Facing Mount Kenya
Jomo Kenyatta
An African turns anthropology into a defense of his own people.
Developed from study under the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in London, this ethnography of the Gikuyu was among the first written by an African about his own society. Kenyatta presented Gikuyu land tenure, religion, education and custom as a coherent order deliberately disrupted by the colonial seizure of land, turning the tools of anthropology into a defense of African civilization and a claim to self-rule.
Its legacy. Its author later became independent Kenya's first head of state.
- Author
- Jomo Kenyatta
- First published
- 1938
- Genre
- Ethnography
- Theme
- Liberation and the Decolonized Mind
More from Liberation and the Decolonized Mind
- The Wretched of the Earth — Frantz Fanon
The psychiatrist of the Algerian revolution anatomizes colonial violence.
- Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism — Kwame Nkrumah
Independence on paper, control in practice.
- Return to the Source — Amilcar Cabral
Culture as a weapon of the liberation struggle.
- I Write What I Like — Steve Biko
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.