Jomo Kenyatta was born in Ngenda around 1895. After moving to Nairobi, he became involved in the political and cultural life. He became general secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) in 1928. In March 1929 he travelled to Britain on behalf of the KCA with Isher Dass, an Indian lawyer living in Nairobi. He had hoped to meet the imperial authorities but only briefly met senior officials at the Colonial Office. However, he established contacts with other anti-colonial activists in London and the Communist Party like George Padmore and Shapurji Saklatvala.

Kenyatta returned to Africa in 1930 but was back in Britain in 1931. He stayed almost continuously until 1946, with the exception of a few trips to Europe. During this period he was admitted to the London School of Economics to study anthropology under Professor Malinowski. Here, he wrote a number of articles that were later published as Facing Mount Kenya (1938). During this time, he also met a small group of black activists and campaigners, including C. L. R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Peter Abrahams, Eric Williams and Paul Robeson. He also associated with the India League and the League of Coloured Peoples and met Gandhi when he visited London in November 1931. Throughout the 1930s, Kenyatta attended India League meetings and would have come into contact with Krishna Menon. In September 1939, Makhan Singh, the General Secretary of the Labour Trade Union of East Africa, asked Kenyatta and Krishna Menon to represent his organization at a conference planned for the end of September in Brussels. However, because of the outbreak of the Second World War, the conference never took place.

Through his involvement in the Pan-African Federation, Kenyatta would possibly have met Jawaharlal Nehru. Kenyatta knew N. G. Ranga from early on. In 1945, Kenyatta attended the fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester along with Amy Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Ras Makonnen, Surat Alley, and George Padmore among others. He participated in Fabian Society conferences on post-war colonial affairs. Kenyatta returned to Kenya in September 1946 where he assumed leadership of the Kenya African Union. After the Mau Mau uprising in 1952, he was arrested in 1953 and spent the next seven years in prison. In 1962, he returned to London to negotiate the terms of a Kenyan constitution on behalf of the Kenya African National Union before being elected prime minister in June 1963. Kenya became independent in December 1963 and Kenyatta became president the next year. He ruled Kenya until his death on 22 August 1978.

Emmeline Pankhurst was one of the foremost suffragettes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century period in Britain, whose tireless campaigning in the face of family tragedy, police brutality and failing personal health has made her an icon of British politics. She was born on either 14 or 15 July 1858 (see Purvis p. 9 for discussion of this matter).

Emmeline married the barrister and political activist Richard Pankhurst in 1879. The Pankhursts were close friends of Keir Hardie, founder of the Labour Party. They were also early members of the Fabian Society following their move to London in 1886. In the spring of 1900 (two years after Richard’s death), Pankhurst left the Fabian Society on account of its refusal to oppose the Boer War, which she interpreted as an act of imperial aggression.

Visitors to the Pankhursts' Russell Square home in the 1880s included Dadabhai Naoroji, the first Indian to become an MP. Later Indian connections included Emmeline’s work with the prominent suffragettes Princesses Sophia and Catherine Duleep Singh, daughters of Maharaja Duleep Singh (last Maharaja of the Sikh empire in Punjab) and his first wife Bamba Müller. Sophia was also the god-daughter of Queen Victoria, and marched with Pankhurst to Parliament on 'Black Friday' in 1910.

During the First World War, opposing two of her daughters, Sylvia and Adela, Pankhurst campaigned with her eldest daughter Christabel for the war effort. In 1916 and again in 1920, Pankhurst addressed the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, a Canadian society initially founded in 1900 to promote patriotism for those leaving to fight in South Africa. In 1920 Pankhurst spoke of the need for women to be loyal to the Empire in order to aid recovery in the aftermath of the war. By 1925, Pankhurst espoused a ‘maternal, imperial feminism that gave high priority to women’s role in raising the moral tone of the nation and Empire’ (Purvis, p. 338).

Emmeline Pankhurst unsuccessfully stood as Conservative candidate for Whitechapel and St George’s in 1926. The Conservative Party was then under the leadership of Stanley Baldwin, for whom Pankhurst proposed a vote of thanks at a large Conservative Party meeting in the Albert Hall, London. The revelation in the press that her estranged daughter Sylvia had had a child out of wedlock horrified Emmeline, and curtailed her campaign. She died two years later, the same year as equal voting rights were extended to women in Britain.

Edward Carpenter was an English poet, social theorist and campaigner, and has been described as an early gay activist. As a proponent of an alternative, anti-industrial mode of life and an advocate of sexual freedom, he exercised a significant influence on progressive social thought at the turn of the century.

Born in Hove in 1844, he was educated at Brighton College before going up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, the scene of his homosexual awakening accompanied by romantic rejection. After leaving university, he visited male prostitutes in libertine Paris before entering the Church of England as a Christian socialist curate. Heavily influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman and increasingly wearied by the hypocrisy of Victorian society, he soon left the Church and travelled to Yorkshire with the intention of educating workingmen, settling in Sheffield in 1882. Here he became increasingly politically engaged, joining the Socialist League in 1884. Like Gandhi, with whom he later corresponded, he was moved by Ruskin to reject the system of industrial capitalism, and advocated the back-to-the-earth Communist society idealized in Morris’ News from Nowhere. Inheriting his father’s fortune, he purchased a home at Millthorpe, Derbyshire, in 1882 and there began his soon-to-be iconic life of market gardening, poetry and hand-crafting the footwear he is credited with introducing from India: sandals.

Drawn increasingly to Hindu philosophy, he travelled to India and Ceylon in 1890. He stayed at the home of a college friend Ponnambalam Arunachalam and climbed Adam’s Peak in the company of Kalua, a lascar whom he had met on the steamer to Colombo. Following conversations with the guru Ramaswamy (known as the Gnani), he developed the conviction that socialism would bring about a revolution in human consciousness as well as of economic conditions. After returning to England, a chance meeting in a railway carriage led to his lifelong romance with George Merrill, a Sheffield workingman who joined him at Millthorpe in 1898. Undeterred by Wilde’s conviction in 1895, Carpenter insisted that ‘Uranian’ relationships could bring about a social levelling, and a stay at Millthorpe in 1912 gave E. M. Forster the outline of Maurice. From the cottage, now a social hub for radicals, he campaigned for environmentalism, animal rights, sexual freedom, pacifism and the Women’s Movement, while in London he encountered a lifelong friend and influence in Rabindranath Tagore. Although he did not travel again to India, friends such as Charlotte Despard, James and Margaret Cousins, Sarojini Naidu, Romain Rolland and Henry Salt continued to connect him to the subcontinent and its freedom struggle. A significant figure in the Fabian Society, he was in 1893 a founder member of the Independent Labour Party. He died in 1929 and was buried with Merrill at Mount Cemetery in Guildford, Surrey.