Facing Mount Kenya

Published in 1938, this ethnographic study turns its attention to the Kikuyu people of central Kenya. Its author, Jomo Kenyatta, was himself a Kikuyu and later became the first president of an independent Kenya. Drawing on his own knowledge of the community, he describes its social life, customs and traditions from the inside.

Bronisław Malinowski, the anthropologist who had supervised Kenyatta while both were at the London School of Economics, contributed the introduction. Read together, the two voices offer a view of an African society recorded by one of its own members at a time when such accounts were rare.