They numbered as well those who entered most warmly into elaborating the new political and cultural institutions , both by entering the district or parochial administration , and by developing new extra-governmental activities , including some secular cultural ones .sx Most strikingly these men tended to develop a new style of life - in clothes , in house-patterning , in work roles , in their preoccupation with the education of their own and their kindred's children , and in a new sensitivity to extra-parochial , extra-local issues .sx In Tanganyika such people were widely linked by their common use of Swahili .sx In many places they were linked as well by their common experience of a particular mission school .sx By mid-century they were in most areas immediately recognisable as the district elite .sx Two features were crucial to their position .sx First , however distinct they may have become from their rural background , the tendrils by which they were attached to it possessed a quite remarkable elasticity .sx And secondly in the virtual absence in East Africa of anything which could as yet be called a national elite - of the kind which in many West African countries had long been present - such people had a peculiar special significance not just in their own local areas but , potentially at least , as the source from which those who would take the lead on a yet larger plane would be drawn .sx Of vital importance here was the phenomenon of what , if we may adopt the Kikuyu term , we may call the muthamaki tradition amongst so many of the peoples of East Africa - the tradition which acknowledged the existence of 'prominent men' .sx Its foundations lay in the fact that few East African societies had previously had any rigid social stratification .sx Where there was at the same time little hereditary fostering of specialised skills , there was very often room for men with particular personal skills to prove themselves as leaders and pioneers , more especially vis- a-circ -vis those outside the local society .sx When , in the first half of the twentieth century , that which was originally right outside the local society came to impinge increasingly upon it , this tradition came to express itself in new terms .sx Jomo Kenyatta had revealed his own relationship to it back in 1942 when he had published a small pamphlet entitled My People of Kikuyu and the Life of Chief Wangombe ( a turn-of-the-century Kikuyu muthamaki) .sx As the twentieth century advanced there was an efflorescence of this previously established tradition .sx That meant both that there were men who felt free to provide leadership for excursions into the new openings which the new century brought to East Africa , and more especially that political leaders with a traditionally legitimized authority were available when the political situation suddenly started , as it did in the less than two decades covered by this chapter , to change very rapidly .sx In the first category one can name William Nagenda , the Balokole leader from Buganda , Bishop Mathew Ajuoga of the Church of Christ in Africa , Bishop Obadiah Kariuki of the Anglican Church in Kikuyu country , or a Muganda farmer such as Leonard Basudde .sx In the second one thinks of Hezron Mushenye , Chief of Tiriki ; of Tom Mboya , a highly effective trade union leader when he was still in his mid-twenties ; of Oginga Odinga with his Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation ; of Eridadi Mulira , the Uganda schoolmaster who became a politician and newspaper publisher ; and of several of those many who became active in agricultural co-operatives before moving into politics more centrally - George Magezi , for instance , and Felix Onama in Uganda , or Paul Bomani and Nsilo Swai in Tanganyika .sx In addition to Kenyatta himself one thinks as well of Milton Obote , of Julius Nyerere , and even of that startingly dramatic figure 'Field-Marshal' Okello .sx It must be remembered that substantial numbers of the new elite managed to find considerable personal fulfilment from participating in the parochial , district , and Christian arenas into which they moved .sx Paulo Kavuma for example , sometime Katikiro of Buganda , was no anxious , uncertain , disenchanted man , despite the trauma of his time in that office in the early 1950s .sx Though the winds of fortune beat upon him , he never lost his inherent composure ; and as behoved a long-experienced former chief clerk to the British Resident in Buganda , he was an efficient bureaucrat as well .sx Always , moreover , a staunch Muganda according to his own personal lights , he remained a man who was calmly proud of the way he believed he had served his people ( and he always seemed to fit a western-tailored suit better than anyone else in Uganda) .sx Kosia Shalita stood likewise .sx Living as bishop in a former missionary's house where he had once been a house-boy , and looking back upon his time as pastor of so many churches at once that only he could be expected to remember their number , he had , in the aftermath of a year of study at Wycliffe Hall , Oxford , become the principal Protestant figure in his own and a couple of neighbouring districts in south-western Uganda .sx As father of a large family he was a much respected figure , unpretentious , active , a reconciler who was always unquestioningly serene in his personal religious faith .sx There were others like him ; the schoolmaster James Aryada , for instance , first of his small tribe ( the Samia of the Uganda-Kenya border ) to go overseas - again to Oxford , but in his case for a mathematics degree .sx As compared with that of most of his compatriots his style of life was clearly elitist .sx His kinship links however were strong .sx He was at his happiest , moreover , when he had a piece of chalk in his hands and a roomful of boys in front of him .sx But he also displayed a shrewder knowledge of all levels of school education than anyone else in Uganda , and could talk about them with unassuming authority .sx There were men like this not only in Uganda but in the other territories as well .sx Tribal state , Christian church , and school , all provided for some of those who worked within them both their major commitment and a steady contentment .sx So much indeed was this the case that when numbers of other men of lesser serenity saw a threat to the order within which they moved , they tended to react in a highly protective manner ; one thinks here of the defiant actions of Kabaka Mutesa II of Buganda through much of the 1950s and 1960s , or of those African clergymen who would have no truck with Africanising their vestments - because they saw here the symbol of a great betrayal - and clung tenaciously to liturgies which by this time , even in the original , were patently archaic .sx The assured ones may have been a minority .sx Certainly there were acute conflicts afflicting many a parochial or district situation , both internally and in relation to the colonial government superimposed upon them .sx The split between the Iseera and Ngoratok in Teso District in northern Uganda is but one example of the first , the Meru land case of the second .sx What seems so often to have accompanied them was a keen desire to take part in some grouping with a cause to advance , so as to thrust aside the atomizing propensities of the changes which were occurring .sx In Kamba country in the 1950s even the British administration could mobilize a popularly acceptable movement against sorcery when this became widespread ; while as independence neared , not only Legio Maria , the breakaway movement from the Roman Catholic Church in Kenya , but the Kamcape movement in south-western Tanganyika , and a series of movements among the Mijikenda peoples of the Kenyan coast all sought to provide through religious renewal both individual security and the renovation of society .sx The chief appeal at this time of the independent churches was precisely indeed that they offered some people what Welbourn and Ogot have neatly termed " a place to feel at home " ; while the sudden alarm which shot through Kipsigi country on the eve of independence in Kenya exemplified the convulsion that a threat of alienation could effect .sx Such concerns pervaded the Bataka movement in Buganda in the 1950s , the Luguru rioters in 1955 , and the Geita disturbances in 1958 .sx They were close to the centre too of the precipitation towards violence upon the slopes of Mount Ruwenzori in the Rwenzururu movement in the early 1960s , and in Nairobi in the 1950s , as they were of course to Mau Mau generally .sx And as Mau Mau - or for that matter the Bataka movement in Buganda - showed , they were especially prevalent where the sense of political , economic , social , and cultural deprivation was most acute .sx This was particularly the case where , as with the Kikuyu , an enterprising and unhide-bound people constantly found itself being confined to what the regime above it saw to be the norm for Bantu Africans in the first half of the twentieth century - that of a labouring proletariat .sx Amid the torrent of unco-ordinated sic !sx change , and within the plethora of all these separated movements , there were those whose focus was narrow or who believed that life was concerned with more things than politics .sx But there were nevertheless increasingly those who saw the chief threat to their individual and social integrity in outside forces - in particular in the persistence of the alien colonial regime in East Africa , most fearfully because it supported the privileged position which the domiciled European population had attained , and the powerful economic hold which the domiciled Asians had secured .sx POLITICAL LEVELS AND ARENAS .sx If ever they were to present an effective challenge to the alien regimes , those Africans who did see the issues in these political terms would have to learn how to influence the various levels of authority in East Africa .sx They would have to do more :sx to deploy the assets they accumulated within East Africa at still wider levels if they wished to bring additional pressure to bear upon the Imperial government .sx At the 'global' level , East African politicians made use of the United Nations forum , most effectively those from Tanganyika for whom access to this level was formally provided through the Trusteeship Council and its three-yearly Visiting Missions .sx The 'African' or continental level also had its uses which , after the All African Peoples' Conference of 1958 , confounded the myopic belief of many colonial administrators in the political impermeability of territorial frontiers .sx More immediately important was the 'regional' or inter-territorial level , for which the Pan-African Freedom Movement for East and Central Africa ( PAFMECA ) was founded in the same year .sx It faced in two directions .sx It attempted to represent Eastern Africa as a group within the continental , African arena .sx But at the same time , like the Imperial government , PAFMECA used its authority to mediate between contenders at a lower level , most notably between the Nationalist and Afro-Shirazi Parties in Zanzibar .sx It was on the 'territorial' level however - once again in replication of the imperial authority - that African nationalism mainly concentrated .sx Until the 1950s Africans had been permitted to exercise power only at the still lower levels which we have called 'parochial' , and it was here that they acquired their political expertise .sx Organised nationalism was thereafter the means through which Africans converted the supports which they had accumulated at these subordinate levels into resources which could be staked against the expatriate power-holders at the territorial level .sx And it was as the hold of the colonial governments relaxed that the territory became increasingly available to Africans as an arena for their own political competitions .sx The political processes involved were here , as everywhere , made up of a complex interplay between the needs of societies and the desires of men .sx East Africa experienced , however , a particular stimulus to this widening of political activity which was perhaps peculiar to the colonial world - namely , an increasingly irreconcilable discrepancy between arenas and levels .sx The concerns and rivalries , that is , which preoccupied the subject peoples tended to diverge ever more insistently from those political institutions which the colonial power had either ratified or created to deal with them .sx It is important to remember that this divergence had been continuous throughout the colonial period , at the parochial level particularly , where every demand for the subdivision of a chiefdom , for the establishment of additional village headmen - or , conversely , for the recognition of a senior chief - was evidence that some Africans at least thought that the existing institutions prejudiced their chances in parochial competition .sx