Mashujaa Day: These ‘meat wrappers’ salivated our history

President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and his daughter Margaret(left) and with his son Uhuru (right) in 1965 Photo: Courtesy

President Uhuru Kenyatta once told Kenyans that newspapers are for wrapping meat. He conveniently forgot that his father, President Kenyatta I, was the editor of the vernacular newspaper, Mugwithania (reconciler) and thus a certified meat wrapper in 1920s colonial Kenya.

Indeed, his old guy went to England to agitate for land rights and other freedoms - only that he wrote just two letters to the ‘meat wrappers’ at The Observer in the 15 years he was in the UK where money given to him by the Kikuyu Central Association ran out, biographer Jeremy Murray-Brown informs us in Kenyatta, published in 1973.