureau, and that of academic anthropology, centering on the London School of Economics.

Kenyatta, Malinowski, and Anthropology Kenyatta's work as a linguistic informant at University College and SOAS, his primary source of income after his return from Russia, was his entree into the university world. In 1934-35, he made the transition from a "detribalized native," representing a political association of dubious repute with the authorities and with suspicious "Bolshevik" connections, to a graduate student at the premier graduate program in anthropology of the era. By June 1935, Malinowski wrote to the librarian at the LSE to obtain Kenyatta a reader's card, noting:

He is a member of the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya, and you may have heard his name. He has a great deal of influence among the educated Africans here and in Africa. His work with me I regard with considerable importance.

He then wrote to Kenyatta with instructions to fill out the application with a note that "my work is under the personal supervision of Professor Mali- nowski." '7 In the fall, Kenyatta enrolled for the three-year post-graduate diploma in social anthropology, a course for students lacking the formal

qualifications for the PhD program, and attended Malinowski's seminar and other courses. For the next three years, he was a full-time graduate student, and in December 1936, with Malinowski's help, he was awarded a student-

ship of seventy pounds by the International African Institute to help him

complete his studies. In the spring of 1938, he presented the diploma thesis that would become Facing Mount Kenya. Before examining the character and significance of this work, we must note why the Kenyatta/Malinowski relationship was so important for both men.

For fifteen years between 1923 and his departure for the United States in the fall of 1938, Malinowski was largely responsible for making the LSE one of the most important training grounds for anthropologists of the interwar

period. Through his startlingly innovative and intensive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands during World War I, and the development of his functionalist approach to the analysis of "primitive" societies as living, integrated communities of real people, rather than stagnant, ossified relics of earlier epochs of social evolution, Malinowski radically transformed the theory and practice of anthropological research. He provided the mythical charter of




modern anthropology by turning his Trobriand experience into the primal encounter with "otherness" and by casting himself as the archetype of the

"ethnographer" (Stocking I992a, 214-I9). A man of strong and complex personality, full of paradox and contradic-

tion, Malinowski was a charismatic intellectual celebrity, revered by most of his students and loved and hated with equal passion amongst his peers. He had close and demanding relations with his students, both intellectual and

social, and most found him an inspiring and challenging teacher. He did not

expect them to be obedient disciples or acolytes, however. As one of them later noted, "he wanted loyalty but not reverence .... No Malinowski cult ever developed." His graduate students at the LSE - Raymond Firth, Ashley Montagu, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Isaac Schapera, Hortense Powdermaker, Meyer Fortes, Audrey Richards, Hilda Kuper, Godfrey Wilson, Phyllis Kaberry, and S.F. Nadel - became some of the most important and influential

anthropologists of the mid-century, as well as pioneers of modern African studies.

Initially interested only in the societies of Melanesia and the Australian

aborigines (the subject of his doctoral dissertation), Malinowski's interests

by the end of the 1920s were increasingly turning towards Africa, which would become the dominant focus of British anthropological research until the 1960s. By 1930, he had become deeply involved in the International Afri- can Institute, founded in 1926 by contributions from colonial governments and mission societies, and had struck up a close friendship with its adminis- trative director, Joseph Oldham. An accomplished academic entrepreneur, Malinowski was instrumental in the IAI obtaining a major grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1931 that made it the principal source of funding for social research in Africa until the outbreak of war in 1939. The chairman of the Institute's executive council was the redoubtable imperialist, Lord

Lugard, who gave it links to, and credibility among, the imperial authorities and the British ruling class, while the academics and missionaries involved in its activities connected it to the African affairs community and the native

rights lobby. In the early 1930os, the IAI served as the focus of informal discussion groups on African affairs, which drew on various constituencies and in which Malinowski was an active participant.

For several years before he met Kenyatta, Malinowski was actively planning to do research in Kenya, although all of these efforts came to naught. His only visit to Africa, from early July through September 1934, was as a

keynote speaker at a conference in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa on "Educational Adaptations in a Changing Society," sponsored by the New Education Fellowship. He stopped on his way home to spend several weeks in Tanganyika and Kenya. During a crowded and busy time in

Kenya, he managed to visit the Gusii, Luo, and Luhya areas, as well as to



328 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

spend some time among the Kikuyu. He came home with a sheaf of field- notes about Kikuyu society and culture, including its political organization. I8

Malinowski thus had a good reason for being keenly interested in meeting a literate Kikuyu in London in the months after his trip. There were, however, deeper reasons for both Kenyatta's importance to Malinowski and the

rapport that developed between the two men. Malinowski was the prime apostle of participatory field research, based on total immersion in the native way of life, in order to produce an account of a culture "from the native's

point of view." He claimed that this method produced rigorously objective, scientific knowledge, but could only be achieved by fully trained professional anthropologists. This was challenged by other purported experts on

"natives," notably missionaries and colonial administrators. Kenyatta was a native African who claimed to speak for his people, and Malinowski had

obviously heard that he was influential both at home in Kenya and among Africans in Britain. He also clearly knew the Kikuyu from within; he gave the "native point of view." If he could be trained in Malinowski's scientific

anthropology to express that point of view in a systematic functional eth-

nography of his own society, the rigor and authenticity of Malinowski's

approach would be powerfully validated. The native insider would become the objective scientific outsider, just as the scientific outsider became the

empathetic insider. Another reason for Malinowski's interest in Kenyatta flowed directly

from his perception of Kenyatta's political importance and certainly would not have pleased the latter, had he known about it at the time. Malinowski was constantly promoting the development of his functionalist social

anthropology by asserting its practical value in colonial administration to the authorities in the Colonial Office and other men of power. Whether he

sincerely believed this to be the case, or it was simply a ploy, well-known to

academics, to sell the financial support of research to tightfisted practical men, is impossible to determine. Malinowski, the liberal, distrusted mili-

tant, ethnocentric nationalism, and he recognized a potential for it in Kenyatta and other African students in Britain. He saw anthropology as providing colonialism with the basis for a more humane social engineering in Africa that would avoid the threat of race wars and "black bolshevism" (Stocking 1992b, 194-95). '9 Kenyatta was, in any case, a valuable resource for Malinowski to use in making his case. When Kenyatta applied to the IAI for a scholarship, Malinowski wrote to Lord Lugard on his behalf, noting:

I should like to state in an entirely confidential manner that since the aim of the Institute has always been entirely non-political, the present application is of high importance. Mr. Kenyatta started his work in my department about two years ago. At that time he had a definite political bias in all his approach. This, I




think, has almost been entirely eradicated by the constant impact of detached scientific method on his mental processes. The highly depoliticizing effect of scientific anthropology has worked a remarkable change.... Since Mr. Kenyatta has considerable influence on African students, and also on educated Africans in Kenya, the contribution will be not only towards the advancement of theo- retical studies, but also towards the practical influence of anthropology. 20

Kenyatta got his grant, although Lugard, "unconvinced of the brainwashing power of functionalist anthropology," was the lone dissenting vote when the matter came before the IAI's governing board in December 1936 (Stocking 1995, 412).

Meanwhile, Malinowski's personal judgment of European colonialism in Africa was becoming increasingly harsh and negative, especially after his 1934 trip. By 1937, he could write in an introduction to a book by a refugee German scholar that anthropologists had to be "not only the interpreter of the native, but also his champion" (Malinowski 1937, vii). His growing understanding of colonialism as harsh, oppressive, and destructive was reinforced by his developing despair and disillusionment over the course of western civilization, his hopeful liberalism having been replaced, he would write in the "Introduction" to Facing Mount Kenya, by a "new historical demoral- ization" in the face of the growing crisis of the epoch (Malinowski 1938, ix). In his writings, the "savage" and Western civilization increasingly became the "so-called." With this came a reassessment of the role of the educated African, reinforced perhaps through his relationship with Kenyatta, whose interests, grievances, and claims to equal political, economic, and social rights Malinowski believed and publicly affirmed could no longer be denied. 21 While avoiding an overt attack on colonialism, especially when he was trying to advance the interests of social anthropology, Malinowski privately could refer to the "detribalized tropical European - whether he develops the pathological form of Kenya lunacy or only the ordinary idiocy of the average colonial administrator or missionary." 22

Despite his fame and eminence, Malinowski was himself an outsider in British society, an emigr6 Pole who was regarded, he knew, by many in the academic establishment as decidedly un-British in manner and personality, who was never really comfortable in the academic establishment, "and [who] always remained a foreigner in England" (Goody 1995, 29). He was also promoting the development of a new discipline, which was viewed with sus- picion among conservative academics. In addition, he was doing this from a school, the LSE, founded by the Fabians only in 1895, which was widely regarded as dangerously "pink" and progressive. A large proportion of his graduate students were themselves socially marginal in Britain, being mostly Jews, white colonials, Europeans from continental states, women, and reputed leftists. 23 Malinowski could empathize with Kenyatta's social



330 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

circumstances, as well as see him as intellectually important. And he did not treat him with patronizing condescension.

Kenyatta had several reasons of his own for being attracted to Malinowski and to the study of anthropology. First, it was a chance for him to satisfy the intense desire for advanced education that had led him earlier to Wood- brooke College and KUTVU. Studying at a first class university, especially at the LSE, which already had an important reputation among colonial stu-

dents, would significantly raise his status not only in Kenya, but also among Africans and other members of the black intelligentsia in Britain. More

importantly, it would enable Kenyatta to deal as an equal with the colonial

authorities, with their Oxbridge degrees, and as a man with a better education than many of the settlers, rather than as a "semi-educated detribalized native." In the pervasive racism of a Britain in which learned people still debated the mental capacity and educability of blacks, there was the motive

also, as his friend Peter Koinange would later put it, to show "what others can do, we can do too" (Koinange 1963, 21).

Most important, however, was the attraction of social anthropology itself and the utility to Kenyatta of writing a monograph about the Kikuyu. At the

time, it was the only discipline at a British university in which he could get a

high level of intellectual training and, at the same time, focus his work on the Kikuyu. Malinowski's functionalist approach, by insisting on seeing "primitive" societies as living, integrated, and viable cultural communities, implicitly affirmed their human value and dignity and undermined perni- cious racist stereotypes of "blank, uninteresting, brutal barbarism." 24 Sev- eral months before he began his studies, the report of the Kenya Land Com- mission had implicitly rejected his claims to be a typical Kikuyu and to represent their interests as a whole. His aspiration to be intermediary and

reconciler, muigwithania, was not accepted. Instead, the Commission opted for a direct movement of the Kikuyu towards modern forms of property and

production that dismissed the petitions of the sub-clans (mbari) that the KCA attempted to represent and made history and custom and their custodi- ans irrelevant (CMD 4556, 1934). Kenyatta thus faced in acute form the dilemma of representation: as long as his depiction of the Kikuyu was not

accepted, his role as advocate could not succeed. The need for the "unanswerable argument" was still unfulfilled. Func-

tionalist social anthropology, however, seemed to provide a rigorous mode of analysis and form of discourse through which he could systematically con- struct his vision of Kikuyu society and culture. It not only demonstrated the inherent value and dignity of Kikuyu civilization to the Europeans, but could do so with the powerful authority of science behind it. The comprehensive monographic study of the culture and institutions of a particular people had become, by the 192os, the dominant form of anthropological discourse, and one that often found an audience beyond academic circles. For




Kenyatta, it served as a most attractive vehicle of representation, with an

ostensibly objective and authoritative scientific depiction of the Kikuyu, providing a secure basis for his expert, rather than partisan, advocacy of their interests.

It was also a way, it seemed, for Kenyatta as muigwithania to define and defend a definitive and unified depiction of the Kikuyu house of custom and extend the project of his journal into a form more likely to be accepted as both authentic and convincing by a European audience. Moreover, the

anthropological monograph confronted in a direct way the duality of representation - the need to act, as Clifford Geertz puts it, as "pilgrim and cartog- rapher," in creating a scientific text from biographical experience. The

monograph is thus simultaneously "an intimate view and a cool assess-

ment," poised between the extremes of positivist science and storytelling (1988, 4-6, 9-Io). It was the one form of expert knowledge that permitted Kenyatta to transform his personal experience into scientific discourse. His

very duality and marginality, between European and Kikuyu, became his most compelling intellectual qualification.

During his time at the LSE, Kenyatta contributed three papers to Mali- nowski's seminars on Kikuyu initiation practices (including clitoridec-

tomy), education, and land tenure, as well as a few others for Raymond Firth, including one on magic that "aroused vigorous discussion." '25 These papers formed the basis for his diploma thesis, which was submitted at the end of the fall term of 1937 and accepted a few months later. Kenyatta's colleagues at the International African Service Bureau, notably Padmore, James, and

Makonnen, put him in touch with Dinah Stock, one of their ILP friends, who was a lecturer in English for the Workman's Education Association, assistant editor of the ILP journal, The New Leader, and secretary for the British Center Against Imperialism. The actual editing of the thesis into a book does not seem to have been difficult, taking Stock only about three weeks. James introduced Kenyatta to his publisher, Frederic Warburg, of Secker and War-

burg, who agreed to publish Facing Mount Kenya. It appeared in September 1938, complete with a laudatory introduction by Malinowski, a few weeks before James' own The Black Jacobins (Makonnen 1973, 112-16; Warburg 1959).

Facing Mount Kenya For Kenyatta, functionalist anthropology provided a model of uniform, integrated, and harmonious cultures that appeared to suit perfectly his political purpose in representing the Kikuyu. Social anthropologists agreed with him that the Kikuyu were in no way inferior to their British rulers, just different. His tasks in the book were to show that he was a true representative of the Kikuyu, and not a detribalized African out of touch with his people, and also to invent a harmonious Kikuyu culture and nationality. Kikuyu



332 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

institutions provided the social harmony that functionalism looked for in all

pre-industrial societies and which confirmed Kenyatta's representative role. He pictured his credentials in the frontispiece and enumerated them in the

preface. He confronted his readers as they opened his book in a photograph of himself in an off-the-shoulder hyrax and monkey-fur cloak, gazing rumina-

tively at the point of a spear he was testing with his fingertips. The portrait was intended to represent elderhood, an honorable status of authority. His

friend, Mbiyu Koinange, who had lent Kenyatta his cloak, later explained that their purpose was to give "an elderly tone" to a "book on Agikuyu by an

elderly Mugikuyu" (Koinange 1963, 21) rather than one by a young upstart "athomi." In the preface, he gave four grounds for his representational authority.

First, Kenyatta declared his independence of white patronage, repudiating in print

... those "professional friends of the African" who are prepared to maintain their friendship for eternity as a sacred duty, provided only that the African will continue to play the part of an ignorant savage so they can monopolize the office of interpreting his mind and speaking for him. To such people, an African who writes a study of this kind is encroaching on their preserves. He is a rabbit turned poacher, [whose] power of expression . . is breaking through and will

very soon sweep away the patronage and repression which surround him (1938, xviii). 26

Second, he was a typical Kikuyu, well educated in the traditions of his people and initiated, he claimed, according to "tribal custom." After warriorhood, he had passed through three stages of elderhood, meeting the requirements of marriage and fatherhood, and earning the right to participate in judicial councils. Kenyatta (1938, xix) was also a leader by traditional criteria, his

family being rich and well connected.

Third, he stressed his specialized knowledge of land law (as the future trustee or muramati of his clan's land), of magic (which he had learned as

apprentice to his magician grandfather), and of the transfer of ritual power between the generations (or ituika). This recitation of his expertise was intended to impress both his Kikuyu constituency and his British audience.

Fourth, his Kikuyu civic virtue qualified him as an external advocate or muthamaki, and Kenyatta was elected as the spokesman for the KCA, while his "knowledge of the outside world" made him leader of "progressive movements among the Kikuyu generally" - a subtle linkage of his personal career to Kikuyu nationhood, not only as the KCA's general secretary, but as editor of Muigwithania (1938, xx).

As far as his anthropological training was concerned, it was justified by its purpose of enlightening outsiders. His "training in comparative social anthropology" was no more than the "necessary technical knowledge for




recording the information scientifically," the information being the Kikuyu knowledge "which had hitherto remained in my head." His archive of

knowledge remained unchanged; he was simply making it accessible to a different audience. In becoming the outside scientific observer, he did not cease to be a participant insider; his marginality did not taint him with the corrup- tion of detribalization. His claim to be the representative authority of insider-outsider was now complete. Indeed, Facing Mount Kenya was also an

ethnographic autobiography. The story of Kenyatta's own hard-earned civic virtue and elderhood and his encounters with the outside world were the

story of his people. In inventing the Kikuyu in his book, Kenyatta also invented himself, having assumed the name "Jomo" as something more

appropriately African than the "Johnstone" given him by the missionaries. 27

The Kikuyu society that Kenyatta depicted in Facing Mount Kenya was an Arcadian republic of the elders - a democratic, integrated, orderly, and civilized organic community free of disruptive internal conflict. The process of internal debate, the loose and fractious community that was the basis of his project of reconciliation in Muigwithania, is nowhere to be seen or heard.

Kenyatta invented a homogeneous Kikuyu society that spoke with one voice. To achieve this construction, he had to emphasize certain features of

Kikuyu culture and institutions and deemphasize or ignore others. The central chapters of the book focus on expositions of Kikuyu land tenure, government and law, education, initiation of youth, and religion. The central issue and Kenyatta's prime concern, the issue for which he had been sent to Lon- don in the first place, was land, specifically the Kikuyu desire to regain land lost to white settlement and to prevent any future alienation.

The idea of land lay at the core of the colonial relationship; it was the emotional bedrock of dominance and subordination, of achievement and

loss, of possessing a social identity and, therefore, either a fitness to exist or a

reproach for living. Land was also time: the past with its ancestral bones; the

present as the resource with which people made their wealth and civic virtue in a competitive world; and the future, sustaining the marital networks of

reproduction and preserving the possibilities of productive labour for one's

grandchildren (Chapter 2). Kenyatta made this argument poetically in his evocative dedication of the book:

To Moigoi and Wamboi and all the dispossessed youth of Africa: for perpetua- tion of communion with ancestral spirits through the fight for African freedom, and in the firm faith that the dead, the living and the unborn will unite to rebuild the destroyed shrines (1938, v).

Today, the names would be rendered "Muigai" and "Wambui," but the full force of Kenyatta's prayer can be realized only when one knows that these were the names of both his parents and his firstborn children.



334 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

It was not only the centrality of land to the life of the Kikuyu that Kenyatta had to show, but also that, contrary to the Kenya Land Commis- sion, all land was privately held family property under the control of mbari or sub-clan elders, not communal or "tribal" land. Land, moreover, was held with a particular legal and moral basis and represented the fruit of the sweated labour of cultivating and civilizing undeveloped forest that had been properly purchased from its previous inhabitants, the Ndorobo, not acquired by "force and chicanery," as the KLC had decided. The representation of Kikuyu land tenure was tied to the patriarchal power of the elders that was the foundation of the Arcadian republic. Contra Malinowski, the construction of a functional system for the Kikuyu was Kenyatta's political project in writing his book, and their system of government was central to both the use of the functional model and the depiction of the Kikuyu as a rational and civilized people.

While Malinowski, in his introduction to the book, thought that Kenyatta had employed functional concepts too crudely, even using inappro- priate European concepts like "church" and "state" that he himself had warned against (Kenyatta 1938, xi-xii), Kenyatta was also replying to the common European assumption that stateless African cultures lacked any interest or coherence, even the rudely barbaric character of African king- doms. In his account of the Kikuyu historical charter and myths of origin, he actually placed the origin of the republic of the elders in the overthrow of an ancient tyrannical king, reversing the sequence of political evolution widely held among Europeans at the time (Chapter I). 2 8 He also stressed the virtues of the Kikuyu culture of democracy in contrast to the British use of lackey chiefs to rule the people.

In creating a harmonious and integrated society based on patriarchal landed property and conciliar government, Kenyatta did write an elderly text in the voice of an elder rich in property, knowledge, and civic status - a far cry from the upstart voice of a literate youth with which he had started a decade before. He wrote at length about Kikuyu education, extolling it as education by doing and as an integral part of daily life, which compared favorably with contemporary European notions of "progressive education" (Chapters 5-6). This traditional education trained boys and girls to responsi- bly assume their place in the social order - nothing here about education "to open up a man's head." Similarly, he defended the positive function of initiation rites, particularly clitoridectomy, in direct response to missionary attacks on their supposed barbarity and encouragement of sexual promiscu- ity, claiming instead that they actually turned children into socially and sex- ually responsible and disciplined adults. Age sets, moreover, promoted both comradeship and competition, acting as the crucibles of Kikuyu cooperation and ambition and of their culture of democracy.




The most striking absences or silences in Kenyatta's account are with

regard to internal differences of wealth and social standing and the position of women. The property-owning mbaris were not miniature democracies, but small oligarchies, generally accommodating significant numbers of poor tenants tied through various forms of landless and kinless dependence on their wealthy patrons. Kenyatta (1938, 22) himself had told the Kenya Land Commission that his wealthy father had fifteen ahoi clients. He scarcely addressed this issue in Facing Mount Kenya, and the little he did say portrayed all such dependent clientage as a matter of generous friendship and alliance. Kenyatta's several references to women in Kikuyu society depicted them as a source of potential disorder and conflict, unless kept under patriarchal control. Nothing is said of their active political role, an account that would have been vigorously challenged at home, and in his description of

Kikuyu historical legend, they are the original rulers and oppressors of men in a polyandrous matriarchy that was overthrown by a male conspiracy to make them all pregnant (Kenyatta 1938, 6-7). This matriarchy was succeeded by the tyranny of King Gikuyu, who was, in turn, overthrown to establish the polygamous democracy of the elders. The chapter on marriage defended polygamy and emphasized women's household duties and social and sexual subordination to male authority in the interest of social harmony (Chapter 8). 29 For Kenyatta, the Kikuyu are men with "their" women, as he notes: "it is the desire of every member of the tribe to build up his own fam-

ily group, and by this means to extend and prolong his father's mbari (clan)" (1938, 163).

European intrusion into this pastoral idyll of social harmony and prosperity was a violent and ignorant trashing of paradise, colonial change an ordeal that disrupted Kikuyu civilization, dividing and confusing the people. Kenyatta not only defended his vision of the Kikuyu, but he also attacked their British detractors, combining the anti-colonial invective he had learned from the Communists with a fine malicious wit of his own. Mis- sionaries were denounced for their ignorant and bigoted interventions, while the seamy origins of colonial rule were condemned in an account of British

treachery and betrayal of Waiyaki. 30 The Kenya Land Commission, mean-

while, got its comeuppance in the comic folk tale of a man and an elephant. This related how a (Kikuyu) man gave shelter to a rain-soaked (British) ele-

phant, who crowded him out of his home. When he complained and demanded return of his abode, the elephant called an investigating commission of other animals, that crowded into the hut to pompously deliberate the finer points of their "law of the jungle" to determine the possession of the hut. Its owner, excluded from the discussions, is driven to burn it down with all the squabbling "jungle lords" inside, saying "Peace is costly, but its worth the expense" (Kenyatta 1938, 47-52).



336 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

In the final chapter of Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta summarized his account of Kikuyu culture, beginning by reasserting his functionalist model:

... it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the various Kikuyu life here described are parts of an integrated culture. No single part is detachable; each has its context and is fully understandable only in relation to the whole" (1938,

309).

Kenyatta concluded the chapter with a ringing restatement of his central

political argument, namely that the Kikuyu and other Africans have the right and ability to both preserve what is of value in their own cultures and select from European culture (and integrate into their own) only that which they regard as useful or desirable:

There certainly are some progressive ideas among the Europeans. They include the ideas of material prosperity, of medicine, and hygiene, and literacy which enable people to take part in world culture. But so far the Europeans who visit Africa have not been conspicuously zealous in imparting these parts of their inheritance to Africans and seem to think the only way to do it is by police disci-

pline and armed force ... If Africans were left in peace on their own lands, Europeans would have to

offer them the benefits of white civilization in real earnest before they could obtain the African labour they want so much. The would have to offer the Afri- can a way of life which really was superior to one his fathers lived before him, and a share in the prosperity given them by their command of science. They would have to let the African choose what parts of European culture could be

beneficially transplanted, and how they could be adapted (1938, 3 17-18).

Had he, however, actually found in ethnography the "unanswerable argument" to advance his political project of representing the Kikuyu and

advancing towards the goals of muigwithania ? Could Facing Mount Kenya serve as not a "eulogy for a society destroyed, but a cultural call to arms to create a modern Kikuyu culture," as Kenyatta struggled to conceive it?

(Shaw 1995, 136).

Conclusion: Modernity and the Contradictions of Conservative Reform Functionalist social anthropology certainly provided Kenyatta with an effective means of depicting a golden Kikuyu past of organically integrated peace and harmony, as well as a means of denouncing the disruptive changes brought by colonialism. The key underlying issue, however, as he made clear in his last chapter, was the control of social change: who decided what change was desirable, who controlled it, and who benefited from it. To con- front this, Kenyatta needed a coherent theory of social change that would empower his project of Kikuyu control, but here, however, Malinowski's




anthropology failed him. Despite Malinowski's growing criticism of colonialism and concern with problems of social change, his functionalism provided no coherent analysis of the colonial situation in which African societies actually existed (Kuper 1996, 113-14). Moreover, the functionalist model of a social system was incapable of identifying endogenous causes of

change within the ostensibly balanced, stable, and integrated social order.

Change, therefore, came from solely exogenous or external sources, and the

consequences of such change were generally seen as disruptive, if not

destructive, of functional integration and order. The consequent quandary of how to achieve both preservation and change simultaneously, without pro- found social disturbance, was not simply Kenyatta's but, as Jack Goody put it, "the classic dilemma of the anthropologist, the contradiction of the progressive preservationist, the radical conserver" (1995, 53).

The anthropology Kenyatta learned at the LSE made his depiction of the

Kikuyu more seamlessly coherent, but it also made his advocacy more prob- lematic. Functionalism gave him a theory, but seriously weakened his politics. True, he now condemned colonialism in a more comprehensive fashion than had the young journalist of ten years before. He pointed out that colo- nialists not only appropriated Kikuyu land and labour, but also disrupted the

organic integration of their social system. This focus on systemic distortion rather than on the interests of an aggrieved people, however, made it more difficult to sustain the next stage of his argument, namely, that by refusing Africans power and opportunity, whites also denied them the chance to decide how to rebuild social harmony in reformed institutions of the house of custom. The more he portrayed Kikuyu society as a damaged system, the harder the task of reconstruction seemed to be. In the end, it was political conviction rather than scientific expertise that enabled him to insist on the

possibility of non-traumatic change. In glorifying a social order based on the authority of the responsible age

and wealth of mbari elders over the young and the poor, Kenyatta also limited the space available for both generational change and the educated

young for whom he once spoke. Whereas in the days of Muigwithania, literate young Kikuyu were the heroes of a process that could itself be construed as part of tradition, now their education, as many of their elders claimed, made them delinquents to custom. Facing Mount Kenya brought Kenyatta face to face with another dilemma of conservative reform that was being faced by dozens of other small peoples who had been confronted with what

Anthony Giddens has aptly called the "juggernaut" of Western modernity

(I99o). Only those among them with significant knowledge of modernity could both protect effectively the heritage of tradition and control selective

change. However, the very education that fitted them for this task made them a source of disruption in the indigenous social order. Kenyatta noted:



338 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

Unless Western education in Africa can keep these bonds (of family and kin-

ship, sex and age grouping) vital and strong it cannot be expected to mould the African in a way which will make him fit in his community on one hand and to establish good relations with the outside world on the other (1938, 122).

He recognized, however, that Western education was linked to "social

groupings which are largely determined by economic, professional and reli-

gious associations" of the social order of modernity (1938, 122). Kenyatta was unable, any more than those who proceeded and succeeded him, to reconcile the conflicting claims of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft.

Facing Mount Kenya, in any case, failed to establish Kenyatta's intellectual authority and enhance his representative role. Few people read the first

edition, which sold a scant 517 copies before the remainder of the printing was destroyed during a 1941 air raid. His audience was overwhelmingly white and British; only three copies can be traced to his Kikuyu colleagues in

Kenya. Reviews were few and far from laudatory. The main academic journals of British anthropology, Man and the Journal of the Royal Anthropologi- cal Institute, ignored it, as did Kenyatta's former friends in the Communist

Party. On the left, Dinah Stock, who helped edit the manuscript, reviewed it in advance of its actual publication for the ILP journal, The New Leader (i July 1938), while another ILP member, H.N. Brailsford, reviewed it for the New Statesman and Nation (07 September 1938). While both took

Kenyatta's account of Kikuyu custom at face value, only Stock took the

point that he showed that Africans could think and act for themselves.

Brailsford, instead, adopted the more characteristic paternalist position, despairing of the ability of the Kikuyu, "a people rapidly deteriorating," to act on their own behalf. Cullen Young, former missionary in Malawi and amateur ethnographer, reviewed the book for the Journal of the Royal Africa Society (October 1938). Praising the gravity and restraint with which

Kenyatta presented the Kikuyu case, Young expressed the liberal imperialist hope that he could be coopted into a more progressive colonialism and denounced the racism which prevented it.

The reaction of missionaries more closely connected to Kenya was uni-

formly negative. A.R. Barlow, one of Kenyatta's early missionary patrons in

Britain, reviewed his book in the IAI journal, Africa. While sympathetic to

Kenyatta's project of muigwithania, Barlow made it clear from his critical remarks that he thought him a less effective advocate than white missionaries. In Kenya, Horace Philp, in a review for the local mission publication, Kikuyu News, thought that Facing Mount Kenya wallowed in shame and indecency, showing that the missions had not defeated the "unfruitful works of darkness." Meanwhile, the business journal, East Africa and Rho- desia, thought that Kenyatta's "no doubt reliable description" was spoiled by the author's political record.




Facing Mount Kenya thus failed in its immediate political objectives, neither establishing Kenyatta's interpretive authority nor commanding the attention of the British authorities to Kikuyu grievances. And the criticisms of it certainly rankled its author. Eight years later, in a bitter outburst at a Fabian Colonial Bureau conference on postwar colonial policy, Kenyatta complained that, "we have published books and our friends have reviewed them more critically than the books of our enemies. ... our friends are under-

mining our activities." 3 Meanwhile, Kenyatta himself had not so much been "detribalized" by his experience as he had become the embodiment of the deep conflicts of conservative modernization, living within the unresolved contradictions of his project. Malinowski understood his student's dilemma. "We have to recognize," he wrote in the introduction to Fac- ing Mount Kenya, "the fact that an African who looks at things from the tribal point of view and at the same time from that of Western civilization, experiences the tragedy of the modern world in an especially acute manner"

(1938, ix). The ambivalence of his identity and politics was reflected in his relations

with both whites and the black intelligentsia, particularly his colleagues in the IASB. Having finally achieved the education that "opened up a man's

head," the defender of the republic of the elders had become a thoroughly westernized and urbane intellectual, with diverse friendships among accom-

plished and influential people in British intellectual and political circles, well beyond the narrow world of the African affairs community. To his Brit- ish friends, he was a charming, well-mannered, intelligent, and charismatic

figure, who stated his views cogently and reasonably - the very antithesis of the savage "other" or violent fanatic. Nevertheless, he also often flamboy- antly played on his exotic Africanness, roaming the streets of London carry- ing a spear, and showing up at his publisher's, Frederic Warburg's, flat for din- ner with the spear and attired in a leopard skin (Warburg 1959, 253). To black

colleagues like Ralph Bunche, meanwhile, he "expressed hatred and distrust of all whites - 'use them, but don't trust them is his advice.'" 32

His relations with the black intelligentsia were marked by equally strik-

ing ambivalence. Most of them were from the West Indies, and while they were concerned with making Africa an active issue in British politics, none of them, except possibly Padmore, had ever visited Africa, and their knowl-

edge of indigenous African societies was limited. They were interested in an African past that could counter the canards of white racists, namely that Africans had neither history nor culture worthy of serious consideration in the story of human civilization, but they were ambivalent about existing indigenous societies in Africa. Moreover, as Marxists, they looked towards an Africa that would be secular, rationalist, and socialist within the institu- tional frame of the modern nation-state. Indigenous societies seemed

unpromising material for the construction of the modern future they valued.



340 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

Both Padmore and James had attacked tribalism and feudalism in Africa as anachronisms, and Padmore later wrote:

... the traditional African way of life needs a cataclysm to free it from its own decay. It is the newly emancipated generation of Africans with a detribalized outlook, who under the stimulus of Western political ideas and technocracy can alone bring about the necessary regeneration (1956, 373).

What, then, could they make of Kenyatta? His preoccupation with the Kikuyu must have struck them as parochial, unprogressive, and marred by the sort of ethnic chauvinism they had rejected. Facing Mount Kenya is strikingly different from both the sophisticated Marxist political analysis of Padmore and the historiography of James. Compared with the IASB's global perspective on imperialism, Kenyatta's work was dismissed by Makonnen as "simply concerned to get certain things known about his people" (Makon- nen 1973, 162). But they recognized his political passion - James vividly, if guardedly, described Kenyatta as a "simmering volcano of African nationalism," while Makonnen was willing to concede that he was "much more

obviously marked to leadership than many of the others in England at the time" (James 1963, 301; Makonnen 1973, 162). And yet, Peter Abrahams later described Jomo Kenyatta among the Africans in the group as "the most relaxed, sophisticated and 'westernized' of the lot of us" (Abrahams i961, 55).

Finally, if Facing Mount Kenya did not achieve Kenyatta's immediate political purposes or resolve the contradictions of his project of conservative modernization, it did intellectually represent the Kikuyu in a much more systematic and sympathetic manner than they had ever been depicted before, and imagined a Kikuyu ethnicity and community on a far broader scale than their localized segmentary institutions and fractious politics had permitted. Equally important, Kenyatta's transformation of Kikuyu legend into a vibrant "national" history furnished an historical charter for both Kikuyu politics and his own leadership, themes on which he was to elabo- rate in the last of his published writings, two pamphlets written during his last years in Britain during World War II (Kenyatta 1942, 1945). 3 3 It also provided an agenda for his return in September 1946 to the increasingly turbu- lent politics of postwar Kenya.

Notes

i. B. Malinowski to Princess Marie Bonaparte, 6 December 1934, Malinowski Papers, Stirling Library, Yale University. We must assume this would include Kenyatta and probably the linguists, T.G. Benson of the School of Oriental and African Languages or Lilias Armstrong of University College, London, for whom Kenyatta later worked as a native informant in her work on Kikuyu phonology. Malinowski had known Louis Leakey for several years and would have mentioned him by name if he had been involved.




2. Born Kamau wa Ngengi, he was baptized "Johnstone Kamau" and, circa 1920, acquired the name "Kenyatta" when he went to live in Nairobi because of his beaded belt, a kinyata.

3. Kenyatta's career as editor and the central themes of his and others' contributions to Muigwithania are analysed in Lonsdale (1996).

4. PRO/CO822/33: "Memorandum of the Kikuyu Land Board Association to the Parlia- mentary Joint Select Committee on the Closer Union of the East African Territories," 6 April 1931; and Kenya Land Commission, Evidence: Volume I, Nairobi, 1934, 422-34. The actual words are probably those of the European and Asian lawyers in Nairobi who assisted in the preparation of the document, but the sentiments are certainly those of Kenyatta and his associates.

5. Jomo Kenyatta, letter to the editor, Muiwithania I, I April 1929, 6 in KNADC/MKS Io/B/12/1.

6. A Scottish engineer and Quaker, Ross had been the Director of Public Works in Kenya from 19o5 to 1923; he subsequently retired to London and became an active member of the liberal Hampstead intelligentsia, writing a notably scathing critique of colonial policy and society, Kenya From Within (London 1927).

7. Leys, a physician in the colonial service early in the century, resigned in protest over the government's appropriation of Maasai land before World War I and then published his own celebrated expos6 of the Kenya government and settlers, in Kenya (London 1924).

8. These unsubstantiated stories, which one missionary described as "noisome tripe" (Murray-Brown 1973, 151), reflect the racism and sexual paranoia of white society. They eventually reached Kenya, where they were combined with his supposed com- munistic ideas, and caused predictable outrage in the European community, compromising Kenyatta's reputation further (See Hildegard Hinde to Lord Lugard, 25 April 1931, Lugard Papers, Rhodes House Library, Oxford).

9. Handley Hooper, CMS, to Miss Soles, 26 September 1929, Hooper Papers, CMS Archives, London.

Io. Reverend J. Arthur to H.S. Scott, 23 December 1930, Presbyterian Church of East Africa Archives, Nairobi (quoted in Murray-Brown 1973, 170).

I I. Reverend H. Hooper to G.W. Maxwell, 31 March 1930, CMS Archives, London. 12. Manchester Guardian i8 March 1930; The Times 26 March 1930. While the polished

English is that of McGregor-Ross, the grievances and positions outlined, especially the references to cultural politics, are those of the KCA and of Kenyatta, in particular.

13. Memorandum on Native Policy in East Africa, London: HMSO, Cmd 3573, 1930. 14. Sunday Worker 27 October 1929. 15. "Lenin School" is repeated as fact in F.D. Corfield, Historical Survey of the Origins

and Growth of Mau Mau, Cmd io3o. London, 1960, 43, note 9. 16. The roster of contributors included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain

Locke, W.E.B. Dubois, Franklin Frazier, Theodore Dreiser, Countee Cullen, Arthur Schomburg, William Carlos Williams, Arna Bontemps, George Antheil, James Ivy, Walter White, and Melville Herskovitz. Nancy Cunard's friend, Samuel Beckett, translated the French contributions. The African section contained 315 pages, much of it on African art and music, although the last section was a series of articles on colonialism, including pieces by Kenyatta, Padmore, and Ben Azikiwe.

17. R Malinowski to W.C. Dickson, 21 June 1935; B. Malinowski to J. Kenyatta, 21 June 1935. Malinowski Papers 3/539, London School of Economics.

18. Africa II/5 5 5 (New Education Fellowship Conference); Africa II/I29 (Correspondence and Field Notes from Tanganyika and Kenya), Malinowski Papers, LSE.



342 CJAS / RCEA 30:3 1996

i9. Malinowski apparently believed that anthropology was unable to support itself since there was "no practical basis to our science and there are no funds forthcoming to remunerate it for what it produces," and thought that "an almost surreptitious devia- tion" was necessary in dealing with the Rockefeller money received by the IAI for fieldwork ("Res. Needs in Soc. and Cult. Anth.," draft memo, Malinowski papers. LSE).

20. B. Malinowski to Lord Lugard, 7 November 1936, Africa 1/696, Malinowski papers, LSE.

21. As he told both white and black audiences during his South African visit (Africa II/5 5 5, New Education Fellowship conference, 1934, Malinowski Papers, LSE). See also Stocking (I995, 413-15) and Rosetti (1987).

22. "Notes on a Meeting with Philip Kerr of Rhodes House," March 1930, Africa 1/495, Malinowski Papers, LSE.

23. See the listing in Stocking 1995, 407-09. Malinowski's supposed racism has been an issue since the publication of his Trobriand diaries (Malinowski 1967). His former colleagues and students vigorously deny it, and are supported by most historians of anthropology, despite, as Stocking delicately puts it, his use of "earthy ethnic language" in private correspondence and conversation. While he could privately write that he yearned for a student who was "not a Jew, Dago, Pole or any of these exotic products," when it counted, he consistently promoted and defended his students regardless of their origins or politics (Stocking 1995, 409, 411-12; Goody 1995, 26-29, 44-47).

24. To quote Sir Charles Eliot, an early Commissioner of the East African Protectorate and originator of the policy of white settlement in what became Kenya (Eliot 1905).

25. Sir Raymond Firth to John Lonsdale, 24 July 1989. 26. He may specifically have had Louis Leakey in mind here, although, as we have seen, he

had met many other ostensibly benevolent white gamekeepers on his intellectual odyssey. For a discussion of the intellectual and political rivalry between Kenyatta and Leakey, see Berman and Lonsdale (1991).

27. Koinange reported that he and Kenyatta manipulated syllables until they found a com- bination that they thought sounded African. Thus, Johnstone Kenyatta finally became Jomo Kenyatta (Koinange 1963). Other evidence, including Ralph Bunche's diaries during his stay in London between February and September 1937, suggest that Kenyatta had been using the name for some time before the publication of his book (Bunche Papers, UCLA).

28. In that sequence, egalitarian forms of "primitive communism" or communal tribalism were succeeded by the rise of the state, which gradually evolved from monarchic autocracy towards more popular and democratic forms of the nation-state.

29. His account, as Eunice Sahle has suggested (personal communication), might well have also reflected an effort to accommodate the patriarchal cultural biases of his largely male and monogamous British audience.

30. On the significance of Waiyaki in Kikuyu historical memory, see Lonsdale (i995). 31. Fabian Colonial Bureau papers 365/69, File 2, "The Relationship between the British

and Colonial Peoples," April 13, 1946, Rhodes House Library. 32. UCLA, Ralph Bunche papers and diaries, April 22, 1937. 33. These are treated more fully in an overview of the corpus of Kenyatta's writings in Ber-

man and Lonsdale (forthcoming). By including such historical narrative, Kenyatta was violating the methodological strictures of his mentor, Malinowski, who rejected such "speculation" from his rigorously synchronic, ethnographic method. However, as John Peel has recently reminded us, "human beings produce sociocultural form




through an arch of memories, actions, and intentions. Narrative is the way in which that arch may be expressed, rehearsed, shared, and communicated. It is this which gives human action its inherent historicity or lived-in-timeness. . ." (1995, 582-83). John Lonsdale and I hope to deal with this subject more fully in another context.

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Documents

Ethnography as Politics, Politics as Ethnography: Kenyatta, Malinowski, and the Making of Facing Mount Kenya