Fatherhood Quote by Louis Leakey

Leakey’s line dresses itself up as neutral observation, but it’s a loaded piece of colonial timekeeping. By likening the Kikuyu in early-20th-century Kenya to the Britons at the moment Rome arrived, he doesn’t just compare two societies; he arranges them on a single track of “civilization,” with Europe holding the stopwatch. The metaphor smuggles in an old imperial alibi: conquest as historical inevitability, domination as a kind of developmental accelerator. Rome becomes the flattering stand-in for Britain, and “2,000 years ago” turns living people into an anthropological reenactment.

The context matters: Leakey was a white Kenyan-born scientist with deep ties to the Kikuyu and an international career built in an era when anthropology often served empire even when it claimed to study it. His phrasing tries to do two things at once. It signals insider authority (“my father arrived,” the family as witness) and offers a schema legible to British readers: you already know this story; you were once “them,” then Rome happened, then progress. That rhetorical move can sound empathetic on the surface, but it quietly relocates agency away from the Kikuyu and toward the invading power. Similarity is doing double duty: it humanizes, yet it infantilizes by implying that the Kikuyu are simply earlier Britons waiting for their Romans.

It’s a sentence that reveals less about Kikuyu life than about the period’s intellectual reflex: the need to translate Africa into Europe’s past so Europe can keep imagining itself as Africa’s future.