Jomo Kenyatta
Return to Europe: 1931–1933

"With the support of all revolutionary workers and peasants we must redouble our efforts to break the bonds that bind us. We must refuse to give any support to the British imperialists either by paying taxes or obeying any of their slave laws! We can fight in unity with the workers and toilers of the whole world, and for a Free Africa."

—Kenyatta in the Labour Monthly, November 1933

In May 1931, Kenyatta and Parmenas Githendu Mockerie sailed for Britain, intent on representing the KCA at a Joint Committee of Parliament on the future of East Africa. Kenyatta would not return to Kenya for fifteen years. In Britain, he spent the summer attending an Independent Labour Party summer school and Fabian Society gatherings. In June, he visited Geneva, Switzerland to attend a Save the Children conference on African children. In November, he met the Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi while in London. That month, he enrolled in the Woodbrooke Quaker College in Birmingham, where he remained until the spring of 1932, attaining a certificate in English writing.

In Britain, Kenyatta befriended an Afro-Caribbean Marxist, George Padmore, who was working for the Soviet-run Comintern. Over time, he became Padmore's protégé. In late 1932, he joined Padmore in Germany. Before the end of the year, the duo relocated to Moscow, where Kenyatta studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. There he was taught arithmetic, geography, natural science, and political economy, as well as Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the history of the Marxist-Leninist movement. Many Africans and members of the African diaspora were attracted to the institution because it offered free education and the opportunity to study in an environment where they were treated with dignity, free from the institutionalised racism present in the U.S. and British Empire. Kenyatta complained about the food, accommodation, and poor quality of English instruction. There is no evidence that he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and one of his fellow students later characterised him as "the biggest reactionary I have ever met." Kenyatta also visited Siberia, probably as part of an official guided tour.

The emergence of Germany's Nazi government shifted political allegiances in Europe; the Soviet Union pursued formal alliances with France and Czechoslovakia, and thus reduced its support for the movement against British and French colonial rule in Africa. As a result, Comintern disbanded the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, with which both Padmore and Kenyatta were affiliated. Padmore resigned from the Soviet Communist Party in protest, and was subsequently vilified in the Soviet press. Both Padmore and Kenyatta left the Soviet Union, the latter returning to London in August 1933. The British authorities were highly suspicious of Kenyatta's time in the Soviet Union, suspecting that he was a Marxist-Leninist, and following his return the MI5 intelligence service intercepted and read all his mail.

Kenyatta continued writing articles, reflecting Padmore's influence. Between 1931 and 1937 he wrote several articles for the Negro Worker and joined the newspaper's editorial board in 1933. He also produced an article for a November 1933 issue of Labour Monthly, and in May 1934 had a letter published in The Manchester Guardian. He also wrote the entry on Kenya for Negro, an anthology edited by Nancy Cunard and published in 1934. In these, he took a more radical position than he had in the past, calling for complete self-rule in Kenya. In doing so he was virtually alone among political Kenyans; figures like Thuku and Jesse Kariuki were far more moderate in their demands. The pro-independence sentiments that he was able to express in Britain would not have been permitted in Kenya itself.
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