In 1938, a Kikuyu man studying in London published an anthropological study of his own people that doubled as a political manifesto. Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya described Kikuyu land tenure, initiation rites, and governance in the language of Western academia - then used that same language to argue that colonialism had shattered a functioning society. This trail follows the book that made Kenyatta an intellectual force, examining how an anthropological text became the ideological foundation for Kenyan nationalism.
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