This is an undated photo in Maralal during Jomo Kenyatta’s restriction of 1959-1961.Mama Ngina had came to visit Mzee Jomo for conjugal exercises, something that is not allowed in Kenya even today. Kenyatta enjoyed that in 1959-1960.
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If you look keenly, the place looks like a 5 star hotel, why did the colonialist to do all this for an inmate? They even took photos for him to remember.
It is worth remembering that Kenyatta was not a maumau, he was actually against maumau. When he was arrested, he was teaching some college in Kiambu. Was the arrest part of the scheme by the colonialists to make their stooge a leader of Kenya? How Kenyatta behaved after independence should answer this question.
This is how Peter Abrams said of Kenyatta in 1959:
… Francis Nkrumah had quickly become a part of our African colony in London and had joined our little group, the Pan-African federation in our protests against colonialism.
He was much less relaxed than most of us. his eyes mirrored a burning inner conflict and tension. He seemed consumed by a restlessness that led him to evolve some of the most fantastic schemes.
The president of our federation was an East African named Johnstone Kenyatta, the most relaxed, sophisticated and “westernized” of the lot of us. Kenyatta enjoyed the personal friendship of some of the most distinguished people in English political and intellectual society.
…
We stopped at the old chief’s compound, where other members of the tribe waited to welcome me. By this time the reception committee had grown to a few hundred. About me, pervading the air, was the smell of burning flesh; a young cow was being roasted in my honor. before I entered the house a drink was handed to me. Another was handed to the old chief and a third to Kenyatta. The old man muttered a brief incantation and spilled half his drink on the earth as a libation. Jomo and I followed suit. Then the three of us downed our drinks and entered the house.
A general feasting and drinking then commenced, both inside and outside the house. I was getting a full ceremonial tribal welcome. the important dignitaries of the tribe slipped into the room in twos and threes, spoke to me through Kenyatta for a few moments, and then went away, making room for others.
“Africa doesn’t seem to change,” Kenyatta murmured between dignitaries. There was a terrible undercurrent of bitterness behind the softly murmured words. I was startled by it and looked at his face. for a fleeting moment he looked like a trapped, caged animal.
He saw me looking at him and quickly composed his face into a slightly sardonic humorous mask. “Don’t look too closely,” he said.
…
And then Kenyatta began to speak in a low, bitter voice of his frustration and of the isolated position in which he found himself. He had no friends. There was no one in the tribe who could give him the intellectual companionship that had become so important to him in his years in Europe.
The things that were important to him–consequential conversation, the drink that represented a social activity rather than the intention to get drunk, the concept of individualism, the inviolability of privacy–all these were alien to the tribesmen in whose midst he lived.
So Kenyatta, the western man, was driven in on himself and was forced to assert himself in tribal terms. Only thus would the tribesmen follow him and so give him his position of power and importance as a leader.
To live without roots is to live in hell, and no man chooses to live in hell. the people who could answer his needs as a western man had erected a barrier of color against him in spite of the fact that the taproots of their culture had become the taproots of his culture too.
By denying him access to those things which complete the life of western man, they had forced him back into the tribalism from which he had so painfully freed himself over the years.
None of this was stated explicitly by either Kanyatta or myself. But it was there in his brooding bitter commentary on both the tribes and the white settlers of the land.
For me Kenyatta became that night a man who in his own life personified the terrible tragedy of Africa and the terrible secret war that rages in it. He was the victim both of tribalism and of westernization gone sick.
His heart and mind and body were the battlefield of the ugly violence known as the Mau-Mau revolt long before it broke out in that beautiful land. The tragedy is that he was so rarely gifted that he could have made such a magnificent contribution in other circumstances.
Source: PETER ABRAHAMS ON NKRUMAH AND KENYATTA (1959) | reimagining (wordpress.com)
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Side note: Mzee alikuwa na ‘njaa’ sana, wanted to be left a lone