Black Cromwell

...He even allowed his old classmate and critic, the late L. S. B. Leakey, who served as interpreter and "Kikuyu adviser" to the English governor in the crucial liberation years, to continue his valuable research in Kenya on the origins of man...

...A less noble presidential figure would have expelled him...

...Jomo-"burning spear"came much later...

...Kenyatta, the archetypical conservative patriot, enabled Kenya to Westernize without becoming a puppet state...

...Elsewhere, the author depicts Kenyatta as a lonely man, having "no cronies of his own age with whom he can relive his past...

...Probably the most curious error of all is Murray-Brown's notion that Kenyatta was the title character of Peter Abrahams' A Wreath for Udomo...

...Murray-Brown can also be careless...

...The government's purchase of perjured evidence from Rawson Macharia ought alone to have justified a retrial after Macharia recanted...

...On the whole, however, Kenyatta pursued his goal in gentlemanly fashion...

...One example was the "Star Chamber" trial that convicted Kenyatta of "masterminding" the Mau Mau movement...

...But Kenyatta was handicapped from the first, not the least by the official enmity against his British lawyer, D. N. Pritt...

...Kwame Nkru-mah, who was 36 when he reached London from America after World War II, is called a "young student...

...More serious than the flaws in this most detailed Kenyatta biography to date is the author's lack of any real "feel" for his subject, who has admittedly sought to avoid memorialization in print...

...Culturally, Murray-Brown empathizes with some of the settler hangups...

...Appearing around the time of Jomo Kenyatta's 82nd birthday, Murray-Brown's work does nevertheless help measure the metamorphosis of an almost preagricultural country of hunters and pastoralists into a nation of critical importance in the movement for an independent Africa...

...Like Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba, he would want to be succeeded by a government of institutions, not personalities, led by men of efficiency rather than charisma...

...Menelik, coming later, was noted for his "conciliation and kindness," in the words of an American diplomat...

...Kenyatta's superb forgiveness of this whole disgraceful incident, which led to his spending nine years of old age in medieval detention conditions (including, initially, chains), is one key to a personality that can reasonably be called majestic...

...as in Algeria, independence came only after a prolonged period of insurrection...

...It was also virgin territory for the Presbyterian missionaries who were his teachers and rejected as frivolous the young Kamau's request to be baptized with two Christian names...

...With hindsight, it is possible to see in this minor anecdote the essentials of Kenyatta's character: determination, resourcefulness and vanity...

...Not only is this a misleading exaggeration—Kenyatta's brother-in-law Mbiyu Koinange, for instance, is a close companion and influential minister—but it implies that Kenyatta's traditional remoteness is not purposefully chosen...

...But the narrative lacks blood...

...Jeremy Murray-Brown's new biography of modern African nationalism's most symbolic figure handles this important event well, though it would perhaps have been fairer to point out that the attitude toward Pritt was in part inspired by the fact that he was a far-out Marxist...

...Indeed, it is hard to see how he could have prevailed if successive governors, and the settlers, had not overplayed their hand...

...Unable to use both John and Peter, he literalized the latter and became Johnstone Kenyatta—taking his surname from the beaded belt worn by his Kikuyu people...

...He berates them for using terms like "kaffir" and "nigger," but on four occasions uses the term "half-caste" himself (referring to Eurafricans...

...Of the currently self-ruled countries of English Africa, Kenya is the only one that was extensively colonized, not just conquered...

...At one point he goes so far as to say that the popularity of "negroes" in Berlin in 1930 "reflected Weimar decadence...

...Conceivably, the brief, sadistic rule of Lij Yasu, Menelik's son, which preceded Haile Selassie's regency, confused the researcher...

...Kenyatta does this and that as he moves from his "bush" beginnings to his early life in Nairobi, his formative years in London, his competent second career as an anthropologist, his chastening visits to other European cities, including Moscow, his four marriages, his political ups and downs, incarceration and triumph...

...He has never dwelt since on either his incarceration or the more politically emotive subject of settler and British Army atrocities during the Mau Mau years...

...He places Howard University in New York City...

...And a reference is made to Ethiopia's "precarious independence based on some of the gains of Menelik's blood-thirsty rule," but Teodros was the ruthless war lord who united the country...

...Yet Kenya's President has merely come to terms with, rather than dispelled, his own Kikuyu tribe's primus inter pares complex...

...Without Kenyatta's earthy, peasant pragmatism, the transformation might well have been diverted by tribal and factional clashes, as was the case in neighboring Congo and Uganda...

...Traditional "African king" that he is, he has thus far discouraged the emergence of a "crown prince...

...For Ethiopia, he uses the pejorative Egyptian word Abyssinia...

...It compares, therefore, not with Ghana or Tanzania but rather with Senegal or even Algeria...

...There can be, vanity or intuition tells him, only one Ken-yatta...

...He spells Negro with a small "n," leaving one to wonder what he would do with Caucasian and Mongol...

...Like those French African countries, it produced an elite bent on building a business-suited, striving, usefully self-conscious society, not on participating in the radical, rhetorical search for a pre-European Utopia...

...It was not always a peaceful transition...

...It remains to be seen, of course, whether Mzee's legacy will span the generation gap...

...His successor, he probably knows, is likely to be either the debonair Josiah Kariuki (whom he mistrusts) or a junta...

...the protagonist, Udomo, was obviously Nkrumah, and Kenyatta is recognizable as an older figure in the novel...

...Reviewed by Russell Warren Howe Veteran Africa correspondent: guest scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center Kamau wa-Ngengi grew up around the turn of the century, a time when Kenya was a "place in the sun for shady people...