Who was the first president of independent Kenya?

Jomo Kenyatta (c. 1897 – 22 August 1978) was a Kenyan anti-colonial activist and politician who governed Kenya as its Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964 and then as its first President from 1964 to 1978. He was the country's first black head of government and played a significant role in the transformation of Kenya from a colony of the British Empire into an independent republic. Ideologically an African nationalist and conservative, he led the Kenya African National Union (KANU) party from 1961 until his death.

In 1929, he travelled to London to lobby for Kikuyu tribal land affairs. During the 1930s he studied at Moscow's Communist University of the Toilers of the East, University College London, and the London School of Economics. In 1938 he published an anthropological study of Kikuyu life before working as a farm labourer in Sussex during the Second World War. Influenced by his friend George Padmore, he embraced anti-colonialist and Pan-African ideas, co-organising the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. In 1946, he returned to Kenya and became a school principal. In 1947 he was elected President of the Kenya African Union, through which he lobbied for independence from British colonial rule, attracting widespread indigenous support yet animosity from white settlers. In 1952, he was among the Kapenguria Six arrested and charged with masterminding the anti-colonial Mau Mau Uprising.