Published in 1938, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu was Jomo Kenyatta's anthropological study of Kikuyu society, written under the supervision of Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. It is simultaneously a work of scholarship, a political manifesto, and an act of cultural resistance, the first major English-language account of Kikuyu society written by a Kikuyu person, at a time when African peoples were almost exclusively written about, never permitted to write for themselves.
Key Facts
- Published by Secker and Warburg, London, 1938; Malinowski wrote the foreword
- Kenyatta uses participant-observer anthropological methodology, he is his own primary source as a Kikuyu man documenting his own culture
- Covers: the Githaka land tenure system, the Age Sets (mariika), irua (circumcision) for both men and women, marriage customs, the role of Ngai, the kiama (council of elders), and the economic organisation of the Kikuyu
- The book's defence of female circumcision (irua ria aka) was deliberately provocative, directly challenging the missionaries who had tried to suppress it and triggered the crisis in the Kikuyu Central Association
- The title is both geographic (Kikuyu homesteads face Kirinyaga) and political (Kenyatta faces his homeland from exile in London)
- Malinowski's foreword praised the book but also contextualised it within "salvage anthropology", the framing Kenyatta was partly resisting
- The book argued that British colonial administrators had systematically misunderstood Kikuyu land law, treating the Githaka rotational system as "vacant land" available for seizure (see White Highlands)
- It became required reading in African nationalist circles and influenced a generation of anti-colonial thinkers across the continent
As Resistance Literature
Facing Mount Kenya is most powerful when read as a document of resistance. By presenting Kikuyu society as complex, coherent, and morally serious, Kenyatta challenged the colonial premise that African peoples were primitive and required European guidance. The book insists on Kikuyu self-sufficiency, in governance, in spirituality, in land management, as a counter-argument to the entire civilising mission.
See Also
Related
Jomo Kenyatta | Githaka | Age Sets | Ngai | Kirinyaga | Kikuyu Central Association | White Highlands