Mzee Jomo Kenyatta (second from right) and Uhuru Kenyatta (right). [PHOTO/Standard]
Did you know that Uhuru Kenyatta's father, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta attended university without first ever graduating from high school?
According to Jeremy Murray-Brown's 1973 biography of the elder Kenyatta, Mzee completed basic mission schooling at Thogoto in Kikuyu after studying the Bible, Mathematics and carpentry.
Masonry was a reserve for brighter students and Mzee was condemned to the less mentally-exerting woodwork which enabled him to become an apprentice carpenter later in a sisal farm under whiteman John Cook in 1912.
Kenyatta never received any secondary education.
But he later had academic forays from University College of London as well as the London School of Economics (LSE) after he left Kenya in
Twenty years after leaving Thogoto, he enrolled at the Fircroft Working Men’s College under a bridging course programme to “improve his English.”
He was later assisted by William McGregor Ross, former Director of Publics in the Kenya Colony, to gain admission and fee payment at the Woodbooke Quaker College in Birmingham in1931.
He later joined the University of the Toiler’s of the East before studies were terminated after just a year in the USSR where his mind embraced the communist ideologies in 1933.
Kenyatta returned to England and served as a linguistic informant at University College in London.
At the University College, he worked on Ruffell Barlow’s English-Kikuyu Dictionary as well as Lilias Armstrong’s The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Kikuyu where the publishers termed him an “interested, patient and critical native assistant.”
In 1935, renowned anthropologist Prof Bronislaw Malinowski wrote a recommendation letter to London School of Economics where Mzee was transferred as his personal student!
He studied social anthropology and after four years published Facing Mt Kenya, a revised version of his post-graduate diploma thesis later in 1938.