Britain was obsessed with 'evil' Kenyan leader Kenyatta

0 Comments | AFP, March, 2005

LONDON (AFP) — Britain considered Kenya's nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta a charismatic and "evil" personality who had to be kept in jail if a rebellion in the then-colony was to be quelled, British archives showed.

Kenyatta was sentenced by the British colonial administration in 1952 to seven years of hard labour for supposedly organising the Mau Mau rebellion, a verdict now generally regarded as rigged.

British forces brutally suppressed the revolt by a secretive movement of landless labourers and peasants from the Kikuyu tribe which aimed to remove white settlers from the country.

After Kenya's independence in 1963, Kenyatta became the country's first president and held the post until 1978.

Files from the era from the Britain's MI5 intelligence...