Jomo Kenyatta among various Kenyan critics who claimed that Kenyatta treated Mau Mau veterans dismissively, leaving many of them impoverished and landless while seeking to remove them from the centre stage of national politics. In other areas Kenyatta's government also faced criticism; it for instance made little progress in advancing women's rights in Kenya. Assensoh argued that in his life story, Kenyatta had a great deal in common with Ghana's Nkrumah. Simon Gikandi noted that Kenyatta, like Nkrumah, was remembered for "initiating the discourse and process that plotted the narrative of African freedom", but at the same time both were "often remembered
Jomo Kenyatta whose assumptions about the Kikuyu it challenged. The book reflected Kenyatta's desire to use anthropology as a weapon against colonialism. In it, Kenyatta challenged the Eurocentric view of history by presenting an image of a golden African past by emphasising the perceived order, virtue, and self-sufficiency of Kikuyu society. Utilising a functionalist framework, he promoted the idea that traditional Kikuyu society had a cohesion and integrity that was better than anything offered by European colonialism. In this book, Kenyatta made clear his belief that the rights of the individual should be downgraded in favour of the interests of the group.