Kenya's founding leader, who moved across a long life from anti-colonial intellectual and author of 'Facing Mount Kenya' to a prisoner the British convicted of leading the Mau Mau rebellion in a trial now widely seen as rigged, and finally to the conservative first prime minister and president of an independent Kenya after 1963, preaching 'Harambee' while choosing a pro-Western, capitalist path that kept the country stable but entrenched a largely Kikuyu propertied elite and slid toward one-party dominance.
In 1953 a British court in a remote Kenyan town convicted a man of managing a secret rebellion whose actual ties to him remain disputed. The judge had secretly taken money from the colonial government. The chief witness later admitted he had lied. The defendant, Jomo Kenyatta, would spend most of the next decade in detention as the imprisoned face of the Mau Mau uprising. Ten years later, after African pressure and constitutional bargaining had made colonial rule unsustainable, Britain transferred power to a Kenya led by the man it had jailed. He walked out of confinement and into State House, becoming independent Kenya's first leader. Then he surprised almost everyone. The supposed firebrand governed as a cautious capitalist, courting Western investors and white settlers he might have expelled, while a new African elite quietly took the land and the power.