1 Aim

This essay searches out one man's sense of purpose, and through his thoughts, reconsiders three historical processes. The man is Jomo Kenyatta. Kenya's first prime minister, then first president, from 1963 until his death in 1978 at over the age of eighty, he has appeared in scores of works of history, politics, and memoir, and is superficially well known.

But he remains an enigma (Anon 1953); his thought has scarcely begun to be explored.  Our ignorance has bred a myth of his wanton, wily, political potency.  Kenyans have attributed his contradictions-saviour and devil, father of the nation and tribal despot-to divine or satanic agency.  Scholars have credited him with a cunning of his own.  A recent opinion epitomises the mix of admiration and suspicion he has aroused.  Summing up Kenyatta's fortitude-born into a culture that knew neither writing nor that the earth was round-Prunier remarks that he 'entered the strange and threatening world that enslaved him with a quite astonishing perseverance, courage and dishonesty' (1998: 138-9, emphasis added).  This essay proposes a straighter Kenyatta.  His authority, I argue, lay in the constancy with which he navigated the moral storms of modernity in quest of the responsible, canny, elderhood that his ancestors and posterity, no less than his allies and clients, expected of him.

            Kenyatta took seriously the modern world's subversion of social order.  His thought deserves a similar attention from us.  It gives insight into colonial Kenya's turbulence and then the country's relatively calm prosperity under his presidential sway.  The three challenges he faced were modernisation in general, religious change as one of its many ambiguities, and the composition of legitimate political authority in unsteady times.  Colonial conquest had thrust a form of modernity on him.  In religion and politics he sought to be his own master.  By his people's demanding cultural tradition his personal self-mastery required that he also make provision for dependants and allies.  Who 'his people' were was a hard question; the answers changed.  His own newly conscious Kikuyu ethnic group was not easily led, still less a yet more problematic Kenyan nation.  To build a world in which his people could exercise a moral agency of their own was however his constant ambition, his aid to navigation, his pole star.  That is not how he has been seen hitherto.

2          Enigma         
            British officials, settlers, missionaries, and many Kenyans too, thought Kenyatta a cynical Machiavelli.  They saw 'astonishing dishonesty' in three successive crises, religious, cultural, and political.  In each he first mastered, then seemed to repudiate, an aspect of modernity.  His youthful Christianity before the First World War was blasted twenty years later by his defence of supposedly cruel custom.  His middle-aged, urbane, political moderation was then betrayed by his presumed control of tribal terrorism.  In old age his integrity was destroyed by his dictatorial denial of the debt he was thought to owe to ordinary Kenyans, whose blood had been outpoured to put him in power.  Kenyatta has been seen, then, as a shifty modern Janus-one of his generation's most enlightened sons, always backsliding into the clutches of cruel tradition, murderous conspiracy and tribalist greed.

            In 1930, to take the first crisis, the Presbyterian lay missionary Dr John Arthur wanted to see his former pupil Kenyatta hanged.  Their church had decided to ban the rite of clitoridectomy for Christian daughters.  Kenyatta was thought to lead the resistance to this humane reform.  His previous Christian respectability made his perfidy the more wounding (Rosberg & Nottingham 1966: 121; Murray-Brown 1972: 139-44).  His white patrons never forgave him.  Their suspicions were confirmed in what looked to be a second phase of cultural conflict, in the late 1940s.  This time whites thought Kenyatta the westernised man had stirred up the witches' brew of Mau Mau.  He had studied in the Soviet Union, earned a diploma in anthropology at the London School of Economics, moved in pan-African circles antagonistic to tribalism, married an English teacher, lectured to white troops and made friends with Labour politicians.  He returned to Kenya in 1946 after sixteen years away.  In 1948 the British won his support for an unpopular census by appealing to his reputation as a man of science.[1]  Yet in the opinion of all Kenya's whites and of many Africans, Kenyatta went on to lead Mau Mau-a violent movement officially portrayed as mentally unhinged, bestial, and blasphemous.

            Whites thought Mau Mau a devilish development of all Kenyatta had learned from two of the west's most ambitious attempts to explain and master the modern world, anthropology and Marxism.  Kenya's governor justified his continued detention by referring to his scarily expert knowledge: 'With his Communist and anthropological training, he knew his people and was directly responsible [for Mau Mau].  Here was the African leader to darkness and death.'[2]  The novelist Ruark (1955: 8) called his romantic ethnography, Facing Mount Kenya, the book based on his diploma, 'an explicit blueprint for . . . terror'.  A missionary (Smoker 1994: 20-1) likewise thought the book had revived 'tribal prayers and sacrifices'.  A bishop saw Kenyatta as satanic, stirring up 'the "Black Mass" of Kikuyuism' (Beecher 1955: 206).  Legal officers could not decide if Mau Mau was an ancient barbarism or a local form of Nazism, modernity's most demonic political expression (KTT 1953: 839-40).

            Many Africans believed Kenyatta owed his presidency of independent Kenya to the self-sacrifice of Mau Mau guerrillas and the militancy of the nationalist 'left'.  Many then saw him as a greedy dictator who betrayed his people's trust.  He ignored the plight of landless Mau Mau veterans, smashed the socialists, and amassed wealth for his family, locality and tribe.  To critics, his presidency was a fitting conclusion to a cynical career.  Kenyan scholars discern two transfers of power at the end of empire-from the British to the nationalists and then from the nationalists as a whole to Kenyatta alone (Anyang' Nyong'o 1989: 230; Ogot & Ochieng' 1995: 94).  The one was the fruit of popular struggle, the other of murder and tribal intrigue.

            As a leader, Kenyatta was necessarily calculating, ambivalent, at times two-faced.  The successful practice of high politics demands an ability to fix deals between unequal localities and opposing interests; and compromise can look crooked.  Leaders are ineluctably an enigma to their clients, at times ruthless, too, when some supporters have to be placated at the expense of others.  My thesis is that there was nonetheless a principled core to Kenyatta's actions.  He held to a political theology-a term to be justified below-which steered his pursuit of authority.  A moral theory of patronage, it derived from his socially conditioned ambition to become a responsible elder.  His Kikuyu people were a frontier society, mobile, open to strangers-like other African peoples.  Their elders were self-made men, their practical wisdom learned in the relatively peaceable patronage of propertied production by a lively and litigious people-fellow owners, allies, clients, and servants (Lonsdale 1992; Kershaw 1997).  Theirs was not a bad foundation for Kenyatta's exploration of the compromised politics of modernity.

            If this thesis is to be judged to possess any utility or interest for the history of Kenya readers must be persuaded of two propositions.  The first is that it is useful to write intellectual biography at all-and feasible to do so in respect of a man who in his fifties had over a ton of private papers and books confiscated by the state, either to be lost thereafter or destroyed.  The second premise is that political theology may guide action.  For that to be credible one has to allow historians to imagine that the religious realm may for some people be a challenge, inviting them to lead lives of integrity and service.  Academic caution normally dictates the neutral premise that religion is a cognitive system of values, devoid of doubt and passion; and historians find it difficult to discern 'patriotism and public service' within, or behind, a more pervasive 'graft and interest' (Bayly 1998: 314).  This essay tries to do so, all the same.  The two exercises, biography and theology, are entwined.  Since it features so little in Kenya's historiography, it is helpful to take first the argument for pursuing a biography of Kenyatta's thought.

3          Biography    
            Biography is irrelevant to any broad historical analysis unless one accepts that individuals can produce socially effective thought.  Its practice therefore raises questions about relations between persons and society, action and structure, will and fate.  Public culture certainly moulds private ambition; one might therefore suppose that individual lives reflect rather than shape their world.  But one of Kenyatta's favourite sayings was 'there is no society of angels'; societies needed 'the morale and courage of individuals' if their 'social rules' were to be respected (1938: 119; KTT 1953: 884; Macdonald 1972: 256).  Waldo Emerson agreed: society was a 'conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members'; but it needed pushy nonconformists to keep it alive (1885: 41, 61).  Persons are everywhere socially embedded; in Kenyatta and Emerson's view, shared by social scientists, they nonetheless have the capacity to re-animate their world.  If their ideas are to move others they must be culturally intelligible; but that proviso does not dictate their message.  For all societies possess differently remembered pasts; they suggest contradictory lessons for the future, provide competing precepts of reform (McCaskie 2000).

            If human initiative is, then, socially structured but at the same time effective social action, a biographer may indeed say that individual intention has some bearing on social outcomes.  It follows that the loss of private source material may be made good, at least in part, by an understanding of the society which formed Kenyatta and which he, in turn, tried to lead.  Kikuyu moral discourse can illuminate enquiry into this one man's search for social authority.  Inference is a legitimate historical method.  Social resonance can repair some of the weaknesses in the evidence of one's chief witness.  The reciprocity of publicly uttered words and audience reaction can recreate a hermeneutics of ambition.  The best discussion of Kenyatta's political project after his return from Britain in 1946 relies more on knowing how as an elder he would have been judged in the moral thought of his peers than on any direct, documentary, evidence of his motives (Kershaw 1997: 199-201, 216-41).

            Few previous accounts of Kenyatta's role have been troubled by such problems.  His ideas were not thought to have historical force; his biography had no wider point.  Reasons for this neglect of the personal in the political have ranged from a romantic belief that nationalism is its own self-evident text, with little call for creative authors; through reluctance to probe the cultural roots of African politics for fear of seeming to estrange the 'native other' from a supposed western normality; to the materialist thesis that social and economic forces in any case speak louder than words.  Behind all these approaches stands a more strictly historical hypothesis-which is that for his allies Kenyatta's chief value lay in his very lack of partisan passion; just as his own good fortune lay in his absence from their disputes, for sixteen fabled years at the heart of the imperial beast in Britain and then nine of martyrdom in prison and restriction in the deserts of northern Kenya.  At successive crises of political division others could look to him to patch up a compromise between them, believing him to be nobody's stooge (Tamarkin 1978).

            None of these arguments for disregarding Kenyatta's thought can withstand the simple fact that these other leaders, with more combative energy than his, found that they had to attach themselves to a man whose oratory could sway crowds with the imaginative power that transmutes core social values into rousing political purpose.[3]  And even compromise, however short term an expedient, can stick only if it rests on an inclusive view of the longer term future.  Political vision can, to repeat, be creative social fact.  This essay argues therefore, contrary to the received view, that the relative success with which Kenyatta's Kenya travelled the rough seas of modernity proved his navigator's sense of strategic direction, not only-if also-his tactical skills of seamanship that kept the ship afloat.[4]

            The first historians of Kenya's nationalism seemed to have good reason to ignore Kenyatta's thought.  The British had believed him to be the brains behind a superstitious revolt against the challenge of modernity.  To scholars the problem was the official mind, not his.  Rosberg and Nottingham (1966: 216-20, 233, 238-9, 260-75, 279-85, 320-54) assumed that Kenyatta, like other African nationalists, aimed to create a pan-ethnic movement, to build a future nation; he held the normal nationalist ambition, to tame modernity's threats and control its benefits by taking power.  What needed analysis, then, was the colonial refusal to listen to reason.  British obduracy, they argued, had produced political impasse, caused Kenyatta to 'lose control' of his following, and incited Mau Mau's violence.  The latter arose from a British, not African, fear of change.  Spencer (1985: 81-3, 213-5, 221-35, 259-72) subverted that argument by showing that the militants had their own reasons to outflank Kenyatta, not least their mistrust of his urbanity, out of touch with ordinary people.  Throup's still more vigorous demolition of British misperceptions (1987 a: 52-3, 152, 127-30, 241-44, 272) made Kenyatta appear almost supine, alarmed by crowds, fearful of his militants, depressed and taking to drink.

            Neither the early nationalist historians nor their revisionist critics saw cause to discuss Kenyatta's ideas.  The question arises-if one accepts even half the revisionist case for doubting his strength of will-how far his post-colonial power stiffened his backbone.  Insofar as they have addressed the question, scholars have given ambivalent replies.  They have admitted that, by comparison with other African states, his regime did well in uniting progress and order (Fieldhouse 1986).  But Kenyatta himself is said to have done no more than swim with the tide of change, if with a personally profitable agility.  Malcolm Macdonald (1972: 253-6, 260-6), last colonial governor and first British ambassador to independent Kenya, set the tone for later scholars.  He knew the president personally but said little of his ideas.  To his own teasing query whether Kenyatta had 'a mixture of devil and angel' in him, Macdonald trotted out platitudes about his 'stern self-discipline' (over drink), 'strength of will', 'ripe sagacity' and magnanimity.  His one fault was a 'streak of tribal prejudice'.  Macdonald's appraisal of Kenyatta's purpose might have been enlightening had it not been so abrupt: a 'sense of mission to lead his followers from their past bondage to freedom and well-being.'  The 'sense of mission' was a shrewd insight, to which other scholars have paid little heed but which this essay develops.  Macdonald was astounded at how much Kenyatta was galvanised by power.  Scholars without the ex-governor's need for diplomatic caution have had still less feel for Kenyatta's ideas and have argued, moreover, that his energy lay only in dexterity, the amoral manipulation of patronage to mollify faction.

            Working in the late 1960s, when Kenya's politics seemed divided between right and left, Gertzel (1970) discussed ideas more fully than all but her most recent successors, but believed Kenyatta himself to be more trimmer than thinker.  Not until the 1990s did scholars again reckon his thought worth scrutiny.  Three very different books in the 1970s were on that point agreed.  Bienen (1974: 75-6) excused himself: 'The politics of family ties and intrigue at the court is a hard politics to analyze.'  Lamb (1974: 36) noted Kenyatta's use of ideology in factional skirmishes, but did not allow him one of his own; his support for private enterprise was seen as a 'striking affirmation of bourgeois virtues', as if there were no local virtues of equal pith.  Leys's influential account of Kenya as a western neo-colony (1975: 62, 98, 112-13, 219-21, 225, 246-9) held that unless intention could be inferred from Kenyatta's actions he was merely the unwitting partner of foreign capital.

            Kenyatta died in 1978; his cunning became the settled wisdom of the 1980s.  Jackson and Rosberg (1982: 77, 99) excluded him from the ranks of prophetic African rulers, those with 'radical vision and ideological faith', to cast him as a mere prince, 'an astute observer and manipulator of lieutenants and clients.'  Miller (1984: 36) also thought him 'a master politician . . . without ideological or deep philosophical intent'; for Throup (1987 b), his instinct was to feed factions and pamper clients with public resources.  As late as 1992 Widner (1992: 32, 53) still dismissed his 'personal predilections' as matter for speculation.  All these analyses seem to have assumed an unthinking congruence between modernisation and nationalism or, later, between patronage and development.  It took three journalists to give Kenyatta's thought some independent weight in bringing about such productive politics; they had to become their own historians, searching out the primary sources for themselves, to do so (Delf 1961; Murray-Brown 1972; Arnold 1974).

            Only in recent years have Kenyan scholars begun to accept that the realm of political thought may be to some extent causative in the factious field of political action (Atieno Odhiambo 1988; Ngunyi 1995).[5]  Kenyatta's Kenya needed a moral basis, no less than artfulness in intrigue.  This was as true of the younger Kenyatta, the political activist, as of the older Kenyatta, man of power.  I would agree that, as president, Kenyatta created an 'ethnic feudalism', such as he had long imagined; but to visualise that future he had to be more than Prunier's 'Kikuyu peasant, wily, suspicious and grasping' (1998: 133, 139).  That stereotype of any old peasant, anywhere, may well be true of Kenyatta but misses the point.  It was the aspiration to eldership which gave moral shape to the Kikuyu peasant world.  To find the connection between implicit ambition and explicitly creative action, or inaction, remains the challenge.  Political theology may provide a key, unlocking the door of Kenyatta's triple confrontation with modernity.

4          Modernity    
            By modernity I mean the human effects of the expansion of markets in goods, labour or knowledge, and of the growing power of states over people, in the past two centuries (Giddens 1990).  Colonialism was the drill sergeant of east Africa's forced march in modernity, although social mobility and trade had always marked the region's history.  Larger markets have loosened the obligations and protections of local communities, and reworked their inner inequalities.  State power-which was new to east Africa outside the Great Lakes region-has unevenly offered greater opportunity and unevenly imposed new demands.  For most people the core of modernity has been the unsettling sense of a greater vulnerability to impersonal, unreachable, forces and the need to repose more trust in the good will of expert strangers.

            Kenyatta came to this bleak crux of moral unknowing from a particular and precious locality of social facts and figments, as do we all.  In his view-the common view-modernisation was a monster of social disruption.  His sensitivity was more bruised than that of most Europeans, his ethnic locality more venerated as a redemptive might-have-been in consequence.  To him, an African colonial subject, modernity was an alien invasion.  His British rulers added to this injury the insult of proclaiming that modernity, their public project, was also their own defining virtue.  Africans should learn to be like them.  Africans were not powerless to resist the colonial attempt to control their lives and minds, but even to adapt elements of modernity to their own use was to risk discord.  The advantages conferred by new knowledge or markets were as morally disruptive as new state oppressions.  Kenyatta believed that both cut people off from the censorious guidance of their local humanity.  In this he voiced a general opinion.

            Kikuyu elders felt the world was falling apart.  Kenyatta attributed their moral panic to a familiar litany of ritual amnesia, social disorder, personal failure.  'Religious rites and hallowed traditions are no longer observed by the whole community.  Moral rules are broken with impunity, for in place of unified tribal morality there is now . . . a welter of disturbing influences, rules and sanctions, whose net result is that a Gikuyu does not know what he may or may not, ought or ought not, to do or believe, but which leaves him in no doubt at all about having broken the original morality of his people' (1938: 251).[6]  Kenyatta agreed with the elders; married, with two children, by the 1930s he was one of them.  He defined his purpose accordingly: to select from modernity with care, so that his people could 'go forward with stability' (Muoria Mwaniki 1947: 2).  It was a moral, even religious, project, to recreate his people's 'morality'.

5          God   
            To make good the argument that Kenyatta followed a political theology requires preliminary discussion.  As an early mission adherent he could scarcely avoid thinking in Christian images.  If so, how could he possibly reconsider his people's 'original morality'?  It is not easy to answer; three uncertainties loom.  The evidence for religious change, from any 'traditional religion' to Christianity, is tainted.  Earlier Kikuyu moral and religious thought was almost certainly in flux, not intrinsically 'traditional'.  And some scholars doubt that Africans could ever speak with their own voice in a new Christian imagery.  One can do little more than acknowledge the importance of the first two issues while failing to resolve them.  But there can be no doubt that Kenyatta made the contested realm of the Christian word his own, fitted to a moral purpose that tutored his politics (cf Landau 1985).

            First, then, the questions of modern African religious change and the evidence by which to assess it.  What happened and how can we know?  In Europe modernity has brought disenchantment; the rational providence of enlightenment has become, for many, the new divine purpose (Giddens 1990: 48); nationhood offers a teleological equivalent for religion (Anderson 1983).  But one must be careful; religious text and ritual have framed the imaginations of nationhood, even in Europe (Hastings 1997).  What then of Africa?  In the continent's encounter with modernity there may well have been as much religious enchantment as disenchantment, despite Kenyatta's dismay.  In some parts of Africa, many may have moved from a past of reasoned moral knowledge to a new era of religious belief (Beidelman 1986; James 1988; Ruel 1996; Lonsdale 2000 b).  It is difficult to say with certainty, on two grounds, the difficulty of generalisation and the sources of evidence. 

            Africa's religious changes defy generality.  Her native cosmologies, insofar as they are historically recoverable, were not only varied, they were as subject to change as any other tradition of thought.  Prophetic possession was a medium of God's revelation in some; quasi-priestly orders of diviners and mediums gave oracular guidance in others; yet others reposed trust in knowledge of natural forces and communion with ancestors.  Competition within and between all forms of truth-searching stimulated religious change, not unrelated to contests of secular power (van Binsbergen 1981; Chidester 1992: ch 1; Schoffeleers 1992).  The impact of the religions of the book has been equally diverse.  Different Christianities arrived, varied Islamic practice too.  Neither Islam nor Christianity was received in its entirety-if theologians could agree on what makes them whole.  Africans made their own meanings out of each.  Kenyatta deplored this fragmentation above all.  The old religion, he presumed, had once united Kikuyu life.  By the 1930s this 'religion of tribal unity' was in tatters.  'Now part of the people are Christians, Moslems, or merely "detribalised," having no religion at all' (1938: 251).

            Kenyatta's concern sprang from a conviction that religion shaped social identity.  Without God there could be no community, only 'detribalisation', a disorder he despised.  But his sense of religious decay, from unifying practice to fragmented belief and 'no religion at all', may have stemmed from Christian premise rather than Kikuyu experience.  It is arguable that Kikuyu, with other African peoples who have adopted Christianity, moved in a direction other than the one he feared.  They did not advance in religious unity, he was right there; they received several mission societies, founded diverse churches of their own.  But, far from losing religion, many may have met it for the first time, adding personal faith to an existing moral knowledge (James 1988).  There may have been a religious enchantment of the Kikuyu mind.  Or there may not.  We cannot know if Kenyatta's certainty that religion shaped society was Kikuyu in origin, or Christian, or both.  Our evidence is scarcely such as to support any firm conclusion (Shaw 1990; Landau 1999).

            Our witnesses to religious transition are its self-interested protagonists, missionaries and converts.  They represented Kikuyu cosmology in contrary ways, but always as 'religion', with beliefs about God set out so as to suggest oppositions and likenesses to Christianity.  Conservative Christians condemned African beliefs as false, the work of Satan after man's fall.  Liberal missionaries visualised Africans as seeking God's truth, but dimly, lacking the light of revelation (cf Smith 1950).  Among the latter were Presbyterian Scots, to whose door the orphan Kenyatta came.  Missionaries had good reason to conceive African ideas of the unseen as religious in nature.  They sought a mutually intelligible discourse with Africans-to present conversion as either repentance or enlightenment, not as apostasy.  They also saw their own mission vocation as providential, fulfilling in Africa a sacred history of humankind's fall and redemption.  They thus set out their own faith, like Paul before the Athenians, as the revelation of one who for Africans had hitherto been a remote, half-hidden God; and, if they were liberals, saw African religion as a divine preparation for the Word.

            It has been persuasively argued, however, that in some parts of Africa missionaries introduced the very idea of 'religious belief' (Ruel 1996; Landau 1999).  The question is whether Kikuyuland was one of them.  The evidence is slim and inferential, not conclusive, but it seems that Kikuyu had a history of both moral and theological enquiry, concerning both virtuous behaviour and divine power (Leakey 1977: 1075-1277; Lonsdale 1992: 332-46; Kershaw 1997: 13-83; Peterson 2000).  Their moral order rested on the dutiful labour that converted forest wilderness into cultivated, cropped, civilisation.  The gulf between nature and culture permeated their thought.  Spirited sweat could domesticate hostile nature.  It needed discipline.  Life was risky, reproduction a gamble.  Ritual practice rested on a strict segregation of materials, the clean and fertile from the hot and devouring.  What missionaries called 'sacrifice' was often, it seems, the use of life-giving animal blood or stomach contents to cleanse people whenever they foolishly overstepped the frontier between benevolent and malevolent matter in the course of daily life.  The moral norms of this cultural struggle were stern.  Juniors must render obedience; elders must encourage effort with reward.  Leaders were known by their domestic management, their persuasion of otherwise fractious households to provide prosperity for kin and dependants, and a propertied future for the unborn.  Without such lineal continuity ancestors lost touch with the living; and the moral world was destroyed (Kenyatta 1938: 76, 175, 263-8, 315). 

            For all the self-sufficient coherence of their moral knowledge, Kikuyu knew of a transcendent being it seems entirely apt to call 'God' (Kibicho 1978).  He seems to have been subject to theological speculation even if, as Kenyatta said, Kikuyu had no priests to teach doctrine (1938: 241), nor texts on which to meditate.  For God was variously named, each name connoting a different attribute: power, or brightness, or the distributor of gifts.  The most recent name for divinity appears to have been Ngai, a concept borrowed from the pastoral Maasai, the most intimate 'others' to Kikuyu-raiders of stock and women, trading partners, suppliers of wives.  God may have been, above all, the guarantor of trust in the wider world of trans-ethnic relations (cf Horton 1971); as well as a power of last resort, to whom what was indeed sacrifice was sometimes made, proof of earnestness in what was indeed prayer.  Ngai was adopted into an animal class of nouns, neither male nor female, not a person but a power, not easily grasped.  When missionaries discerned a Kikuyu religion, worship of God, there is then no proof that they were wrong, however much their calling predisposed them to see faith where there may have been none.  They may well have clothed in clearer doctrinal dress the implicit, eclectic, and locally variable, nature of Kikuyu moral knowledge and the religious uncertainty inherent in the animal Ngai.  It is this rather precise aspect of the encounter that we can now never know.

            We can however know what Kenyatta made of his Christian learning, even if we cannot tell how much it affected his perception, or misperception, of his people's 'original morality' and its socially cohesive religious root.  All his writings and speeches, over forty years, are shot through with biblical diction.  Of itself that proves nothing.  The bible is a book of heroic stories and prudent proverbs, enigmatic prophecies and improving tales-the repertoire of any oral culture.  With bible portions as the first Kikuyu texts in print the Christianisation of the vernacular could as well be called its modernisation.  Does that mean that Christianity became Kikuyu?  Or that Kikuyu Christian speech was denatured, alienated, deprived of its native vigour?  Or that oral culture's eclecticism left people free, as before, to argue their case within the flux of a continuing moral debate, in a language already full of loanwords and a borrowed God?  The last interpretation seems best to fit the evidence; which also means that Christianity did indeed become Kikuyu.  But that is to anticipate, since to explore what Africans first thought of Christianity is to find oneself in a maze of cross-fertilising images, local and biblical (Lonsdale 1992: 370-73 for Kikuyu instances).  In the middle of the maze there sits a question: were Africans colonised in their consciousness by western modernity in its still enchanted, Christian, guise; or did they use the west's ideological imports to enter into a more equal dialogue not just with white colonialism, a historical contingency, but also with modernity, their more general fate?  One's answer is crucial to resolving the Kenyatta enigma.

            Scholars offer two broad views, within an historiographical dialogue on the culture of Africa's Christian encounters.  On one side of the argument Christianity is said to have hallowed a wider western hegemony, thanks to its arrival in most parts of Africa at a time when the west was dominant in all else.  And hegemony-unquestioned mastery-would seem to be the right term when one recalls that even resistance to the west was at its most effective when Africans used their colonizers' Christian idiom.  African nationalisms argued against the west in its own, formerly religious, narrative of a fallen past and redeemable future; even African Marxisms were no more than a Christian heresy.  Christianity was even more seductive as a narrative of human destiny when it was embodied in the western cultural practices that missionaries taught as normal daily life.  Demure respectability was allied to the explanatory force of western science no less than to alien bureaucratic and coercive power.[7]  The Christian, western, capacity to 'colonize the African mind' lay here, it has been said, in the uncontrived, organic, 'elective affinity' of its overall common front (Comaroffs 1991, 1997).

            The other way to tackle the question is to disaggregate the western impact and its African reception.  Africans used Christian insights, it is true, to challenge the modernising, 'developmental', case for the colonial seizure of black labour and land.  Africans also used the Word as a means to claim their share in a universal Christian self-respect.  Hegemonic western ideas were indeed the most effective critique of western colonial rule.  But Africans first used Christian authority against each other, to reinforce or challenge existing power.  The faith often spread as an indigenous healing cult, addressing local fears of evil, far from mission influence, let alone control.  When the bible came out in local vernaculars, translated as much by black intellectuals as by white missionaries, Africans found themselves as close to the word of God as those who had brought it.  They found in the old testament their own religious past; in the Israelites' sorrows and triumphs a redemptive colonial parable for themselves; in the new testament a discursive quarry for debating their own issues of custom-the 'law'-and freedom.  Colonial regimes, thinking God to be on their side, could be more alarmed by African religious enthusiasm than by political opposition.  A hegemony reliant on a fickle Holy Ghost had reason to be nervous (Fields 1985; Gray 1990; Karanja 1999; Landau 1995; Lonsdale 1992: 383-4; Peterson 1996; Ranger 1986; Sanneh 1989).

            One approach emphasises Africans' narrative inequality (Hymes 1996) in face of hegemonic conquest by Christianity and western power.  Africans could speak intelligibly to whites only in Christian voices and even then were rarely heard; and followed whites in the mute, material, refashioning of domestic, every-day, decency.  The other approach allows more room for the possibility, indeed probability, that Africans could win narrative equality in an ideological contest of power and freedom in which colonial rule could not begin to live up to its professedly Christian, liberating, claims.  Hypocrisy could not for long support hegemony.

            Such issues of interpretation are often evaded via the professional escape-hatch called historical contingency: in which all cases differ.  But they force one to square up to the enigma of Kenyatta; and his biography suggests contingency is too easy an exit from controversy.  His experience supports the view that Africans achieved narrative equality with Europeans, in their own minds if not in white opinion.  His special case makes a general point.  It suggests that Africans worked up the discursive vigour to take on their white teachers and officials in first arguing among themselves, within the localities which modernity threatened but did not erase.  They argued out new moral economies for more self-conscious ethnic identities, in a world as ineluctably modern as it was fortuitously colonial.  Christians among them had to show that their new loyalty was part of the answer to moral panic, not the problem.  Their polemical use of the west's ideas, even their enthusiasm for its material culture, gave a new edge to old rivalries couched in local terms.  Africans competed between themselves to tame colonial modernity before they protested to whites; intellectual colonizers as much as colonized subjects, using new ideas to defend new visions of locality, their internal arguments governed their oppositions to colonial rule.  Kenyatta had to build up a Kikuyu authority before he could deploy it against the British.  He had to prove himself a man of 'morale and courage' in local estimation first.  From this observation another point follows, as general, again, as it is specific.

            Christianity has many meanings; it is critical to know what Kenyatta made of a universal faith which also sacralises the local (Sanneh 1989; Hastings 1997).  In Africa, as elsewhere, Christianity bore this dual character.  For many Africans Christianity became a new language of trust in a strange, mobile, larger, world (Taylor 1955: 69-70; Ruel 1997: 192-201).  Its universal message also held out hope; a global God should open the door of a racially secluded modernity.  White refusal to open the door of equality kindled in many Africans the first fires of nationalism.  But Africa remains a continent of localities (Iliffe 1995: 250, 256).  And it was here, in his own, the locality of Kikuyuland, that Kenyatta felt most driven to duty-for all his stylish representation of 'Africa' in London's imperial political theatre.

            Kenyatta enjoyed and used Christian universalism, but was most fully engaged by the way its imagery clarified questions of local obligation.  Here he took a particular stand which distinguished him from others, unlettered conservatives on the one hand, full Christian converts on the other.  For him as for many others in oral cultures, religious change meant adding new ritual and explanation to an existing archive, not conversion to a new world view.  New belief was rarer than adhesion to new mission practice.  A convinced minority of Christians trusted in the 'good news' of the gospel, enough to challenge the household ritual order (Karanja 1999).  Kenyatta was not among them, perhaps because he was an orphan.  He did not cast out his ancestors in exchange for the grace of God.  Kikuyu Christian differences in part reflected their missions' denominational divisions.  American Baptists, for instance, believed African life was ruled by Satan; were convinced of the imminence of Christ's second coming; and wished to save souls rather than train minds or leaders (Sandgren 1989: 17-25; but see Morad 1997).  Presbyterians and Anglicans took a liberal view of Kikuyu religion if deploring many customs; aimed to raise 'the whole man', to educate and instil self-government in local parishes.  Roman Catholics interfered little in matters of custom and conviviality; they were neither satanic nor essential to faith.  Missionaries, in sum, were divided on whether the old God, Ngai, was Christ's father; how far Christ demanded moral reform or cultural revolution, or if soap was needful for salvation.  (Bottignole 1984; Casson 1998; Karanja 1999; Lonsdale 2000 b; McIntosh 1969; Murray 1974; Njoroge 1999; Strayer 1978; Ward 1976).

            Kikuyu well knew these missionary differences.  Their young shuttled between them looking for a better school or an easier respectability.  But Kenyatta's views were not simply derived from liberal mission teaching.  He worked them out himself, helped by his experience as founding editor, in 1928, of the Kikuyu Central Association's (KCA's) monthly newspaper, Muigwithania, 'The Reconciler', the first Kikuyu-owned journal.[8]  Excited 'readers' used it as a debating society.  Kenyatta's editorial line used Christian insights to create Kikuyu unity and pressed a progressive ethnic identity, in order then to project it on to the widening modern world.  He urged the need to learn from Europeans; praised missions as cattle-kraals, protective of Kikuyu wealth against (white settler) hyenas; echoed missionaries in pleading for literates to 'have done with trifling' and invest their earnings at home rather than waste them on town trivia.  He published letters which argued that the water of baptism could not wash away one's tribe; or urged Kikuyu to follow Christ's advice not to worship urban idols and, instead, to emulate the prodigal son, return to their ancestral home, to do their duty and claim their rights.  Readers saw themselves as irungu, the cyclical 'straighteners' of Kikuyu moral economy, what each successive new ritual generation had called itself since time began.  They took themselves to be renovating their own society, not reverencing the west.  Christianity was the answer to moral panic, binding the wounds of modernity.  The bible, telling of a small tribe at the centre of history, also inspired them to counter-attack, to project on the world's stage the modern normality of their own particular ethnicity.[9]

            Kenyatta hoped Christianity would renew what historians think to be an entirely fictive Kikuyu unity.  But he did not warm to Christ the man.  The only time Kenyatta named him (that I have discovered) he did not in fact do so.  Rather, he referred his readers to Galatians  6: 2, in urging them to cooperate, irrespective of religion or mission denomination.[10]  He did however gain a more personal God.  In his ethnography, Facing Mount Kenya, published ten years later, he was to maintain that Ngai took no interest in individuals save at the life-crises of birth, initiation, marriage and death-and then only if the person's 'family group' were all involved in the ritual (1938: 234-6). But before he sailed to London early in 1929 he asked his Muigwithania readership to pray for him as an individual.  And when it came to telling a wider world about Kikuyu origins in his book, Ngai the animal power became in that context a personal Mogai, if still 'the Mogai', as if Kenyatta were not quite sure (1938: 3-4).  He seems to have used both religious traditions, Kikuyu and Christian, to give him some critical distance from each.  He redefined Ngai, not as Christ's father, as liberal missionaries did, but at least as a person, somewhere in between.  His politics followed suit.

6          Political theology   
            Nationalisms embody religious hope disguised as political purpose.  Whether ethnic or civic, they imagine a named population to be something more, a community joined by duty to past, present and future (Anderson 1983; Hastings 1997).  Kenyatta did not have to be told this; he knew it in his bones.  He proved that in five short lines, the triple dedication in his book, Facing Mount Kenya-in which direction elders occasionally prayed to Ngai.  He offered his work, first, to 'Moigoi and Wamboi'.  His parents, these were also his children.  He saw to it that his baptized, Christian-named, offspring honoured the tradition of renewing the life, and names, of their grandparents.  It was by their household disciplines that Kikuyu leaders were known, as he repeatedly said (1938: 9, 11, 76, 175, 194-5, 265, 310, 315-16).  After his household he invoked, next, 'the dispossessed youth of Africa'.  Some Kikuyu had lost land to white settlers.  Kenyatta feared that this deprived them of ancestral guidance (1938: 213; Kershaw 1997: 176); the general tenor of his book suggests he had a more pervasive spiritual pauperisation in mind.  Lastly, he called for 'perpetuation of communion with ancestral spirits through the fight for African Freedom, . .  in the firm faith that the dead, the living and the unborn will unite to rebuild the destroyed shrines' (1938: v).  Kikuyu call freedom wiathi; it meant self-mastery first.  Kenyatta's dedication, thus contextualised, set the recovery of self-mastery, and land, within a wider political freedom, to attain which Africans must revive the disciplines that once ruled their households and reproduced ancestral generations past in unborn generations yet to come.  It was a conservative call for the reform of morals as a condition of sovereignty.  Malcolm Macdonald was to recognise the same deeply nationalist vision in president Kenyatta, thirty years on.

            But why did Kenyatta adopt this language?  There is no record of man-made shrines in the Kikuyu past.  Rather, on his and others' accounts Kikuyu saw the landscape itself as numinous.  There were sacred groves, oracular caves, God's mountain seats; 'sacrificial units', bounded by the rivers that furrow Kikuyuland; or areas linked by the rekindled fires of crop-purification (Kenyatta 1938: 38, 190, 233-4, 236, 245, 256; Leakey 1977: 1075-1119).  Kenyatta catalogued the sacrifices and prayers that elders conducted under sacred fig-trees.  Sacrilegious white farmers had felled many when clearing their alienated land (Kenyatta 1938: 245, 249-50).  And yet these trees, he observed in plagiarising the first book-length account of Kikuyu life, were analogous to churches, the 'House of God' (1938: 236; Routledges 1910: 226). 

            Kenyatta had adopted the missionary discourse of 'religion'; which is why one may write of his political theology rather than political morality.  In explaining his religious heritage to others and, it is fair to suppose, to himself, he could do no better than transcribe it into Christian images, to create his God in between.  He reflected on his people's behaviour with the aid of ideas not their own.  Trees became shrines or churches, nature something man could rebuild in his political imagination.  The self-reflective and systematic (re)ordering of one's culture and its narratives is one of the gifts of literacy, however much oral performance also requires critical insight.  In Kenyatta, as in many others, self-reflection was aided by his getting 'outside' his 'inside' knowledge, thanks to his experience of the dislocation and distancing that comes with modernity (Giddens 1990: 36-45)-which in his case led to an ideological training in Moscow and a London university diploma.

            But Kenyatta was scarcely colonised in mind.  Taken outside himself, given a critical distance from his own culture, enlightened, would all be better terms.  By the time he wrote Facing Mount Kenya, in the 1930s, he had long lost any Christian enthusiasm.  The Church of Scotland Mission (CSM) had disowned him after his clash with them over 'female circumcision', discussed below.  Whenever after 1930 he was publicly asked his religion he always denied church membership, always asserted his Christianity.  Yet Christians remained a small minority of Kikuyu until the 1960s.  It was as if he were laying claim to a future unity while deploring existing fragmentation.  And in his discussion of Kikuyu religion his mission teaching, with its scriptural expositions, continued to nag him as the comparative case to answer.

            Kenyatta analysed Kikuyu religion under three main heads, the nature of God, how he could be known, how people should live in consequence.  He agreed with liberal missionaries that for his forebears God, Ngai, was the creator of all life, immanent in nature; but also remote, aloof, not well known: he was subject to no doctrinal teaching (1938: 233-4, 241; Barlow n.d.).  Kenyatta looks, however, to have placed more trust than either missionaries or his ancestors in prophetic claims to know the mind of Ngai.  Kikuyu, no less than missionaries, seem to have viewed prophets, arathi, with scepticism.  Kongo wa Magana, Kenyatta's grandfather and a recognised prophet, had had to choose his words with care, since he risked death if proven false.  The only two arathi noted by early British officials were said to have founded short-lived cults, which suggests that most people scoffed at their believers.  Yet in Facing Mount Kenya Kenyatta gave one of the few named historical actors, the prophet Mugo (or Chege) Kibiru, a central, 'national', role in preparing his people to endure the ordeal of colonial modernity.  They must be disciplined, self-reliant, and learn.  He could have been out of the Old Testament, an Elijah, Jeremiah or Ezekiel; he could have been the voice of a personal, knowable, Mogai (Kenyatta 1938: 242-3, 41-4; Lonsdale 1995: 243-4).

            But what had God to do with behaviour, a vital question for political theology?  Kenyatta was ambivalent.  Ngai was uninterested in individuals; regular prayer was dangerous; 'Ngai must not needlessly be bothered.'  Even should a child die, 'Ngai must never be pestered.'  In sickness he was a God of last resort.  Medical treatment was tried first.  If that failed a diviner was consulted: perhaps an ancestor was angry.  If atonement failed, and only when the whole family, living and dead, were assembled for sacrifice, did they turn to God, assuring him that they had 'exhausted all other means' (1938: 236-40).  Yet this aloof God, Kenyatta asserted, 'loves or hates people according to their behaviour.' (233)  Kikuyu elders must have been shocked to hear of the Christian God's offer of undeserved grace for penitent sinners; it must have sounded morally idle, a needless pestering of Ngai.  But then, Kenyatta made no mention of sin; missionaries thought Kikuyu did not know the concept (Barlow: n.d.).  It was too personal.  It did not take account of the world of external powers, natural or social, that affected one's fate.  Kenyatta stressed, instead, that Kikuyu 'belief' was 'a matter of social experience of the things that are most significant to human life (1938: 316, emphasis added).'

            Here one can begin to resolve the contrast between God's remoteness and his interest in human behaviour.  The things 'most significant to human life' were land and lineage.  Land, said Kenyatta, was 'the "mother" of the tribe, . . . the most sacred thing above all that dwell in or on it.'  To cultivate the soil supplied both material needs and 'spiritual and mental contentment'; it 'nurse[d] the spirits of the dead for eternity.' (21)  Land was lineage commonhold, devolved to household property.[11]  Like land, life was a continuous cycle.  Death was not an end; it began an ancestral career.  How far people were reborn in their grandchildren was a matter of speculation but the worst fate for any ancestral spirit was the extinction of their living line of descent.  Kenyatta went so far as to say that 'the main principal' [sic] of marriage was the provision of heirs to commune with the lineage's dead (13-14).  Married sex was a sacred reproductive duty (cf Bernardi 1993).

            What joined land and lineage was a stern theology of abundance.  In Kenyatta's view productive human labour pleased God; it supported life and promised the future reproduction of civilisation.  Fruitful labour required social order; order proved ancestral approval.  Elders should commune with ancestors more than they prayed to God, for obedient human effort was the best agent of God's benevolence.  This was the disciplined behaviour God loved; its absence he hated (1938: 263-8).  Religions rooted in stewardship of land always have demanding moral regimes (Brueggeman 1996).  Kikuyu knew that; sometimes they prayed to Ngai the great elder, strict household manager (Kenyatta 1938: 81-2, 246-7).  In his Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta may even have understated the degree to which honest effort was drilled into each generation.  For while sweat brought blessing, fortune was fickle, even for the deserving.  It was always difficult to know from whence misfortune came.  An ancestor may have been offended, or a neighbour prompted to take jealous recourse to sorcery, or carelessness cause transgression of the rules of purity.  The chief defence against further disaster was a resolute optimism of the will.  It did not do to dwell on past evil.  To trust that toil would be duly rewarded was as good for the poor client, in expecting his right to self-mastery to be endowed by his patron, as it was for the patron himself, whose mental labour of management was his title to civic virtue (Kershaw 1997: 15-18, 75).  Kenyatta's theology of patronage, its encouragement to clients to sweat before the God of abundance, grew out of harsh history.

7          Leadership   
            Kenyatta believed religious decline, and the modern divorce of waged ambition from local duty, weakened social cohesion and political energy.  Yet all societies needed leadership, the creation of which is the third process his biography illustrates.  Societies not made up of angels, as he said, relied on 'the morale and courage of individuals' to keep them in order-and not least in the choppy backwash of modernity.  Renewal must come from within.  This viewpoint had severe implications for his canons of political responsibility, ethnic and national; it made it difficult for him to overrule division, of which there was plenty.  Scrupulous hesitation in large part explains his enigmatic reputation.

            Kenyatta's 'people of Kikuyu', subject to a colonial regime itself lorded over by white settlers, had urgent need of effective power.  But common subjugation did not unite them behind 'social rules', it never does.  They split between resistance to alien modernities, subsidiary alliance with white power, and resolutely independent exploitation of the advantages the west had brought.  Like others, Kenyatta shuttled between these principled options, in widening arenas, with changing allies.  The search for authority divided Kikuyu.  It divided black Kenyans still more.  A desire to capture modernity for their own good fired their nationalism.  They agreed on little else.  Nationalism sharpened the dilemmas of African authority.  This had to be composed out of competing interests in different localities.  In Kenyatta's view-and this is vital-each locality deserved its own moral autonomy, to be responsible to its own ancestors, to obey its own theology of abundance.  His was not a politics of ethnic difference but of moral equivalence,

            Self-mastery, wiathi, was the sole authority for public action.  This I take to be Kenyatta's pole star.  Kikuyu religion may not have been a system of 'belief', but it had become one retrospectively, by the 1930s, in dialogue with Christianity.  It authorised a strict political theology.  Kenyatta's God remained Ngai, aloof and grudging of grace.  Ngai helped only those who had 'exhausted all other means'; who had done their duty to their ancestors, dependants and successors.  In the 1920s Kenyatta had put it more succinctly in his newspaper's motto, 'work and pray'-in that order-than in his book.  After his return from Britain in 1946 he urged audiences not to trust all to God but to respect their parents-which meant hard work (Muoria Mwaniki 1947: 8).  As Kenya's president in the 1960s he rounded on his socialist critics with the same advice, 'there are no free things'.  That was a Kikuyu proverb; Kenyatta's political theology was scarcely new.  It was also consistent (Murray-Brown 1972: 321), his constant guide to 'progress with stability'.  It had three implications for the leader of any territorial African nationalism.  Scholars have yet to take them sufficiently seriously.

            First, Kenyatta's insistence on self-mastery as the title to leadership required the critical approval of a community with censorious ancestors.  'It is the culture which he inherits', he wrote in London, 'that gives a man his human dignity as well as his material prosperity.  It teaches him his mental and moral values and makes him feel it worth his while to work and fight for liberty (1938: 317).'  Cultural communities were God's earthly agents.  Those defeated by modernity were those without religion.  In his view only Ngai's followers-including Muslims and Christians-remained true Kikuyu.  It might be nearer to historical experience to say that they became Kikuyu, for African ethnicities owe much to the self-reflective internal discourse with which their members have come to terms with modernity.  Complex and contingent, ethnicity represents neither a continuity of inherited, primordial identities (contrary to Kenyatta's view) nor, in origin, an instrument of political competition with other localities.  Many causes of self-imagination have entwined.  The acquisition of vernacular literatures, the bible especially; the oscillating exile of migrant labour; the exploitation of wider markets or state power that prompted the renegotiation or repudiation of old social reciprocities; scandalous new forms of dress and domesticity.  All caused Africans to rethink rights and duties in a wider arena than household or clan.  They had to conjure from out of their former, less reflective, moral economies of gender and generation a new 'moral ethnicity' in which their new powers, opportunities, stories, had an honourable place, against the disbelief of their elders.  This is what made Muigwithania 's inter-generational discourse of religious change so exciting (Lonsdale 1992, 1994, 1996 a & b, 1998).

            The second implication of Kenyatta's political theology was that one could, and should, do rather little for fellow Africans outside one's own moral community.  By the 1940s Kenyans well knew that some groups were more clerical and commercial, politically more aggrieved and active, than others.  For a political party to claim to represent all ethnicities risked the arrogation of too much power to vanguard groups and the denial to others of their own duty of self-defence, owed to God, their land, and their ancestors.  Kenyatta saw ethnic virtue as a bastion of social order; the detribalised were mischief-makers, not future Kenyans.  'The rest of the community' were disgusted by them, crying that 'the white man had spoiled and disgraced our country.'  What was the answer?  Schooling must turn from undermining to supporting local solidarities, so that 'tribal society not only maintains its existence, but secures the continuity of its distinctive features over against other tribes (1938: 120, emphasis added).'  It came back to religion, or moral knowledge, in the end.  If ancestral blessing gave 'morale and courage', then political virtue was ethnically specific; there was even, he wrote, 'a tribal organisation of the spirit world (267).'  Pan-ethnic nationalism could be, morally, too pushy a project.  After 1947, when he became its president, Kenyatta tried to lessen Kikuyu dominance in the Kenya African Union (KAU), Kenya's first nationalist party.  Others construed his inability to do so as dictatorship (Spencer 1985: 178-80).

            Kenyatta's scruples were clearly shared by his KAU critics.  And it can be argued that his insistence on ethnic self-mastery helped him-it is no paradox-to imagine a multi-national Kenya united in self-respect.  As the country's president he repeatedly stated that 'we all fought for freedom', playing down Mau Mau's part in winning independence.  He is usually thought to have had three motives in promoting this inclusive national memory: to deny any debt to Mau Mau'; to reunite Kikuyu after a liberation struggle they experienced as civil war; and to reassure other groups that Kikuyu, who had predominated in Mau Mau, would not disproportionately 'eat the fruits of independence' (Buijtenhuijs 1973: 50-62).  Kenyatta's political thought suggests, additionally, a more positive message: that Kenyans drew strength from ethnicity; that this proved that they too had learned how to master themselves in modern times; that Kenya was a moral community precisely because its people were not 'detribalised' (Lonsdale 1992: 265-9).

            Finally, principled objection to any alliance more managerial than was tolerable to the canons of moral ethnicity had implications for the politics of class.  Moral ethnicity was sustained by the courageous exercise of civic virtue in a dislocated modern world.  Wealth's duty to ancestors and clients was the chief pain and pleasure of self-mastery.  If this was a bourgeois value it was also indigenous political theory: 'a man is judged by his household'.  Applying this maxim to politics, Kikuyu thought 'economic strength, not words, would convince the government . . . gaining economic strength was itself resistance (Kershaw 1997: 186).'  The wealth that fertilised reproduction was by now as much commercial as agrarian; construction rivalled cattle as a sign and store of wealth.  Eliud Mathu, Kikuyu teacher and the first African appointed to Kenya's legislature, chided the Luo trader Oginga Odinga, seated in 'a poky room' in the Luo market town of Kisumu.  'Where are your Luo people?  You don't even have a building of your own.'  Odinga hated the Luo to be seen as laggards in the panoptic pageant that Kenya had become with the mobility of modernity.  Stung into action, seeking 'independence through business', he raised the funds for a two-storey hotel, to be named after Ramogi, the Luo ancestor (Odinga 1967; Atieno Odhiambo 1975).  Locality was naked as never before; it needed squared stone shops, roofed in corrugated iron, to preen itself.  As Kenyatta said to another ethnic audience, the Kamba: 'we need to decorate ourselves, . . . we need to respect each other and then speak in one voice (Muoria Mwaniki 1947: 21-2, emphasis added).'  But he had little time for wage-workers when they spoke in the one voice of strikes and trades unionism.  He disdained labour invested neither in its possessor's land nor in the hope of a share in a patron's property.  No African, he declared in 1947, was as poor as some he had seen in Europe.  All Africans, unlike poor Europeans, retained some land (17).  He despised Nairobi as gecombaini, the place of strangers (15).  Was this because he thought both its poor and its white-collar workers equally detribalised, the former landless, the latter too proud, perhaps too colonised in mind, to decorate their ethnicity with agrarian sweat, to respect their illiterate parents?

            A sense of the proprieties governing the search for authority, the limits which the now religious duty of self-mastery imposed on trans-ethnic organisation, may help to clarify the history of anti-colonial nationalism.  Modernity did not make territorial nationalism the only self-evident African platform.  True, there were no ethnic nationalisms in Kenya; none sought a separate, different, sovereignty.  But all sought equivalence.  The scruples of moral ethnicity imposed their own political restraints on pan-ethnic unity, and reopen the enigma of Kenyatta.

8          Moral narrative: the enigma reconsidered        
            Religion, Kenyatta wrote in Facing Mount Kenya, was a matter of social experience.  An ethnography, the book was also autobiography (Willey 1991), one that hid half his life.  Making much of his youthful representation of sexual innocence at rainmaking rituals (1938: 245), he said nothing of his early Christianity.  Kenyatta never forgot his training in Kikuyu cosmology, yet was equally marked by 'reading'.  Orphaned around 1900, he was attracted to the Scottish mission by the 'magic' of writing.  Circumcised at the mission, absent from his age-mates' solidarity in courage, he married a Christian, Grace Wahu, from the Anglican mission nearby.  Christian women were then very few: he was unusually set on following the new discipline.  New honour was as hard to earn as old.  His Kikuyu church elders suspended him from membership for marrying Grace by Kikuyu custom before they solemnized their union in church, and for drinking-the first an entirely new, the other an old, form of indiscipline.  Driven by desire to baptise his son, Kenyatta legally registered his marriage and swore to give up alcohol, ready to submit to the dictum he later enunciated in his book, that religion should govern behaviour.  Christian marriage negotiated between new and old paths of self-mastery (Murray-Brown 1972: 91-4; Kariuki 1985: 31-40; cf Summers 1997).  Kenyatta's offences against both his moral communities, age set and church, may have made him unusually sensitive to modernity's ambushes along this dual path to elderhood.

            One of the few times Kenyatta was angered during his trial thirty years later, on a charge of managing Mau Mau, was when asked if he practised polygamy.  Led by his defence counsel, he had up till then given a self-portrait, repulsive enough to Kenya's whites, of a 'lovable Darkie-cum-Gandhi'.  In cross-examination the crown prosecutor then put the question.  Marital irregularity would cast doubt on Kenyatta's Christianity-on whose bible he had sworn to tell the truth-and damage his legal credit.  A white observer caught the moment.  'Kenyatta paused and looked at him.  Before our eyes, in that long pause, an alchemistical change occurred.  Some movement passed over the face and the courteous Darkie was something very different and strangely frightening (Mumford 1953: 373-4).'  Kenyatta asked if were charged with polygamy or terrorism, admitted to polygamy as whites understood it, but did not call it that himself.  He was correct; he had had four wives; one had died, another remained in England.  He had practised serial monogamy, living with each in turn, while continuing to respect (if often unable to support) the others (KTT 1953: 1001; Macdonald 1972: 275).

            Kenyatta's private life thus preserved decent Christian appearances.  His public life may be seen as a sustained effort, after his irregular initiation, to put things right with an imagined tradition.  In his early thirties he decided to serve his people.  He had come to regret that his status as the white man's 'pet' (his word) at the CSM and in his first job had blinded him to his people's suffering.  One of his first journalistic homilies after 'conversion' (also his word) to his people's cause, called Moses to mind, the Israelite who had been the Egyptians' pet.  Kenyatta urged those of his readers in white employ not to be so 'beguiled by splendours and temporary delights' that they 'spurn[ed] the humble soil of the Kikuyu.'  If they read Hebrews 11: 24-25 they would see that Moses chose to suffer affliction with the people of God rather than continue to be the son of Pharoah's daughter.[12]  Here lies the key to the first enigma in his career.  He had sacrificed his 'temporary delights' to church discipline.  He decided 'to have done with trifling' in Nairobi, to join the KCA.  And then his church, the CSM, decided to break the cultural entente that had supported many of its members in their often costly attempts, like Kenyatta's, to combine Christian modernity and their gendered social order.

            Kikuyu men saw modernity as a twin subversion of gender discipline.  Alien rule emasculated self-mastery, urbanisation inflamed female sexuality.  Colonialism was a multiple moral alienation.  Conquest deprived youths of the warriorhood in which they once proved their mettle.[13]  Land loss denied many the virtues of domestic production and ancestral guidance.  Migrant wage labour seduced young men from the duty they owed their parents and ancestors by cultivating the land God had bestowed.  British officials usurped Kikuyu conciliar authority, sapping 'the spirit of manhood', the capacity for moral choice.  Elders could no longer be sure that they had become what the French aptly term 'un homme accompli' (Droz 1999).  Kenyatta pressed these complaints in his book.  As if all this were not enough, towns alienated not only male production but female reproduction.  Nairobi, the nearest, was Kenya's capital and a Kikuyu market.  Men heard that women who went there to sell potatoes and beans remained to sell themselves to strangers in cars.  Other Africans called Kikuyu men shenzi, savages, for losing control over their women.  Female fertility sold to others was no longer Kikuyu seed.  The imagery of lineage, sex, and cultivation was all one.  Townswomen were lost to the ancestors, like land under a white settler plough (White 1990; Robertson 1997; Lonsdale 1992: 385-8).

            Christians felt they alone could answer these threats; they were the solution, not the problem.  Some missionaries supported them, evangelists of improvement as much as messengers of grace (Casson 1998).  In the 1920s they formed an agrarian alliance of progress, opposed to the white settler dream of a proletarian African future.  Kenyatta called missions cattle kraals, stores of wealth.  In place of warrior spears, readers proposed education, to sharpen the brain.  They took land grievances to government; pioneered new crops, the disciplined alternative to wage labour.  Literacy also restored the power of decision, lost to oral performance by the migrant expansion of Kikuyu workers.  Muigwithania  could be heard, read aloud, in Nairobi.  Print scolded giddy women more widely than any elder's talk.  Christian reform was also, to repeat, truly Kikuyu; readers were irungu, 'the straighteners', a candidate generation like those who used to cleanse the land of envy every thirty years or so.  They returned home in print, like scripture's wastrel migrant, the prodigal son, to become muigwithania, an elder influential enough to reconcile faction.  Literacy enlarged the elders' discourse of harmony; age-set and lineage were no longer the key arena.  In modern times that had to be a self-conscious print-ethnicity.  Far from colonised in their consciousness, Christians argued out Kikuyu moral economy.  Their arguments were their fathers'; only their images were new (Lonsdale 1996 a).

            Protestant missionaries suddenly seemed to ally themselves to social subversion, when Muigwithania's campaign of progress with stability was barely one year old.  Missionaries did not object to male circumcision.  But clitoridectomy seemed cruel and revolting; unable to hospitalise the rite, the protestants taught against it; some of their Kikuyu church elders and a determined minority of women were of the same opinion.  Government tried ineffectually to moderate the operation; the issue became politicised.  The KCA publicly supported clitoridectomy in 1928; in 1929 the CSM demanded it be banned.  It was a complex and now well studied issue (Clough 1990: 137-51; Feldman 1978: 272-87; Lonsdale 1992: 388-95; Murray 1974; Neckebrouck 1978: 208-303; Pedersen 1991; Pemberton 1998: 187-94; Rosberg & Nottingham 1966: 105-35; Sandgren 1989: 71-85; Tignor 1976: 235-50; Ward 1976: 182-97).  To missionaries the question was one of genital mutilation.  For Kikuyu, men and women, it was more serious.  The rite turned girls into disciplined adults, ready for marriage and the productive and reproductive labours they owed to their husband's line.  Without clitoridectomy, the pain that secured gain, there could be neither female self-control nor male control over women, neither lineage continuity nor ancestral communion, no guarantee of property.  Missions, far from being cattle kraals, seemed determined to invite the hyenas in.  And Kikuyuland was already in a moral panic over women in towns.

            Dr Arthur, crusader against clitoridectomy, wanted Kenyatta hanged.  The evidence however suggests that Kenyatta, away in London for most of the crisis, tried to compromise.  He urged that clitoridectomy's future be left to education and conscience rather than subject to a provocative ban (Murray-Brown 1972: 134-47).  Arthur refused to concede that such a middle ground existed or that conscientious Christians of any race could be of different minds.  But mission views themselves varied between Scottish and Baptist fervour for a ban, Anglican indecision and Catholic unconcern.  Kikuyu compromise was baulked by the Scots.  Both sides appealed to the bible.  Paul's letter to the Galatians justified each in its account of the early church's split on the same issue.  Should Christians follow the liberty of faith in which circumcision meant nothing, or Judaean law where it was all?  In Kenya each side called the other 'Judaisers'-narrowly Kikuyu or arrogantly European.  Kenyatta knew his Galatians and charged missionaries with demonising all that made for solidarity in African life (1938: 135, 153-4, 269-73; cf Meyer 1992).  He exaggerated, like Dr Arthur, in a world of compromise-where even the churches that Kikuyu founded at the time adopted different views on clitoridectomy.  But the point is that Kenyatta had not betrayed his early faith, if he had ever had one.  He was distinguishing religion from culture.  The enigma was not that Kenyatta defended custom but that the crisis of 1929 was so soon over.  Government distanced itself from controversy; missions agreed to differ; Kikuyu accepted varying bodily disciplines.  The crisis had been no more than a heated exchange in a local conversation which argued out what it was to be Kikuyu and Christian, socially responsible yet modern.  It was an equal contest.  White and black argued, against each other, between themselves, within the same narrative, the bible.  Kenyatta's next clash with European dogma showed how much he valued this open ethnic debate.

            Kenyatta's real enigma is his role in Mau Mau.  The problem starts with his cosmopolitan urbanity, learned in Europe as the KCA's emissary.  Whites who had known him in Kenya were astounded at his social ease and fluent English.  He enjoyed London's 'splendours and temporary delights'-explored opinion, dressed in style, loved white women, was often in debt.  He found that Christianity, new to Kenya, was in Europe rather out of date.  But his pan-African friends found him disappointingly tribal in focus.  The Soviet Russians also gave him up in despair.  He enquired into communism, the most confidently modern of doctrines, but rejected it.  The Russian evidence is clear, and consistent with all else we know of the man.  Staff at Moscow's University of the Toilers of the East reported that Kenyatta was weak on 'anti-religious questions' and class stratification.  More surprisingly, in the wake of the clitoridectomy crisis, he told them 'the bourgeois school' allowed more freedom of thought than they.  Rubbing salt into that wound he called the Comintern 'insolent' in presuming to draft a policy line for him (Berman & Lonsdale 1998; Cohen 1979: 15, 106-07, 174-5; McClellan 1993; Pegushev 1996).  But Kenyatta's Moscow tutors, unlike Dr Arthur, did not let doctrinal rebuff distort their judgment.  Appreciative of bourgeois freedoms, untroubled by class (perhaps because good patrons allowed clients their upward mobility), possessed of religious sensibility, determined upon self-mastery, they had captured him exactly.  The British security services, supposing him to be indoctrinated, were prejudiced rather than informed.

            The British were not alone in suspecting Kenyatta.  On his return to Kenya his press agent, Henry Muoria, had to deny the rumour that he wished to kill the Kikuyu heart; he would resurrect it (1947: 3).  Kenyatta found that difficult; he pined for his London friends (Abrahams 1959); but his ideas on how small societies should face modernity had not changed since the days of Muigwithania.  He told a chief's tea-party, 'Education means digging our own foundation and doing what we can without looking to the Asians and the Europeans for help.  Our great enemy is ourselves and not others that we think of.'  He had learned that in England.  'I took what I already had from here and compared it with what was foreign to me', and had concluded that 'we need to be proud but not insult each other; we need the sort of pride a boy or girl achieves after circumcision . . . the dignity that makes a person a person.'  Moral ethnicity was the road to progress.  But Kenyatta soon found that it paralysed politics.  To respect other ethnic groups was easy.  The problem lay within, in the personal pride he otherwise commended.  Kikuyu followed only themselves.  What spoiled them was 'to say I am circumcised.  If you say you are circumcised, or you are clever, or you are rich, how can you listen to what other people are saying?' (Muoria Mwaniki 1947: 5-7, 15).

            On his return, leadership was forced on Kenyatta by African dread that the British would finally consign the colony to settler rule.  Africans could do nothing.  They were too divided; between ethnic groups, old and educated, landed and landless, rural and urban.  But all could put hope in this man of many parts.  His old KCA colleagues were the hardest to convince, fearful lest exile had estranged him (Spencer 1985: 204).  Like many small-scale societies Kikuyuland was mutually suspicious, litigious, fee-paying, a costly realm in which to prove oneself worthy to be heard.  Leadership had to respect these constraints, as Kenyatta complained.  His method of reconciling division invited Kikuyu dissent and white misunderstanding.  The latter hardened into the certainty of propaganda.  The British case against him rested on four charges: that with ethnographic insight and communist skill he got the worst out of his people; that his Mau Mau oaths were evil; that the movement was blasphemous; and that its violence betrayed the liberalism of his British friends.  Kenyatta's politics were believed to strip him of all civilised pretentions, to reveal a power lust more savage than the bewildered peasant masses he exploited, and to fail utterly to measure up to the moral tests of modernity, let alone self-rule. (Kershaw 1997: 199-247, 329-30; Lonsdale 1990).

            The first charge is soon disposed of.  Both British and Kikuyu had exaggerated fears of how far Kenyatta had been corrupted by exile.  He had never been communist, he was still Kikuyu.  The second, the evil of the oaths, raises in acute form the relations between ethnicity and modernity, religion and politics.  It is too simple to say, if true, that oaths were 'an organizational tool in a crisis' (Rosberg & Nottingham 1966: 262).  Why that form?  In part, again, the answer is simple.  Kikuyu, hybrid frontiersfolk of immigrant origin, had long sworn commitment between lineage- or age-mates, to seal land deals, test truth in court, rebut accusations of sorcery.  Oaths were sworn on the stuffs of life, soil, vegetables, goat's meat and blood.  Their power rested on the evocation of social forces, past, present and future, not on invocation of God.  Modern associations had adopted them for collective projects (Githige 1978; Kershaw 1997: 311-20).  But there is a less easy side to the answer.  Landowners grew nervous of neighbours' envy, the mainspring of sorcery, as land became more private and state office more profitable.  Modernity and its instruments, money, property, bureaucracy, were tearing social relations apart, separating wealth from visibly laborious, face-to-face civic virtue.  However ancient Africa's fear of sorcery may be it is also a peculiarly modern curse (Austen 1993; Geschiere 1997).  Yet  political unity was urgently needed.  Household heads, men with the right to lead, feared lest dynastic or business rivals would tell tales of their discontent to the British.  The best insurance was an oath, adapted from one used against sorcery or its imputation.

            The first and commonest Mau Mau oath, of unity or uiguano-the harmony sought by an influential muigwithania, what many called Kenyatta-protected political purpose against envy.  Missionaries led white opinion in condemning this and the later oaths that demanded more commitment from initiates.  They were guilty of muddled theology.  Oaths had been sworn by many admirable leaders in the bible; old testament priests, like Kikuyu, visualised animal blood as the medium of life.  Oaths both biblical and Kikuyu had the same purpose: to witness to cooperative commitment and exclude all frivolous or malevolent persons.  For years Kikuyu Christians, some of them court elders by now, had presided over legal oaths involving the meat and blood of slaughtered goats.  Nothing in the oaths with which Kenyatta was associated was inconsistent with the old testament or what Christians had previously tolerated.[14]  Nor had mission Christianity ever had anything to to say about sorcery except that it was of the devil and no threat to believers; to condemn Mau Mau oaths as satanic was to fail to understand the world of wills in which Kikuyu lived (Lonsdale 2000 b). 

            But if missionaries were muddled, Kikuyu were divided.  Local debate was as lively in the crisis of Mau Mau as it had been in the earlier crisis of clitoridectomy.  Few Christians hesitated to take the first oath.  There were few Christians in any case, not more than fifteen per cent of Kikuyu.  A minority of these did refuse to swear, the 'revived' or born again, for whom sorcery held no fears.  They relied on the efficacy of Christ's blood, the blood of the lamb (Smoker 1994).  Later Mau Mau oaths, however, were as offensive to Kikuyu, non-Christian and Christian alike, as they were to whites.  They broke a cardinal rule of moral ethnicity in that those administering the oaths were men without landed, ancestral, authority.  Land-poor recruiters could offer no surety for their own good faith, previously thought to be essential for conducting the inherently dangerous procedure of oathing.  Some elders reluctantly conceded that the greater evil of alien rule justified this lesser evil of illegal practice (Kershaw 1997: 315-20).  There is no evidence that Kenyatta did.  Indeed, he condemned those involved in it as 'hooligans', who scorned the self-mastery derived from husbandry of ancestral land.  He thus lashed Mau Mau's young townsmen at a mass meeting in 1952 that left him shattered by its raw energy: 'Prosperity is a pre-requisite of independence. . .  I do not want people to accuse us falsely-that we steal and that we are Mau Mau.  I pray to you that we join hands for freedom and freedom means abolishing criminality (Henderson 1952: 304-05).'  He was wrestling with the modern derangement that gave Nairobi's workers more power than their rural elders.  Whites thought he was stirring up that bedlam himself.

            Whites also thought Kenyatta led a retreat back to 'tribal religion'.  That too was a muddle.  He railed only against Christian denominational divisions, weevils in the corn of Kikuyu unity.  He had been doing so, not so pungently, since 1928.  He also wished to ban a Kikuyu 'spirit' church-but on good theological grounds.  It was one of those sects that pestered God with prayer, not to mention flags and drums.[15]  Worse still for whites, political songs hailed him as Messiah, as in the line 'he gives his life to save us'.  Some Kikuyu saw him as a past hero, Waiyaki, reincarnated after sitting at God's right hand, sixty years after his death in British custody in 1892.  But Kenyatta's critics failed to notice that he rejected both statuses, publicly and privately, when a cynic might have kept silent.[16]  The point is that Kenyatta, and Kikuyu generally, were arguing, in modern, Christian, images that criss-crossed locality and the wider world.  At this moment of extreme danger one might have expected them to withdraw, to rediscover their core values.  They found them, but they had to expand in order to do so; their values now linked ethnicity to the the modern world.  They had to argue their identity with modern, and that included Christian, intellectual materials.

            Lastly, whites charged Kenyatta with violence.  This is a crucial issue for grasping what 'progress with stability' meant for African political strategy.  Kenyatta expected African protest to provoke violence-British violence.  It had happened before.  The deaths of African demonstrators in 1922 had been one reason why London had then curbed settler ambitions.  Kenyatta knew his history, and that it could repeat itself; he thought parliament would take British repression of unarmed Africans more seriously than armed African rebellion; and warned that he had returned from Europe without an atomic bomb (Muoria Mwaniki 1946).  The first Mau Mau oath required solidarity only, not violence.  The later oaths of violence emanated mainly from Nairobi, where Kenyatta had no influence.  When he denounced force he was himself threatened; and maintained a bodyguard (KTT 1953: 1063; Kershaw 1997: 246; Lonsdale 2000 a).  Whites, supposing Mau Mau to be united, could not conceive that it had civil and violent wings, with contradictory ideologies.  One trusted in the sworn alliance of landed property to impress the British with its civic virtue (and perhaps mass disobedience); the other resolved on direct action by young men, without their elders' authority if needs must.  One preserved the dynastic order of land and lineage, the other subverted it, in the equally indigenous idiom of generational change.  Young 'readers' had used this in the 1920s; now it was turned against them, an established gentry.  Again, African energy against whites was generated by internal uproar.  This Kikuyu debate also provides a clue to the third and final enigma of Kenyatta, his presidency of independent Kenya.

            President Kenyatta is alleged to have betrayed those to whom he owed most, the Mau Mau guerillas who had died in their thousands, and the radical nationalists who had rejected any independence deal that excluded him from power.  But to believe this is to adopt the radicals' cause, not to understand the norms by which Kenyatta was obliged to constitute his power.  Little can yet be said about the nature of his rule; historians have seen few sources (but see Ogot & Ochieng' 1995).  The case cannot therefore be proved, but my analysis suggests Kenyatta could never have shared power with ex-Mau Mau or the 'left', or heed their views on property.  It is true that the handling of central state power was a new problem for Kenyans; its scale was without precedent, its relations between private reward and public service untried.  But the general criteria of power were well enough known, if from out of a previously stateless history.  They allowed for negotiation; clients should be granted their right to self-mastery, if under a big man's, an elder's, shade.  Kenyatta knew this.  After marrying a chief's daughter in the 1940s he took care to preface his speeches by avowing 'I speak openly; I am nobody's dependant.'  (Lonsdale 1992: 384, 412).  Even clients were moral agents.  The severest criticism of one of president Moi's ministers has been that he permitted his clients no initiative, so creating 'a constituency of beggars.' (Kanyinga 1995: 111).  This was to defy the maxim under which people had colonized eastern Africa in past centuries, namely, that patronage must release a client's creative energy, promote it within a reciprocal moral order, not suppress effort by command and greed.

            Kenyatta's presidential practice followed this ground rule of past pioneers.  A moral basis for Kenyan capitalism, premised on a theology of abundance, it needed anchorage in social order, as before.  Only time and self-interest would decide how people renegotiated the unequal moral economy of property and patronage, labour and opportunity.  But Kenyatta could sway opinion as to the proper balance.  Again, it cannot be proved but it would be odd if the indigenous ethnic discourse on moral economy and modernity had not informed his early decisions on his regime's composition and its policy, especially with respect to land.  What gave people 'the dignity that makes a person a person', he had said in 1947, was social order, which he then visualised as the age-setted discipline of circumcision.  And however much he owed Mau Mau, its veterans remained anti-social hooligans-imaramari-as he had called them in 1952.  Scarcely any forest fighter had made boast of his age set; the 'Forty Group' who supplied many of their leaders had openly flouted the rules of age (Lonsdale 1992: 422-3).  To have accorded Mau Mau any privilege would not only excite non-Kikuyu suspicion but honour men who had broken the social order that ought to distribute power.  In the forest, indeed, Mau Mau had torn itself apart in arguments about authority (Lonsdale 1994: 142-50).

            Similar considerations apply to Kenyatta's relations with the 'left'.  In 1932 he had thought communists 'insolent' for telling him what to do in his own country.  Clients wanted self-mastery, not socialism.  It did not matter how much he owed to the radical nationalists; and they were in any case undecided how far their socialism in fact meant penny capitalism.  In his fond imaginings of precolonial Africa, moreover, the author of Facing Mount Kenya had never pushed consensual communalism to the lengths of other cultural nationalists.  Neither Kenyatta's moral ethnicity nor his personal experience taught him that socialism was beneficent.  He had no right to deprive Kenyans of the hope of moral agency by taking all property-and thus all responsibility-into state hands.  His rule, rather, should be morally enabling in respect of Kenya's citizens, just as his journalism had once supported a morally enabling Christianity, the cattle-kraal of progress.

            In 1952 Kenyatta had declared that freedom-which in Kikuyu, to repeat, is self-mastery-meant abolishing criminality.  He said much the same in 1965, as president.  'There is no room here for the lazy and idle.  There is no room for those who wait for things to be given for nothing.'  (1968: 277).  Three years later he expanded on the relations between socialism ('things to be given for nothing') and envious political tribalism.  He associated the latter with sorcery, the enemy of the self-disciplined ethnicity which shouldered responsibility for one's own fate.  '. . . [I]n the early days of nation-building, there are always some people who remain slaves of the past.  There are those who still occupy their little worlds of doubt. . . .  There are those who find they cannot rise above en