Harry Thuku

His family were Kikuyu, one of the ethnic groups that lost the largest amount of land to white settlers during the British takeover of Kenya.

He spent four years at the school of the Kambui Gospel Mission, Harry Thuku became a typesetter for the Leader, a European settler newspaper.

The Young Kikuyu Association was a non-militant group that pursued a peaceful and structured liberation struggle with the government and missions.

Thuku argued that land was an important factor of production and that the livelihood of the Kikuyu people, who are primarily farmers, risked being lost.

[5] On 16 March 1922, a crowd of 7,000 to 8,000 of his supporters gathered around the Nairobi police station to demand his release from detention.

[8][9] Thuku was exiled, without charge or trial, to Kismayu in the Northern Frontier Province of Kenya, in present-day Somalia.

During Thuku's absence, the government of the day tried to co-opt the association leadership with monetary inducements and piece-meal reforms.

[11] In 1932 Thuku became president of the Kikuyu Central Association, then Kenya's foremost African political group.

Although dissension arose among the loyalists and the co-opted leaders of the association, which was fomented by the colonial powers of the day.

Harry Thuku's ideals and approach were one strand in the larger African struggle for political and economic independence from the late 1940s to 1960s.

On 12 December 1952 he broadcast to the nation, saying that "To-day we, the Kikuyu, stand ashamed and looked upon as hopeless people in the eyes of other races and before the Government.