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.

On his return to London, he wrote a long article for The Sunday Worker (on October 27, 1929), the official Communist Party newspaper in Britain. The headline was ‘Give Back Our Land’ and it included salient sentences like “discontent has always been rife among the natives; and will be so until they govern themselves”.

Communist correspondent

At some point that summer, probably in Moscow, Kenyatta had gone from being a mere Mugikuyu agitator for native land rights to a communist correspondent for a Soviet-sponsored newspaper.

The ideology of the communists – the overthrow of the capitalists (white settlers) so that the land could wholly go back to peasants (his native Gikuyu) – must have had a deep appeal.

Three months later, in January 1930, its Communist sister paper, The Daily Worker, published a second article describing Thuku riots in Nairobi as an African workers’ general strike.

Interestingly, the place where these deadly riots took place is the Harry Thuku Road, just adjacent to University Way, which has Anniversary Towers and has been the recent scene of anti-IEBC protests in Nairobi, complete with violent police action against demonstrators.

The caption beneath the author photograph of the article read as ‘Comrade Kenyatta’. Kenyatta seemed to have become a self-confessed, fully fledged communist.

The next time he met a concerned Drummond Shiels, the very capitalistic Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, the mzungu slyly said: “The Christian missionaries (some of whom were Jomo’s London sponsors) are unhappy with your writing for those newspapers because, you know, the communists are atheists. What were your impressions of Russia?”

Kenyatta gave a typical politician’s parrying non-answer: “It was very interesting, sir, but the towns were not as good as they are in England, or even France or Germany. The people in the streets also looked much poorer.”

Kenyatta returned to Kenya later in 1930 to find the Scottish missionaries enjoined in a serious quarrel with the Agikuyu over female circumcision, which the whites sought to abolish.

To the disappointment of the missionaries, ‘enlightened’ Jomo supported the Agikuyu position over the ‘civilised’ one. But Kenyatta was playing politics, and siding with the majority of his tribal natives, who were all for the female cut, or today’s female genital mutilation (FGM).

Meanwhile, a new muthirigu song that referred to Kenyatta as ‘our new king’ (the ultimate Uthamaki) incensed colonial authorities so much that they denied him licences to hold public (political) meetings.

The KCA decided that Jomo, alongside a gentleman called Parmenas Mockerie, had to challenge this mockery of civil rights at the joint Select Committee on Closer Union in London.

This was an era in Britain when all sorts of societies and unions proliferated the legal landscape – London Business Communities, cricket clubs, trade unions, dart teams, animal rights activists, stamp collectors’ societies, churches and suffragettes, and more than sufficient philanthropic charities.

On Tuesday April 28, 1931, the traditional Nyakinyua Dancers saw off the two men at the Nairobi Railway Station, on the Lunatic Line to Mombasa, then by ship to Britain.

None of the members of the dancing troupe could have known they would not see their king for another 15 years.

Once in London, as Mockerie went about preparing their petition, Jomo picked up on his old contacts and went about activities like a whirlwind – teaching at the Labour Party Summer Schools, lecturing to Fabian gatherings, travelling to Geneva, and of course writing for the Communist newspapers.

Land grievances

He enrolled at the Quaker College of Woodbrooke, Selley Oak, Birmingham (ironic for a Communist ‘atheist’) and lived there until March 1932.

On June 16, 1932, Kenyatta presented evidence on African land grievances before Sir Morris Carter who was head of a Commission coming to receive evidence and prepare a report – much like our current, unimplemented Ndungu Land Report.

Then in July of that year, Kenyatta, at the instigation of the West Indian radical socialist George Padmore, went to Moscow to train as a professional (violent) Communist radical, learn Marxism and the ideology of dialectics, as well as the struggle between the bourgeoisie capitalists (like the white settlers in Kenya) and the lumpen proletariat (the Kikuyu masses back home).

Jomo spent most of his days at the Revolutionary Institute in Moscow, receiving para-military training – presumably learning to do what Dedan Kimathi later did during the Mau Mau war of the 1950s.

But he also studied economics, especially planning, under the tutelage of former Politburo Secretary General of the Comintern Executive, Nikolai Bukharin, and would in decades to come prove to be much more of a capitalist economist than a socialist revolutionary.

He often visited Bukharin at the Lux Hotel where he and many current visiting and former Comintern (Communist International) members were housed in Moscow.

But in 1933, when Bukharin actively criticised Russia’s second Five Year Plan of Collectivisation, championed by the great dictator Josef Stalin, he fell out of total favour with the Soviet State.

And George Padmore, the West Indian who had convinced Jomo to come to Communist Russia in the first place, told the Kenyan it was time to show Moscow a clean pair of heels – before they found themselves in the gulags of Siberia as acolytes of Bukharin.

In fact, Bukharin would be imprisoned, then ‘purged’ (butchered) in Siberia five years later – under the direct orders of his former colleague, Comrade Stalin.

Be that as it may, Kenyatta was back in Britain by the August of that year.

Jomo was finally beginning to think like a nationalist, and not just a representative of the Kikuyu association, after his ‘World Communist’ experiences in Russia.