Philip Ochieng
3 July 2009
analysis
Nairobi — Nothing opens a young person's eyes wider than growing up in another culture. That is one thing Kenya owes to Tom Mboya. At a time when local opportunities were extremely limited, he enabled thousands of Kenyans to pursue university education abroad.
Of course, his name is usually associated with the 1959 airlift, the first of a series which took place every year till the mid-1960s. But even this loses much of its significance because we usually fail to describe the circumstances in Kenya which made it historic.
The most important is that tertiary places were extremely limited. There was only one truly academic institution - Makerere - to serve Britain's three East African colonies (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania). Places and resources being so few, entry was highly competitive.
Many very capable individuals failed to be enrolled and had to enter the job market, thus ending what might have been brilliant academic careers. Besides, up to the late 1950s, Makerere was not a true university. Famous early "Makererians" had come out only with the equivalent of Form Six.
After that, most went into teaching. And only then did some find opportunities and scholarships to pursue degree courses away from East Africa, mostly in Britain. A few opportunities came from India, the United States, Canada and continental Europe.
But therein lay another of the problems. It is that imperial propagandists - including the Britons who dominated our high schools - constantly spoke disparagingly about everything Indian and America. Only British education was worth the name.
The colonial authorities did everything to frustrate all attempts to enter Indian and American universities. And, of course, each of the continental Europe countries gave preference to students from their own colonies.
The upshot is that, for East Africans, university education remained dangerously elitist and confined, since it was to those who passed the Cambridge School Certificate examination with the highest marks. It was that system straitjacket that Tom Mboya set out to destroy.
When - in the middle of 1959 - he returned from an extensive US tour to announce that he had secured scores of scholarships for young Kenyans to study on American campuses, he was offending some very delicate British sensitivities and prejudices.
If this chance had not come about, I would have studied economics at the Royal Technical College (now the University of Nairobi). But the outcome might not have been the same.
If I had never left Kenya, my colonially imposed prejudices against certain races, religions, sects, tribes and even gender might have continued and even intensified.
Had I not spent four of my most formative years in Chicago, my moral and intellectual education might be much shallower, my social consciousness much dimmer, my world perspective much narrower.
The upshot is that only after Tom Mboya made it possible for me to cross both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic did my eyes open to the world.
Moreover, as I say, there were 81 of us in the first airlift. After that, there were close to 10 other equally massive airlifts. It is, therefore, probable that hundreds - perhaps thousands - of other Kenyans feel the same way as I do.
By opening this "window of opportunity", Mboya paved the way for other geopolitical Northern countries to offer scholarships to Kenyan boys and girls, especially such Commonwealth countries as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan and, with them, South Africa.
A number of us, who went to America between 1959 and 1963, later played vital roles in nation-building.
I can recall a few names: Jennifer Adhiambo, Paul Adhu Awiti, Samuel Ayany, Theodora Ayot, Dorcas Boit, Philip Githinji, Dunstan Ireri, John Kang'ethe, Peter Kenya, Arthur Magugu, Geoffrey Maloiy, Muthoni Muthiga, Simeon Odede, Steve Swai and Orwa Walgiyo.
In this way, too, Mboya connected Kenya with America in a manner about which historians will always write.
For among us was a certain Barack Obama, the man whose extra-curricular activities produced the present President of the United States of America. Moreover, Mboya's growing monopoly of Western sources of assistance was among the factors that split the nationalist movement, forcing an anti-Mboya faction - led by Jaramogi Odinga - to turn Eastwards, among other things, for similar educational opportunities.
Throughout the 1960s, Jaramogi sent thousands of youngsters from all over Kenya to universities in Albania, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia - thus, like Mboya, stepping on the toes of our British jingoes.
The anti-"communism" which informed the propaganda against Eastern education proved to be completely baseless because our graduates from Eastern Europe and the Far East turned out to be much more conservative than ourselves. During the Cold War, America proved to be much more radicalising than Russia.
Directly speaking, the social benefits that accrue to us from Eastern education go to Jaramogi. But, at least indirectly, they must also go to Mboya because it was his initiative that created the "jealousy" that enabled us to exploit the other side of the world.
Mboya moved closer and closer to the Kennedy family and America's labour aristocracy. But he was killed before his long-term aims could become manifest.
That is why, for the time being, we have to confine our eulogy to his educational contribution - the most ambitious single initiative in all of Kenya's history.
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