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You make Ruby’s point: no one disputes that a Republic did not exist in law until the revision of the constitution in June 1964.

The sole point we are making is that despite the non-existence of a republic de jure, in law, it is not only conceivable to to think that people referred to the interim Kenyan state as a republic from the fall of 1963 onward,

BUT we have multiple newspaper articles from Oct. 1963 onward showing that people around the world referred to Kenya as a republic, even though it was not one de jure.

The great importance of no. 5160 is that it is from the London Times and the source of the terminology is Kenyatta’s interim government and it is at the time of the decision to go independent. Other evidence was from local newspapers in small towns in the US showing that exchange students were referring to themselves as from the Republic of Kenya. That’s valuable, but not as important as 5160.

What this shows is the foolishness of the debunkers who took general political status dates from encyclopedias etc. and pontificated that because Kenya was not de jure a republic until June 1964 (or, more commonly, people say, Dec. 1964), therefore the term “Republic of Kenya” could not have been used before June or Dec. 1964.

That is a faulty conclusion to draw from genuine facts.

It is a fact that Kenya became a republic either with the revised constitution of June 1964 or the recognition of the republic by England in December. That is a true fact.

But it does not follow from that fact that a certificate issued by a government unit in Kenya in February 1964 COULD NOT POSSIBLY have used the term “Republic of Kenya.”

No, Kenya was not yet a republic. But you simply cannot conclude definitively from that that the term could not have been in use.

And now we have contemporary evidence showing that the term was indeed in wide use.