Chapter 2 narrates how the campaign to release Kenyatta from jail, launched in 1958, culminated with him taking over the leadership of the nationalist party, the Kenyan African National Union, in 1961. Using the new “migrated files” from the British National Archives, it argues that Kenyatta emerged as a national figure out of a deeply divided and inimical political scene. This chapter shows that Kenyatta’s rise to power was largely accidental. His name was merged with the myth of the father of the nation, which his comrades had created, and wrongly thought they could manipulate and control. In fact, no politician who campaigned for Kenyatta’s release expected that he would dominate the political scene and frustrate their own political ambitions. No one had anticipated how the power of this ambiguous Mau Mau past managed to unite a fragmented electorate. Once released, Kenyatta chose to remain silent, refusing to speak publicly. His almost unexpected political rise would have a profound impact on Kenyan decolonisation: he became the “sole spokesman” of a nationalist elite he could not trust, and yet he alone could unite.

Chapter 4 explores how Kenya became, in 1964, a presidential republic. As the previous chapter showed, the centralisation of state resources (i.e. land) was decided before independence had been negotiated. Kenyatta thus found himself in control of centralized resources that enabled him to defend presidentialism (i.e. the concentration of extensive executive powers in the hands of the president) as the only possible system of rule for the post-colony. The chapter reconstructs the negotiations of presidential power: these were hasty and poorly anticipated by the divided Kenyan elite. The chapter argues that presidential rule emerged out of the weaknesses of KADU and KANU contenders, who depended on the central state to access state resources. The creation of an independent presidential republic in 1964 left Kenyatta not only with a new, but also an extensive set of powers to control a territory that was politically, socially and ethnically divided.