President Kenyatta and Chief Seattle: Founding Fathers or Founding Sellouts?

Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta and the Duwamish tribal may have had different conquerors, in different centuries, and on different continents, but did they have one thing in common? Did they sell out their neighboring tribes? 

"The Great Chief above who made the country made it for all." — attributed to Chief Seattle (Si'ahl), Point Elliott Treaty negotiations, January 1855

“Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.” — Jomo Kenyatta, 1962

Made by ChatGPT, July 2026

What do I think

Every colonized people needs a Kenyatta or a Si'ahl … or Mandela, Gandhi, and Jinnah. These revered leaders bravely step forward, distancing themselves from the freedom fighters to put their marks on the paper the colonialist hands them. In doing so, each buys his own people a seat at a power table. History rewards him with a country or city named after him. But history is less kind to the neighbors he signed away in the process. Is this process a patriotic effort to make a nation and save all people or is it more self-serving than we tend to believe?

I've written before about how America's colonial legacy hides in plain sight, dressed up as "territories" and "bases" instead of colonies. Today I want to zoom into two men who stood in front of the oncoming colonial power and made a history-changing decision. One African and one American, both revered, both accused (fairly or not)of selling out the tribes living next to them. And I want to also zoom in on the aftermath, because both Nairobi and Seattle drew the exact same racial zoning lines once the ink on the agreement was dry.

Did Kenyatta sell out the other tribes?

I’m talking about Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya and the father of a more recent president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, who was the first world leader to have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes against humanity before being elected as president. 

Jomo Kenyatta was jailed by the British, accused of leading the Mau Mau uprising against them (that he later called a disease), and then became the face of Kenyan independence in 1963. I grew up with his face on all our currency. None of that is disputed.

What is disputed is what he did next. Once in power, Kenyatta ran a government that was, in Britannica's phrasing, "notably favorable to the British and other Western powers." He kept Kenya inside the Commonwealth, reassured white settlers they could keep their land, and let Cold War capital pour into Kenyan infrastructure. Kenyans are tribal before national and the Kikuyu currently constitute the dominant tribe, numerically, economically, and politically. But that dominance is due to Kenyatta. His primary cabinet posts in Finance, Defence, Foreign Affairs, and Land and Settlement clustered around his own Kikuyu tribe. 

When the old European-held "White Highlands" opened up, it was Kikuyu-dominated land-buying companies that resettled hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu into the Rift Valley — a valley that belonged, by long use, to the Maasai and Kalenjin. The Luo and Kalenjin, who had fought just as hard for independence, watched the wealth gap widen in the other direction.

So: did Kenyatta embrace the departing colonial power to protect his own, at the expense of Kenya's other tribes? The historical record says, yes, although he'd have argued he was simply keeping a fragile country from tearing apart. And apart it almost tore, 44 years later, during the 2007/2008 post election violence that took Kenya to the brink of civil war.

Did Chief Seattle sell out the other tribes?

More than 100 years before Kenyatta drove the British out of Kenya and positioned his own tribe for the spoils, another leader was positioning his people against his colonial power. Chief Seattle, more accurately, Si'ahl, of the Duwamish and Suquamish, was the first tribal leader to put his mark on the Treaty of Point Elliott in January 1855, ceding roughly five million acres of Puget Sound land to Governor Isaac Stevens. Eighty-some other headmen supposedly signed with him although many did not know what they were giving away. In the treaty's aftermath, when others took up arms against the settlers in the 1855–56 war, Chief Seattle notably helped protect the small settlement that would later bear his name, rather than join the resistance.

Here's the twist historians still argue over: unlike the Snoqualmie, Lummi, or Skagit, Si’ahl’s own Duwamish people never received a reservation at all. Today, they are not a federally recognized tribe with all the protections that label affords. He signed away the land, kept the peace for the settlers, and got nothing durable in return. So was Si’ahl a collaborator who chose the winning side, or the one who got played hardest by his own accommodation? 

Colonial legacy of land use, zoning, and redlining

In both cities, Nairobi and Seattle, the colonial legacy is visible even today. 

Nairobi's 1948 "Master Plan for a Colonial Capital" split the city into color-coded zones as deliberately as any apartheid statute — Europeans in Muthaiga, Parklands as a buffer "Asian estate" for Indian traders, and everyone African pushed east of the railway into Eastlands, where small houses were built small on purpose, to discourage extended family from visiting. By 1969, six years after independence, 73% of Nairobi's African population still lived in Eastlands. I grew up in Parklands where all of the Indian community infrastructure lies. Land titles in the coveted Karen neighborhood still prohibit non-whites from owning land, even though no one currently abides by those words. 

Seattle ran the identical playbook. It used racially restrictive covenants — deed language literally banning "persons of Asiatic, African or Negro blood" from buying north of the Ship Canal — plus a 1936 redlining map that steered banks away from Black neighborhoods for good measure. The result: by 1960, Seattle was 92% white, and over 90% of the city's Black population was boxed into the Central District. Seattle voters rejected an open-housing law by two to one in 1964 and only reversed course in 1968, after Dr. King's assassination forced the issue. See my posts on America’s racist past and on the fact that in this century, 29% of voters opposed “removing historical racial references, such as “negroes,” “mulattoes” and “whites," from the Oregon Constitution." 

Nairobi got Eastlands while Seattle got the Central District. Different empires, different conquerors, different continents but the same instinct: draw a line, put the people who built the place on the wrong side of it, and call the line "planning." What did Kenyatta and Si’ahl get?

Why should you care

Although both men got a chapter in history books, but they are difficult to slot into "hero" or "villain." Kenyatta fought colonialism and then, arguably, ran a smaller version of it for his own tribe. Si’ahl cooperated with the very government that erased his own people from the map while it kept a version of his name on the city.

Maybe that's the real lesson: the leaders empires prefer to negotiate with are rarely the ones who represent everybody, and the deals struck at that table tend to outlive the men who signed them — right down to the zip code you live in today.