Jomo Kenyatta > Quotes

“When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”
― Jomo Kenyatta

“Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.”
― Jomo Kenyatta

“They speak as if it was some how beneficial to an African to work for them instead for himself and to make sure that he will receive this benefit they do their best to take away his land and leave him with no alternative. Along with his land they rob him of his government, condemn his religious ideas, and ignore his fundamental conceptions of justice and morals, all in the name of civilisation and progress.”
― Jomo Kenyatta

“To .. all the dispossessed youth of Africa: for perpetuation of communion with ancestral spirits through the fight for African freedom, and in the firm faith that the dead, the living, and the unborn will unite to rebuild the destroyed shrines.” ~from the dedication”
― Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya

“It Africans were left in peace on their own lands, Europeans would have to offer them the benefits of white civilization in real earnest before they could obtain the African labour which they want so much. They would have to offer the African a way of life which was really superior to the one his fathers lived before, and a share in the prosperity given them by their command of science. They would have to let the African choose what parts of European culture could be beneficially transplanted, and how they could be adapted … The African is conditioned, by cultural and social institutions of centuries, to a freedom of which Europe has little conception, and it is not in his nature to accept serfdom for ever.”
― Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya

“A culture has no meaning apart from the social organisation of life on which it is built.”
― Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: Tribal Life of the Kikuyu