Jomo Kenyatta Jomo Kenyatta Jomo Kenyatta ( – 22 August 1978) was a Kenyan anti-colonial activist and politician who governed Kenya as its Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964 and then as its first President from 1964 to his death in 1978. He was the country's first indigenous head of government and played a significant role in the transformation of Kenya from a colony of the British Empire into an independent republic. Ideologically an African nationalist and conservative, he led the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party from 1961 until his death. Kenyatta was born to Kikuyu farmers in Kiambu, British East
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