Jomo Kenyatta - Overseas

Overseas

In 1929 the KCA sent Kenyatta to London to lobby on its behalf with regards to Kikuyu tribal land affairs. Using the name Johnstone Kenyatta, he published articles and letters to the editor in The Times and the Manchester Guardian. He returned to Kenya on 24 September 1930 and was welcomed at Mombasa by his wife Wahu and James Beauttah. He then took part, on the side of traditionalists, in the debate on the issue of female genital mutilation of girls. He later worked for Kikuyu Independent Schools in Githunguri.

He returned to London in 1931 and enrolled in Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham. Discouraged by the lack of official response to the land claims he was putting forward, he began an association with British Communists, who published articles he wrote in their publications.In 1932 to 1933, he briefly studied economics in Moscow at the Comintern School, KUTVU (University of the Toilers of the East) but left after the Soviet Union (worried about Hitler's growing power and seeing Britain and France as potential allies) withdrew its support for the movement against British and French colonial rule in Africa.

In 1934, Kenyatta enrolled at University College London and from 1935 studied social anthropology under Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was an active member of the International African Service Bureau, a pan-Africanist, anti-colonial organization that had formed around former international communist leader George Padmore, who had also become disillusioned with the Soviet Union and himself moved to London. Kenyatta read the draft of the Kenya section of Padmore's new book, How Britain Rules Africa (1936) With the editorial help of an English editor named Dinah Stock who became a close friend, Kenyatta published his own book, Facing Mount Kenya (his revised LSE thesis) in 1938 under his new name, Jomo Kenyatta. The name "Jomo" is translated in English to "Burning Spear", while the name "Kenyatta" was said to be a reference to the beaded Masai belt he wore, and later to "the Light of Kenya". After the war, he wrote a pamphlet (with some content contributed by Padmore), Kenya: The Land of Conflict, published by the International African Service Bureau under the imprint Panaf Service.

During this period, Kenyatta was an active member of a group of African, Caribbean and American intellectuals who included Dudley Thompson, George Padmore, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, W.A. Wallace Johnson, Paul Robeson, and Ralph Bunche. During his presidency, a number of streets in Nairobi were named after those early black-emancipation intellectuals.

Kenyatta acted as an extra in the film Sanders of the River (1934), directed by Alexander Korda and starring Paul Robeson.

During World War II, he worked as a labourer at an English farm in Sussex, and lectured on Africa for the Workers' Educational Association.

In 1942, he married an Englishwoman, Edna Clarke. He also published My People of Kikuyu and The Life of Chief Wang'ombe, a history shading into legend. Edna gave birth to their son, Peter Magana, in 1943.

In 1945, with other prominent African nationalist figures, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Kenyatta helped organise the fifth Pan-African Congress held in Britain.

He left Edna Clarke behind in Britain when he returned to Kenya in 1946.