An Ethnography Written From Inside, Not About, the Community

Most of the colonial era ethnography behind this atlas's African pantheon entries was written by outsiders describing a community from beyond it. Kikuyu religion is a documented exception. Jomo Kenyatta, later independent Kenya's first president, studied anthropology in London under Bronislaw Malinowski and published Facing Mount Kenya in 1938, an account of Kikuyu life, law and religion written as a member of the community being described rather than as a visiting researcher. The book sets out Ngai, the one divinity associated with Mount Kenya as a resting place, and the mediating role of ancestors, alongside a wider defence of Kikuyu custom against colonial administrators and missionaries who treated it as primitive or in need of replacement.

Because Kenyatta wrote with an explicit political purpose, defending Kikuyu land rights and social structure at a time when colonial policy was actively undermining both, later scholars have debated how far Facing Mount Kenya should be read as neutral ethnography and how far as advocacy shaped by the moment of its writing. That debate has not displaced the book from its position as the primary account of pre-Christian Kikuyu religious practice; rather than being read despite its political stance, it is now more often read with that stance made explicit, as one of the earliest instances of a colonised people's own scholar answering back to the ethnographic record made about them.