Jomo Kenyatta to the independent Kenyan state. His administration pressured whites-only social clubs to adopt multi-racial entry policies, and in 1964 schools formerly reserved for European pupils were opened to Africans and Asians. Kenyatta's government believed it necessary to cultivate a united Kenyan national culture. To this end, it made efforts to assert the dignity of indigenous African cultures which missionaries and colonial authorities had belittled as "primitive". An East African Literature Bureau was created to publish the work of indigenous writers. The Kenya Cultural Centre supported indigenous art and music, with hundreds of traditional music and dance groups being formed; Kenyatta
Jomo Kenyatta degraded black people. Appearing in the film also allowed him to meet and befriend its star, the African-American Paul Robeson. In 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia), incensing Kenyatta and other Africans in London; he became the honorary secretary of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, a group established by Padmore and C. L. R. James. When Ethiopia's monarch Haile Selassie fled to London in exile, Kenyatta personally welcomed him at Waterloo station. This group developed into a wider pan-Africanist organisation, the International African Service Bureau (IASB), of which Kenyatta became one of the vice chairs. Kenyatta began giving anti-colonial lectures