The Audrey Richards Annual Lecture in African Studies

The British attributed Jomo Kenyatta’s supposed leadership of colonial Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising to his canny knowledge of ‘his people’, the Kikuyu. In the British view this knowledge came from his academic and ideological studies in London and Moscow as much as from his personal experience. But it has long been agreed he did not lead Mau Mau, a largely Kikuyu movement. So, did he also not know his people? This lecture offers an answer to that question. The evidence comes from both our present understanding of Kikuyu history and Kenyatta’s own changing view on where their political authority lay. This answer is framed in the context of state-free African political thought more generally.

Biography

After his national service in the King’s African Rifles John Lonsdale read History at the University of Cambridge. With a PhD thesis completed on the colonial history of western Kenya in 1964, his first job was at the University College of Dar es Salaam, teaching history under Terence Ranger. As fellow of Trinity College he taught African history from 1968 to 2004. Publications include essays on the “Scramble for Africa in African history” in the Cambridge History of Africa(1985), on the “Moral Economy of Mau Mau” in his co-authored Unhappy Valley (1992), and on “Anti-colonial nationalism and patriotism in sub-Saharan Africa” in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (2013). Edited and co-edited books include Writing for Kenya: The life and works of Henry Muoria (Brill, 2009), Colonial Kenya Observed (I. B. Tauris, 2015), and From Divided Pasts to Cohesive Futures (Cambridge, 2019). Work on Jomo Kenyatta’s political thought continues.