Desiring a one-party state, he transferred regional powers to his central government, suppressed political dissent, and prohibited KANU's only rival—Oginga Odinga's leftist Kenya People's Union—from competing in elections.

He promoted reconciliation between the country's indigenous ethnic groups and its European minority, although his relations with the Kenyan Indians were strained and Kenya's army clashed with Somali separatists in the North Eastern Province during the Shifta War.

[47] Political upheavals occurred in Kikuyuland—the area inhabited largely by the Kikuyu—following World War I, among them the campaigns of Harry Thuku and the East African Association, resulting in the government massacre of 21 native protesters in March 1922.

[54] In February 1928, he was part of a KCA party that visited Government House in Nairobi to give evidence in front of the Hilton Young Commission, which was then considering a federation between Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika.

[82] Anger between the two sides had heightened, several churches expelling KCA members from their congregations, and it was widely believed that the January 1930 killing of an American missionary, Hulda Stumpf, had been due to the issue.

He expressed the view that although personally opposing FGM, he regarded its legal abolition as counter-productive, and argued that the churches should focus on eradicating the practice through educating people about its harmful effects on women's health.

[102] The emergence of Germany's Nazi government shifted political allegiances in Europe; the Soviet Union pursued formal alliances with France and Czechoslovakia,[103] and thus reduced its support for the movement against British and French colonial rule in Africa.

[146] Facing Mount Kenya was a commercial failure, selling only 517 copies, but was generally well received;[147] an exception was among white Kenyans, whose assumptions about the Kikuyu being primitive savages in need of European civilization it challenged.

[208] The defendants assembled an international and multiracial team of defence lawyers, including Chaman Lall, H. O. Davies, F. R. S. De Souza, and Dudley Thompson, led by British barrister and Member of Parliament Denis Nowell Pritt.

[215] The trial lasted five months: Rawson Macharia, the main prosecution witness, turned out to have perjured himself; the judge had only recently been awarded an unusually large pension and maintained secret contact with the then colonial Governor Evelyn Baring.

[223] Pritt pointed out that Thacker had been appointed magistrate for the wrong district, a technicality voiding the whole trial; the Supreme Court of Kenya concurred and Kenyatta and the others were freed in July 1953, only to be immediately re-arrested.

[241] The Governor of Kenya, Patrick Muir Renison, insisted that it was necessary; in a March 1961 speech, he described Kenyatta an "African leader to darkness and death" and stated that if he were released, violence would erupt.

[282] KADU desired a federalist state organised on a system they called Majimbo with six largely autonomous regional authorities, a two-chamber legislature, and a central Federal Council of Ministers who would select a rotating chair to serve as head of government for a one-year term.

[330] Kenyatta's government nevertheless rejected the idea that the European and Asian minorities could be permitted dual citizenship, expecting these communities to offer total loyalty to the independent Kenyan state.

[336] Support was given to the preservation of historic and cultural monuments, while street names referencing colonial figures were renamed and symbols of colonialism—like the statue of British settler Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere in Nairobi city centre—were removed.

[353] To this end it emphasised social welfare schemes over traditional industrial institutions,[353] and in 1965 transformed the Kenya Federation of Labour into the Central Organization of Trade (COT), a body which came under strong government influence.

[403] Kenyatta also maintained a warm relationship with Israel, including when other East African nations endorsed Arab hostility to the state;[404] he for instance permitted Israeli jets to refuel in Kenya on their way back from the Entebbe raid.

[419] In its manifesto, the KPU stated that it would pursue "truly socialist policies" like the nationalisation of public utilities; it claimed Kenyatta's government "want[ed] to build a capitalist system in the image of Western capitalism but are too embarrassed or dishonest to call it that.

[448] Over coming years, many other political and intellectual figures considered hostile to Kenyatta's rule were detained or imprisoned, including Seroney, Flomena Chelagat, George Anyona, Martin Shikuku, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

[464] African heads of state also attended, including Nyerere, Idi Amin, Kenneth Kaunda, and Hastings Banda, as did India's Morarji Desai and Pakistan's Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.

[504] "Ever a showman, [Kenyatta] could appear one moment in gaily coloured shirts, decorated with the cock of KANU, and the next in elegant suits from Savile Row, seldom without a rose in his buttonhole; he could be photographed in leopard-skin hat and cloak waving a silver fly-whisk or in old slacks on his farm tending his shrubs; he was equally at home in academic robes at a university function and in sandals and shorts on the beach at Mombasa.

[507] One of Kenyatta's fellow LSE students, Elspeth Huxley, referred to him as "a showman to his finger tips; jovial, a good companion, shrewd, fluent, quick, devious, subtle, [and] flesh-pot loving".

[122] Kenyatta liked to dress elaborately; throughout most of his adult life, he wore finger rings and while studying at university in London took to wearing a fez and cloak and carrying a silver-topped black cane.

[510] Referring to Kenyatta's appearance in 1920s Kenya, Murray-Brown stated the leader presented himself to Europeans as "an agreeable if somewhat seedy 'Europeanized' native" and to indigenous Africans as "a sophisticated man-about-town about whose political earnestness they had certain reservations".

"[487] He welcomed white support for his cause, so long as it was generous and unconditional, and spoke of a Kenya in which indigenous Africans, Europeans, Arabs, and Indians could all regard themselves as Kenyans, working and living alongside each other peacefully.

[547] Kenneth O. Nyangena characterised him as "one of the greatest men of the twentieth century", having been "a beacon, a rallying point for suffering Kenyans to fight for their rights, justice and freedom" whose "brilliance gave strength and aspiration to people beyond the boundaries of Kenya".

[542] As noted by Arnold, "no figure in the whole of British Africa, with the possible exception of [Nkrumah], excited among the settlers and the colonial authorities alike so many expressions of anger, denigration and fury as did Kenyatta.

[560] Providing a similar leftist critique, the Marxist writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o stated that "here was a black Moses who had been called by history to lead his people to the promised land of no exploitation, no oppression, but who failed to rise to the occasion".

[561] Ngũgĩ saw Kenyatta as a "twentieth-century tragic figure: he could have been a Lenin, a Mao Zedong, or a Ho Chi Minh; but he ended up being a Chiang Kai-shek, a Park Chung Hee, or a Pinochet.

[569] During the 1990s, there was still much frustration among tribal groups, namely in the Nandi, Nakuru, Uasin-Gishu, and Trans-Nzoia Districts, where under Kenyatta's government they had not regained the land taken by European settlers and more of it had been sold to those regarded as "foreigners"—Kenyans from other tribes.