Why Jomo Kenyatta was probably more communist than Jaramogi Oginga

Jomo Kenyatta and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. (Photo: File)

It has always been assumed that while Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was a communist sympathiser, his friend and later political rival Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was a diehard capitalist. But 40 years before they irredeemably fell out in 1969, Jomo himself was a journalist for the Communist Party.

In June 1929, 40-year-old Jomo Kenyatta - who had been sent to London by the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) to agitate for Gikuyu land rights - left London on a summer tour that took him West to Berlin, Hamburg, Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and Moscow in Russia, Odessa on the Black Sea and Constantinopole in Turkey.