Jomo Kenyatta

Jomo Kenyatta was a Kenyan nationalist leader and the first president of independent Kenya. His career moved from anti-colonial activism and imprisonment during the Mau Mau era to leadership of the post-independence state.

Jomo Kenyatta also held the offices or ranks of President of Kenya, Prime Minister of Kenya, and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kenya. Jomo Kenyatta was born in Gatundu and died in Mombasa.

Wilbur Smith’s Legacy of War sets its Kenyan strand amid the land disputes, colonial repression and African nationalism that lead towards the Mau Mau Emergency, the political crisis from which Jomo Kenyatta would emerge as the dominant nationalist leader of independent Kenya. Lawrence James’ Empires in the Sun places Kenyatta within the wider dismantling of European rule in Africa, using Kenya’s transition from settler colony to independence as one example of how nationalist movements overturned imperial authority after the Second World War.