Kenya's first president took his surname from a beaded Maasai belt
Born Kamau, the boy who became Jomo Kenyatta spent part of the First World War living among the Maasai, adopting their customs and jewellery. He favoured a beaded belt called a kĩnyata in his native Kikuyu, and began calling himself Kenyatta after it. The name would later belong to the father of an independent nation.
No one recorded his birth; estimates range from 1890 to about 1897. He grew up in a Kikuyu farming family near the Thiririka river, herding goats and sheep. After his father died, his mother married his uncle, as custom required, and the boy became Kamau wa Ngengi. His stepfather was harsh, his mother died young, and Kamau went to live with his grandfather, a traditional healer, before walking off in 1909 to a Church of Scotland mission school at Thogoto. There he learned to read and write English, apprenticed as a carpenter, and was baptised Johnstone Kamau in 1914.
During the war his brother Kongo joined the British army and vanished; the family never learned his fate. Kenyatta avoided service by moving among the Maasai. Afterward he drifted through jobs in Nairobi until, in 1922, he became a stores clerk and meter reader for the city's water department. The wage was unusually high for an African, enough to lend money to European clerks and enjoy cinemas, football and British fashions.
Politics came through a friend in the Kikuyu Central Association, which sent him to London in 1929 to lobby over land. He stayed for years, studying in Moscow and at the London School of Economics, publishing a study of Kikuyu life in 1938 and spending the Second World War labouring on a Sussex farm. With George Padmore he helped organise the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester.
Back home he led the Kenya African Union, and in 1952 was arrested as one of the Kapenguria Six, accused of masterminding the Mau Mau uprising. He protested his innocence, a view later historians share, but spent years imprisoned and exiled. Freed in 1961, he led KANU to victory, became prime minister in 1963 and president the following year. Hailed as Mzee and father of the nation for preaching reconciliation, he also built a one-party state, suppressed dissent and was accused of favouring the Kikuyu and tolerating corruption. He died in office in 1978.
Source: Jomo Kenyatta
