As Kenya's first common-roll elections began, the land was heavy with fear and dread. It was the first time a black man's vote was as good as a white's. To the white settlers, the imminent prospect of control by the blacks was disturbing enough. Even more alarming was the fact that the chief black candidate sometimes seemed to be Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta himself. Though Kenyatta was still confined to a desert village after his 1953 conviction for masterminding the savage Mau Mau movement, his name was on placards everywhere, his photographs at every black rally. Fiery Tom Mboya campaigned in a sports shirt emblazoned with Kenyatta's image. As if things were not tense enough, it was the peak of the dry season, when the air is hot, dusty and stilla time when tempers are short. The army canceled all leave for the troops, and heavily armed riot police set up tents in Nairobi's city park.
Tom's If. To everyone's surprise, there was no violence at all. Almost to a man, African speakers urged moderation on the black electorate. Mboya astonished white witnesses by eschewing his usual provocative slogans. "Let us not become arrogant or racial, but humble and conscientious in taking on our new legitimate and rightful status," cried Tom to the crowds, and quoted Rudyard Kipling's "If":
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated don't give way to hating
When the votes were counted, Tom Mboya's Kenya African National Union had won control of 18 seats; 15 other black candidates were elected, giving the blacks a majority in the 65-man legislature. Mboya's own victory was a triumphant refutation of the charge that the Africans would split along tribal lines. Mboya is a member of the Luo tribe, and his opponents cannily ran a prominent Kikuyu doctor against him in his Nairobi district, where Kikuyus made up the bulk of the voters. It was no contest. Mboya won, 31,407 to 2,668. Young (30), victorious Tom was hoisted to the shoulders of the mob, as 6,000 shrieked "Uhuru!" (freedom).
Whites v. Whites. The extremist white settlers, led by Sir Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck, suffered a sharp defeat. In the all-white primaries for the ten seats reserved for whites, Cavendish-Bentinck's candidates swamped the moderate backers of Kenya Farmer Michael Blundell, who had sided with the British in advocating cooperation between the black majority (6,000,000) and Kenya's white minority (65,000). Blundell's fellow whites in the rich Rift Valley bombarded him with eggs and tomatoes at village rallies and hanged him in effigy. But in the general election, blacks were voting for the first time on the same list with whites, and their votes pushed Blundell to victory over Cavendish-Bentinck, 20,009 to 2,059. In the new legislature. Blundell's liberals probably will outnumber C-B's followers 8 to 3.
The long-feared first step toward peaceful transferral of power was at hand.
Though the British will retain ultimate control of Kenya's colony through the governorship, the Africans will get one-third of all Cabinet posts. But there is still Jomo Kenyatta. Mboya and his party swore to take part in no government until Kenyatta ("our first Chief Minister") is released "unconditionally'' from detention in Lodwar in the Northern Frontier Province wasteland 340 miles away.
Governor Sir Patrick Renison. who only last May had called the jailed Kenyatta a "leader to darkness and to death." was forced to find a compromise. Kenyatta, the Governor decreed, would be moved to a house within 200 miles of Nairobi so that he could be consulted by the African politicians. But he insisted that Kenyatta must remain apart from his nation in detention "until the new government is working well." Whether Mboya. in his new moderation, is satisfied by this remains to be seen.
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Bwana Tom Goes to Court
In their earnest efforts to hold on to Kenya—and to establish some sort of permanent peace between the races—the British have run into two kinds of obstacles. Once it was the Mau Mau terrorists; now it is a new kind of impatient black nationalism led by an aggressive 27-year-old labor leader named Tom Mboya. who wants nothing less than to set up in Kenya the same sort of black republic that Kwame Nkrumah runs in Ghana.
A Luo tribesman who spent a year at Ruskin College, Oxford, Mboya has become increasingly strident in his complaints against British attempts to bring about a gradual "multi-racial'' government in Kenya. Insisting on "parliamentary democracy for the African masses." he lashed out at the Colonial Office's 1957 constitution, which for the first time gave the 6,000,000 Africans the same number of elected seats in the Legislative
Council as the 57,000 whites. Nor did he like another British plan to divide an extra twelve special seats equally among Africans. Arabs and Europeans. When a group of moderate Africans agreed to run for these special seats. Mboya and six of his henchmen denounced them as "stooges, traitors and quislings." With that, the Crown haled Mboya & Co. into court for conspiracy and criminal libel.
When the trial began in Nairobi, it seemed inevitable that it would provide Mboya with the kind of martyrdom that is so invaluable in nationalist politics. The first day, Bwana Tom (as his idolatrous followers call him) arrived ostentatiously wearing a Ghana toga of kente cloth. Wherever he went, his followers trailed him crying the Ghana chant: "FreeDOM! Free-DOM!" His new People's Convention Party, modeled after Nkrumah's party, organized an effective boycott of buses, beer and tobacco, staged such wild demonstrations that the police had to call on Mboya himself to stop them.
Mboya's leftist London lawyer, D. N. Pritt, Q.C.. the defender of Mau Mau Leader Jomo Kenyatta (now in prison), got the conspiracy charge thrown out on a technicality, and set forth to destroy the reputations of the moderate African nominees who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution. At one he thundered: "Do you hate Africans, or merely despise them?" But somehow, the fireworks did not go off.
Far from being European stooges, some of the Africans emerged from hard cross-examination (as the judge remarked at the end of the trial) as simple, frank and engaging men. Last week the court declared Mboya & Co. guilty of criminal libel, slapped each with a token £75 fine, not enough to make martyrs of them. Outside the courthouse, where thousands of Bwana Tom's followers had demonstrated only a few days before, one native forlornly waved a placard saying EIGHT MILLION AFRICANS ON TRIAL, for the benefit of the small, halfhearted crowd—and the Nairobi police phlegmatically waited to quell the riot that never came.
A Luo tribesman who spent a year at Ruskin College, Oxford, Mboya has become increasingly strident in his complaints against British attempts to bring about a gradual "multi-racial'' government in Kenya. Insisting on "parliamentary democracy for the African masses." he lashed out at the Colonial Office's 1957 constitution, which for the first time gave the 6,000,000 Africans the same number of elected seats in the Legislative
Council as the 57,000 whites. Nor did he like another British plan to divide an extra twelve special seats equally among Africans. Arabs and Europeans. When a group of moderate Africans agreed to run for these special seats. Mboya and six of his henchmen denounced them as "stooges, traitors and quislings." With that, the Crown haled Mboya & Co. into court for conspiracy and criminal libel.
When the trial began in Nairobi, it seemed inevitable that it would provide Mboya with the kind of martyrdom that is so invaluable in nationalist politics. The first day, Bwana Tom (as his idolatrous followers call him) arrived ostentatiously wearing a Ghana toga of kente cloth. Wherever he went, his followers trailed him crying the Ghana chant: "FreeDOM! Free-DOM!" His new People's Convention Party, modeled after Nkrumah's party, organized an effective boycott of buses, beer and tobacco, staged such wild demonstrations that the police had to call on Mboya himself to stop them.
Mboya's leftist London lawyer, D. N. Pritt, Q.C.. the defender of Mau Mau Leader Jomo Kenyatta (now in prison), got the conspiracy charge thrown out on a technicality, and set forth to destroy the reputations of the moderate African nominees who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution. At one he thundered: "Do you hate Africans, or merely despise them?" But somehow, the fireworks did not go off.
Far from being European stooges, some of the Africans emerged from hard cross-examination (as the judge remarked at the end of the trial) as simple, frank and engaging men. Last week the court declared Mboya & Co. guilty of criminal libel, slapped each with a token £75 fine, not enough to make martyrs of them. Outside the courthouse, where thousands of Bwana Tom's followers had demonstrated only a few days before, one native forlornly waved a placard saying EIGHT MILLION AFRICANS ON TRIAL, for the benefit of the small, halfhearted crowd—and the Nairobi police phlegmatically waited to quell the riot that never came.
Setback for Tom
Met over luncheon or at a cocktail party, Kenya's handsome, articulate Tom Mboya is one of Africa's most winning personalities. But in his campaign to force Kenya's whites to surrender their political control of the fertile British East African colony, Tom Mboya shows a steely contempt for moderatjon and half measures. His platform: complete electoral equality for Kenya's blacks and whites by 1960, common schools for all races and a ban on further white immigration to Kenya.
Mboya's "racist extremism" shocks even some of his fellow Africans—so much so that in July a group of African elected members in the colonial Legislative Council dealt a painful blow to Mboya's prestige by breaking away from his leadership to form their own multiracial National Party, devoted to slowly increasing African representation, which would assure democratic self-government by 1968 for Kenya. To regain his political luster, Mboya promptly announced a new party of his own—the all-African Kenya Independence Movement. But last week fate dealt Tom another setback: the Kenya government nipped K.I.M. in the bud by refusing to grant it a license to function throughout the colony.
Protesting loudly, Mboya demanded that other parties be similarly restricted. But Kenya's white rulers pointed to a 1956 emergency decree prohibiting formation of any all-African group that was not confined to a single district or administrative area. Talking darkly of plans to push ahead with his new party in legally disguised forms, Tom Mboya cut to the heart of the issue with the question: Why was it only Africans who were prohibited from organizing on a colony-wide basis? Said he: "We wait to see what action the government now takes against the Indian Congress, the Moslem League, and the European Convention of Associations."
Mboya's "racist extremism" shocks even some of his fellow Africans—so much so that in July a group of African elected members in the colonial Legislative Council dealt a painful blow to Mboya's prestige by breaking away from his leadership to form their own multiracial National Party, devoted to slowly increasing African representation, which would assure democratic self-government by 1968 for Kenya. To regain his political luster, Mboya promptly announced a new party of his own—the all-African Kenya Independence Movement. But last week fate dealt Tom another setback: the Kenya government nipped K.I.M. in the bud by refusing to grant it a license to function throughout the colony.
Protesting loudly, Mboya demanded that other parties be similarly restricted. But Kenya's white rulers pointed to a 1956 emergency decree prohibiting formation of any all-African group that was not confined to a single district or administrative area. Talking darkly of plans to push ahead with his new party in legally disguised forms, Tom Mboya cut to the heart of the issue with the question: Why was it only Africans who were prohibited from organizing on a colony-wide basis? Said he: "We wait to see what action the government now takes against the Indian Congress, the Moslem League, and the European Convention of Associations."
Death in the Afternoon
It was a quiet Saturday afternoon in Nairobi, and Tom Mboya, Kenya's Minister of Economic Planning and Development, was doing a little shopping downtown. He stepped into Chhani's Pharmacy to buy a bottle of lotion. As he emerged, an assassin opened fire, escaping in the ensuing confusion. Mboya was struck in the chest, blood soaking his suede jacket, and died in an ambulance on the way to Nairobi Hospital. Grieving Kenyans soon gathered in such numbers at the hospital that baton-wielding police were called out to keep the crowd at bay.
Only 38, the handsome, articulate Mboya embodied many of the qualities so urgently needed by the fledgling nations of black Africa. He was a member of Kenya's second largest tribe, the Luo. But he saw his real loyalties to Kenya's detribalizing urban classes and made them his constituency. He was an early and fervent apostle for his country's freedom, inspired by Jomo Kenyatta. But he deplored the violence and bloodshed of the Mau Mau uprisings against the British and refused to participate in them. He became the architect of independent Kenya's major documents, including its constitution. He also pleaded eloquently for a Marshall Plan for all Africa, for the creation of an African economy, and "the brotherhood of the 'extended family' in a United States of Africa."
Mboya thought of himself as an African socialist, that catchall for moderate African reformers who favor mixed economies. Thoroughly pro-Western, with close ties both to the U.S. and Britain (he spent a year at Oxford), Mboya had no use for Soviet and Chinese efforts to gain a foothold in Kenya. It was on that issue that Mboya and his principal political enemy, Oginga Odinga, collided. Odinga, a Luo like Mboya, is an emotional, radical tribalist with Communist leanings and support. Mboya helped oust Odinga as Vice President in 1966.
Mboya had many political enemies on the right as well as the left. He also had personal enemies, for he could be arrogant, brittle and ruthless in political infighting. As a Luo, Mboya was given only a scant chance to succeed Kenyatta, a member of the country's dominant Kikuyu tribe. His talents were such, however, that he might have been assassinated to head off any possibility of his presidency. Kenyatta described his death as "a loss to Kenya, to Africa and the world."
Only 38, the handsome, articulate Mboya embodied many of the qualities so urgently needed by the fledgling nations of black Africa. He was a member of Kenya's second largest tribe, the Luo. But he saw his real loyalties to Kenya's detribalizing urban classes and made them his constituency. He was an early and fervent apostle for his country's freedom, inspired by Jomo Kenyatta. But he deplored the violence and bloodshed of the Mau Mau uprisings against the British and refused to participate in them. He became the architect of independent Kenya's major documents, including its constitution. He also pleaded eloquently for a Marshall Plan for all Africa, for the creation of an African economy, and "the brotherhood of the 'extended family' in a United States of Africa."
Mboya thought of himself as an African socialist, that catchall for moderate African reformers who favor mixed economies. Thoroughly pro-Western, with close ties both to the U.S. and Britain (he spent a year at Oxford), Mboya had no use for Soviet and Chinese efforts to gain a foothold in Kenya. It was on that issue that Mboya and his principal political enemy, Oginga Odinga, collided. Odinga, a Luo like Mboya, is an emotional, radical tribalist with Communist leanings and support. Mboya helped oust Odinga as Vice President in 1966.
Mboya had many political enemies on the right as well as the left. He also had personal enemies, for he could be arrogant, brittle and ruthless in political infighting. As a Luo, Mboya was given only a scant chance to succeed Kenyatta, a member of the country's dominant Kikuyu tribe. His talents were such, however, that he might have been assassinated to head off any possibility of his presidency. Kenyatta described his death as "a loss to Kenya, to Africa and the world."
Tug of War
A year ago, young Tom Mboya from Kenya was the toast of Accra, enjoying the benevolent patronage of that would-be leader of emerging Africa, Ghana's Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah himself. The principal difference between the two men is that Nkrumah is the unchallenged boss of an independent nation of 5,000,000, almost all of them black, while Mboya, in the multiracial British colony of Kenya, is merely the leading African politician in a government where the whites run things. When Nkrumah held his All-Africa Peoples Conference, he propelled Labor Leader Mboya into the chairmanship, and the stage seemed set for a lasting alliance of Mboya's rising influence in East Africa with Nkrumah's power on the West Coast.
This was not to be; last week Nkrumah's obedient press in Ghana was lambasting Mboya as being a "stooge of imperialism" and "under the thumb of the Americans." The reason: Mboya had dared to challenge Nkrumah in the race for leadership of the budding trade-union movement in Africa.
Neutralist Nkrumah, with Partner Sékou Touré in neighboring Guinea, would like to build an "independent" union movement in Africa and cut labor ties with the free world's International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, but many suspect this merely conceals an inclination to affiliate with a Communist-backed rival, the World Federation of Trade Unions. Mboya's union headquarters in Nairobi was built with $35,000 contributed by U.S. unions, and Mboya himself is a staunch supporter of I.C.F.T.U. as well as chairman of its union organization in East, Central and Southern Africa.
Last May, Mboya called a conference in Lagos, Nigeria, almost next door to Nkrumah, to form the first All-Africa I.C.F.T.U. labor organization. Ghana stalled for months before replying, finally sent word that the idea of a conference was all right, but that it should be held in Accra, "capital of the All-Africa movement." Mboya declined to change the site, tartly pointing out that Nigeria, with a population of 35 million, is the largest African country. Ghana decided to call a trade-union conference of its own at the same time as Mboya's.
In Lagos, Mboya's meeting drew union leaders from 29 countries. Nkrumah's affair was a flop, with officially accredited delegates only from Guinea, Morocco and the United Arab Republic. "I have no quarrel with Nkrumah," Mboya insisted last week, but it was no secret that he strongly dislikes the way Nkrumah runs his unions, i.e., as a government department and as instruments of government power. Apparently, most other African labor officials feel the same way. Delegates representing Nigeria, the Belgian Congo, the French territories and many other parts of Africa voted overwhelmingly at Lagos to form an All-Africa union under Mboya's leadership, totally ignoring a rival group formed by Nkrumah's rump session in Accra.
This was not to be; last week Nkrumah's obedient press in Ghana was lambasting Mboya as being a "stooge of imperialism" and "under the thumb of the Americans." The reason: Mboya had dared to challenge Nkrumah in the race for leadership of the budding trade-union movement in Africa.
Neutralist Nkrumah, with Partner Sékou Touré in neighboring Guinea, would like to build an "independent" union movement in Africa and cut labor ties with the free world's International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, but many suspect this merely conceals an inclination to affiliate with a Communist-backed rival, the World Federation of Trade Unions. Mboya's union headquarters in Nairobi was built with $35,000 contributed by U.S. unions, and Mboya himself is a staunch supporter of I.C.F.T.U. as well as chairman of its union organization in East, Central and Southern Africa.
Last May, Mboya called a conference in Lagos, Nigeria, almost next door to Nkrumah, to form the first All-Africa I.C.F.T.U. labor organization. Ghana stalled for months before replying, finally sent word that the idea of a conference was all right, but that it should be held in Accra, "capital of the All-Africa movement." Mboya declined to change the site, tartly pointing out that Nigeria, with a population of 35 million, is the largest African country. Ghana decided to call a trade-union conference of its own at the same time as Mboya's.
In Lagos, Mboya's meeting drew union leaders from 29 countries. Nkrumah's affair was a flop, with officially accredited delegates only from Guinea, Morocco and the United Arab Republic. "I have no quarrel with Nkrumah," Mboya insisted last week, but it was no secret that he strongly dislikes the way Nkrumah runs his unions, i.e., as a government department and as instruments of government power. Apparently, most other African labor officials feel the same way. Delegates representing Nigeria, the Belgian Congo, the French territories and many other parts of Africa voted overwhelmingly at Lagos to form an All-Africa union under Mboya's leadership, totally ignoring a rival group formed by Nkrumah's rump session in Accra.
Under the Ayieke Tree
Throughout his life, Tom Mboya worked for an end to tribalism and for the growth of a Kenyan nationalism.
Ironically, his sudden death by a still un known assassin aroused Kenya's tribal rivalries. As his body lay in state in his Nairobi home last week, his fellow Luo tribesmen closed ranks against the rest of Kenya. Any mourner who was a Luo was welcomed, even if he had been an opponent of Economic and Development Minister Mboya. As the day wore on, Luo bitterness increased and even Mboya's close friends, if they were Kikuyus, Tugens or of any other tribe, were turned away with taunts and stones.
The Requiem High Mass for Mboya in Nairobi's Holy Family Cathedral be came a shambles. A crowd of 20,000, mostly Luo, jammed the cathedral square. When venerable President Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, arrived in his black, bulletproof Mercedes, the car was pelted with anything handy, even shoes. The police reacted with flailing batons and white-foaming tear-gas grenades. The gas penetrated the cathedral, and its sting set children wailing. Some of the harried congregation used holy water to rinse their eyes, and one retired government official died the next day of the gas's aftereffects. The words of Archbishop J. J. McCarthy were lost in the shriek of sirens, the lamentations of women, the crash of plate-glass windows. When a rock smashed the windshield of his car, a German bank official drove into a tree and was killed.
Negative Rays. A public viewing of Mboya's body, scheduled for that night, was canceled. At four in the morning, the funeral cortege set out, headed for the shores of Lake Victoria, the heartland of the Luos, 300 miles away. Mboya's coffin was draped in the national colors of black, green and red, and covered with tropical flowers. Nothing went right. After only five miles, one car broke down. On the escarpment of the Rift Valley, the car carrying Mboya's pregnant widow, Pamela, was involved in a three-car collision that injured five people. At Nakuru, where 50,000 had gathered, Pamela Mboya complained of chest pains. She was rushed to the local hospital, but when X rays proved negative, she returned to the cortege. The hearse broke down and was hastily repaired. Thereafter, it had to stop for ten minutes every 20 miles to prevent the radiator from boiling over.
The progress through Luo-land was agonizingly slow. Women in vividly patterned dresses flung themselves onto the road ahead of the hearse; men and boys clung to the hood and the body. Other Luos sat half naked by the road, smeared with the traditional clay of mourning, while witch doctors in white ostrich feathers and monkey-skin skirts pranced among them. Trucks, cars and buses decorated with palm fronds and jacaranda branches brought thousands more to vantage points along the way.
Strong forces of police, armed with Sten guns and rifles, charged repeatedly in an effort to keep the route open. At Kisamu, a grass fire started, and a curtain of ash hung in the air. The lamentations of the huge throng continued for hours after the cortege passed by.
The political effect of Mboya's murder will apparently be to strengthen the opposition to the government. Mboya himself had been in Kenyatta's Cabinet and a supporter of the government. But most Luos, led by Leftist Oginga Odinga, belong to the opposition Kenya People's Union. Along the entire route of the cortege, crowds shouted the defiant party rallying cry of "Dume! Dame!", which means bull, and refers to the K.P.U. party symbol. How badly the government will be hurt depends, of course, on how swiftly it can capture the assassin and on the discovery of which faction the killer represents. If the killer turns out to be a fellow Luo, the K.P.U. will be unable to use Mboya's death against the government. But if he should be a Kikuyu, Kenya's dominant tribe, Odinga will probably be able to rally Luos to his party in large numbers.
Buckskin Drums. The final leg of the journey was to Homa Bay on the shore of steel-gray Lake Victoria; the cortege arrived after nightfall, and the surrounding hills echoed with the ceaseless throb of buckskin drums. Another Requiem Mass was held, celebrated by the African Bishop of Kisii, Maurice Otunga, and throughout the night mourners filed past the casket at the rate of 100 per minute. Finally, the coffin was ferried across the choppy water to Rusinga Island, the ancestral home of Mboya's clan. Outside the family home, Mboya's coffin was placed under a shelter of poles and cornstalks—to take the coffin into the house would be to run the risk of bringing another death to the family. Next day, Mboya was buried beneath the yellow blossoms of an ayieke tree, together with his oxhide shield, beaded cap and walking stick, as required by Luo law. After five days, the tribal elders will go down to the lake to bathe and cleanse themselves of evil spirits.
Ironically, his sudden death by a still un known assassin aroused Kenya's tribal rivalries. As his body lay in state in his Nairobi home last week, his fellow Luo tribesmen closed ranks against the rest of Kenya. Any mourner who was a Luo was welcomed, even if he had been an opponent of Economic and Development Minister Mboya. As the day wore on, Luo bitterness increased and even Mboya's close friends, if they were Kikuyus, Tugens or of any other tribe, were turned away with taunts and stones.
The Requiem High Mass for Mboya in Nairobi's Holy Family Cathedral be came a shambles. A crowd of 20,000, mostly Luo, jammed the cathedral square. When venerable President Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, arrived in his black, bulletproof Mercedes, the car was pelted with anything handy, even shoes. The police reacted with flailing batons and white-foaming tear-gas grenades. The gas penetrated the cathedral, and its sting set children wailing. Some of the harried congregation used holy water to rinse their eyes, and one retired government official died the next day of the gas's aftereffects. The words of Archbishop J. J. McCarthy were lost in the shriek of sirens, the lamentations of women, the crash of plate-glass windows. When a rock smashed the windshield of his car, a German bank official drove into a tree and was killed.
Negative Rays. A public viewing of Mboya's body, scheduled for that night, was canceled. At four in the morning, the funeral cortege set out, headed for the shores of Lake Victoria, the heartland of the Luos, 300 miles away. Mboya's coffin was draped in the national colors of black, green and red, and covered with tropical flowers. Nothing went right. After only five miles, one car broke down. On the escarpment of the Rift Valley, the car carrying Mboya's pregnant widow, Pamela, was involved in a three-car collision that injured five people. At Nakuru, where 50,000 had gathered, Pamela Mboya complained of chest pains. She was rushed to the local hospital, but when X rays proved negative, she returned to the cortege. The hearse broke down and was hastily repaired. Thereafter, it had to stop for ten minutes every 20 miles to prevent the radiator from boiling over.
The progress through Luo-land was agonizingly slow. Women in vividly patterned dresses flung themselves onto the road ahead of the hearse; men and boys clung to the hood and the body. Other Luos sat half naked by the road, smeared with the traditional clay of mourning, while witch doctors in white ostrich feathers and monkey-skin skirts pranced among them. Trucks, cars and buses decorated with palm fronds and jacaranda branches brought thousands more to vantage points along the way.
Strong forces of police, armed with Sten guns and rifles, charged repeatedly in an effort to keep the route open. At Kisamu, a grass fire started, and a curtain of ash hung in the air. The lamentations of the huge throng continued for hours after the cortege passed by.
The political effect of Mboya's murder will apparently be to strengthen the opposition to the government. Mboya himself had been in Kenyatta's Cabinet and a supporter of the government. But most Luos, led by Leftist Oginga Odinga, belong to the opposition Kenya People's Union. Along the entire route of the cortege, crowds shouted the defiant party rallying cry of "Dume! Dame!", which means bull, and refers to the K.P.U. party symbol. How badly the government will be hurt depends, of course, on how swiftly it can capture the assassin and on the discovery of which faction the killer represents. If the killer turns out to be a fellow Luo, the K.P.U. will be unable to use Mboya's death against the government. But if he should be a Kikuyu, Kenya's dominant tribe, Odinga will probably be able to rally Luos to his party in large numbers.
Buckskin Drums. The final leg of the journey was to Homa Bay on the shore of steel-gray Lake Victoria; the cortege arrived after nightfall, and the surrounding hills echoed with the ceaseless throb of buckskin drums. Another Requiem Mass was held, celebrated by the African Bishop of Kisii, Maurice Otunga, and throughout the night mourners filed past the casket at the rate of 100 per minute. Finally, the coffin was ferried across the choppy water to Rusinga Island, the ancestral home of Mboya's clan. Outside the family home, Mboya's coffin was placed under a shelter of poles and cornstalks—to take the coffin into the house would be to run the risk of bringing another death to the family. Next day, Mboya was buried beneath the yellow blossoms of an ayieke tree, together with his oxhide shield, beaded cap and walking stick, as required by Luo law. After five days, the tribal elders will go down to the lake to bathe and cleanse themselves of evil spirits.
Ready or Not
It was the biggest African political rally in Nairobi's history. Under the hot sun, 20,000 blacks packed into African Stadium, sang and chanted as they waited for the returning hero, just back from London.
Then a mighty roar went up, and there came Tom Mboya on the shoulders of his excited supporters. Around his shoulders was a black skin cape. The sleepy eyes danced with pleasure, and a grin split the gleaming, satin-smooth black face.
With a wave of his fly switch, Tom brought the throng to sudden silence. "My brothers," he cried, "today is a great day for Kenya. When we left for London, the government was in the hands of the Europeans. Now it is we who can open or close the door. Kenya has become an African country!" With one voice, the crowd roared "Uhuru!" (Swahili for freedom).
"Whose Kenya is it?" shouted Tom. "Ours!" shrieked 20,000. Now the mob's chant was in throbbing rhythm. "Are you tired of asking for freedom?" asked Tom. "No!" came the resounding answer.
As he left the stadium, thousands followed, pressing around his open Land Rover, which led the way toward the African locations. Alarmed, the police read the Riot Act through a loudspeaker, hurled tear-gas bombs, and advanced in a baton charge, finally dispersing the crowd in a hail of stones. But all that night in the dark streets of the African sections, the familiar cry echoed: "Uhuru!"
Sleepers Awake. In Nigeria, the cry was "FreeDOM!" and the Congolese yelled " 'depenDANCE!" Whatever its label, the spirit of self-rule was sweeping at gale force across Africa, last of the continents to awaken from the sleep of centuries.
On Africa's broad western bulge facing the Atlantic, freedom is already established or imminent almost everywhere. There, independent Ghana, Guinea and Liberia will soon be joined by the rest of France's fragmenting African empire. At least seven new sovereign African states will come into existence in 1960. First on the timetable was Cameroon; soon to come: Togoland, the sprawling, wealthy Belgian Congo, the Mali Federation of Senegal and French Sudan, little Somalia, and Madagascar. On Oct. 1, the 35 million people of Nigeria, most populous of all, will get formal independence. By year's end, 180 million of the continent's 240 million people will be under black rule.
For Africa's 5,700,000 pioneering whites, it is a time of foreboding and doubts. "But are they ready for independence?" is the common question. A.D. 1960, the Africans have a quick and emphatic reply: Here we come, ready or not.
The Self-Assured. Many perils lie ahead as African colonialism gives way to the ferocity of raw new nationalism across a continent so large that the U.S., India, Pakistan and China together could fit within its boundaries. How it all turns out will depend largely on the new crop of young leaders rising to prominence in the peaceful revolution's wake. They are a mixed lot: clerks, teachers, village firebrands, and bush politicians with considerable native talent but little background or experience for the task of nation-building. Yet they walk onto the world stage with uncommon self-assurance. A Patrice Lumumba, onetime postal clerk and jailbird in the Congo, debates Congolese independence on even terms with the skilled ministers of Belgium in Brussels' Palais des Congrès. Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika enraptures sophisticated U.S. audiences on a coast-to-coast lecture tour. Kenya's Tom Mboya, 29, who used to be courted only by English left-wingers, now holds forth suavely as honor guest in the private dining rooms of London's largest banks and casually keeps a colonial governor waiting while he takes a shower.
Twenty years ago, handsome Tom Mboya was just another barefoot child in the untamed highlands of East Africa, where his people had only recently discovered the uses of the wheel. He was born to illiterate parents on the dried cow-dung floor of a grass-roofed hut on the sisal (hemp) estate of Sir William Northrup McMillan, who, a local yarn has it, won his 34,000 acres of Kenya highlands with a throw of the dice in Nairobi's Norfolk Hotel bar.
Tom Mboya has come a long way from his origins, but he remembers them and their rigid social order: at the bottom were the African workers, earning $3 a month in the sisal fields; then came the Indian shopkeeper, who sold them kerchiefs, trinkets and tobacco; on top were the few whites around.
"Do not set yourself against the white man," warned Tom Mboya's father, a sober, hard-working Jaluo tribesman who was the African headman at the farm's sisal-processing plant. "He is too powerful, and you cannot change him." But Tom Mboya recalls how riled he was at the sight of the stern estate manager, whom the Africans in fear called Bwana Kiboko—the boss who carries the hippo-skin whip.
Scrawling in the Sand. Making the princely local sum of $7 a month as headman, his father could afford the luxury of school for Tom at Kabaa mission, 25 miles away, where Roman Catholic priests were Irish and the fees were $14 a year. There, at nine, Tom scrawled his lessons in the sand under a shade tree, for classrooms were crowded and blackboards nonexistent. At his next school, St. Mary's, near Lake Victoria, the lessons for the first time were in English. He was no prodigious scholar, and no leader, but he liked singing, acting, and especially debating. His teachers noted another characteristic, a deep aversion to violence. No one recalls a single fist fight or angry argument; when the kids ribbed him about his soprano voice and his chubby figure, he laughed it away.
He barely passed in history, but he did absorb a few ideas: the American revolutionary slogan, "No Taxation Without Representation," echoed in his mind, and he wrote an enthusiastic paper on Napoleon—"Here was a man who defied the whole world." Later, at the Holy Ghost College (high school) at Mangu, he learned about Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington. But the missionaries discouraged his political questions and, irritated, he abandoned his plans to enter a seminary, forming a bitterness toward the church that he retains to this day, though he still considers himself Catholic ("My disagreements are not with the faith, but the church has been very weak in its position on the colonial question; it has tended to defend the status quo").
The Voice of Kenyatta. Tom's high school days ended when his father could no longer afford to help with the fees. But this shock was to give him his political start. He took a free, three-year public-health course in Nairobi to qualify as a sanitation inspector with the city government, and began slipping off to hear the fiery political speeches of Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta, the famed Kikuyu leader. As a city official, Tom Mboya noted bitterly, his job paid $30 a month for work that brought white inspectors $140, and the whites drove official cars and wore street suits, while Tom was expected to go about his duties on a bicycle and dressed in uniform.
Nor was he pleased when one day a white woman walked into the health-office laboratory to have a bottle of milk examined. "Is nobody here?" she asked of Tom, who was alone in the lab. "Madam, something is wrong with your eyes," replied Mboya. Stomping out, the woman huffed: "I must have my work done by Europeans. This boy is very rude."
From then on, say his former official superiors, Mboya had little time for his job. Instead of going out on inspections, he held court in his office, taking up and then taking over the Africans' municipal union. Jomo Kenyatta's scowling photo hung in the most conspicuous place on Tom Mboya's office wall.
Hard Work & Play. Dark storm clouds were gathering over Kenya's lovely land of smoke-blue mountains, deep forests and lush green pastures. For the white landowners, some of them from England's titled families, carving farms out of virgin bush had been hard but rewarding work, producing some modest fortunes. They lived well, and when the sun went down, they played hard. Upcountry, there was cricket, polo, and pink gins on the terrace for the retired military and naval officers, whose modest pensions stretched farther in Kenya than they did in the changing social order back home in England. In the free and easy atmosphere, few of the 30,000 whites (in a land of 6,000,000 Africans) made much note of the brooding hatred of the million-strong Kikuyu people, Kenya's largest tribe, who fiercely resented the white intrusion.
The Kikuyu are a people of dark and mystical dreams whose legend relates that when Ngai (God) first divided up the world, he held Kenya in such affection that he kept Mount Kenya as his favorite resting place. He told Gikuyu, the first Kikuyu, that if difficulty ever arose, Gikuyu should make a sacrifice and raise a hand toward Mount Kenya, and Ngai would help. Not far away, under a fig tree, Gikuyu found a beautiful woman, Moombi, to be mother of the Kikuyu race. Later, when their nine beautiful daughters needed husbands, Gikuyu sacrificed a lamb and a kid under a fig tree, smeared their blood on its bark, faced Mount Kenya, and saw his daughters' wishes come true.
From this legend came the Kikuyu deep veneration of their mountain and the earth of its endless slopes. The Kikuyu looked with bitterness on the 12,700 sq. mi. of land especially reserved for European settlers, the rich "white highlands" whence comes most of Kenya's lucrative coffee, tea, sisal and pyrethrum. The whites in rebuttal said that their highlands were never Kikuyu territory but a neglected no man's land between contending tribes, and that the Kikuyu had badly farmed their own reserve north of Nairobi, leaving it poor and eroded.
Return of the Native. In 1929, fierce, bearded Jomo Kenyatta, wild-eyed Kikuyu spokesman and student of telepathy, magic spells and Kikuyu lore, journeyed to London to demand the white man's land and political rights for his people. After 15 years in London and two in Moscow, he returned to Kenya to set up a network of bush schools, which spread antiwhite propaganda and upheld such barbaric Kikuyu rites as female circumcision,* which the missionaries and government officials had tried to stop. District officers stumbled onto fanatic ritual meetings in forest clearings. Later, word spread that tens of thousands of Kikuyu were taking fierce oaths of loyalty to a strange creed called Mau Mau, sealing the bond by drinking blood and waving cat corpses in the air as they sat facing the holy mountain.
In 1952, marauding Mau Mau gangs began darting out of the Aberdare hills to slaughter white farmers and hack their cattle to death, and the government declared a national emergency. It is generally agreed that Mboya played no part in the savage three-year revolt. But he had been an active member of Kenyatta's Kenya African Union.
When Kenyatta, accused of fostering Mau Mau, was sent to serve a seven-year prison term in the Northern Frontier
Province, Tom Mboya volunteered to help out, and Kenyatta's successor as K.A.U. president, Walter Odede, recognizing a talented propagandist, made him public-relations officer of the party. Odede, in turn, was locked up in March 1953, and Mboya became acting treasurer, despite an order from Kenyatta sent through clandestine channels: "He is a very young man and I've only met him once, so do not confirm the appointment."
As K.A.U. treasurer Tom helped raise funds for Jomo's defense, and still insists that Kenyatta was not guilty of engineering the Mau Mau terror, which before it ended took the lives of 84 whites, of more than 1,500 Kikuyu who fell under the Mau Mau pangas for failing to support the movement, and of 10,500 terrorists, killed by police and soldiers. Mboya himself had a close call when police raiders stormed into his office during a roundup and opened fire, wounding a colleague sitting next to him. The government's ruthless countermeasures (including the arrest of 35,000 people in one day) disturbed Tom as much as did the revolt itself.
Moving Up. With so many Africans being arrested, Mboya rose to increasing prominence. "All of a sudden I was just in it," he recalls. "People looked to persons like myself, for after all, we had no elected members in the government to speak up for the Africans." Tom's Luo tribal origins saved him from landing in jail—the police were scouring Nairobi for the Kikuyu, and their Embu and Meru allies. Technically still on the city payroll, he spent most of his time expanding his local union to a Kenya-wide municipal workers' organization and had a sharp eye on the big Kenya Federation of Labor, with which he affiliated his expanding group. When K.A.U. was finally banned in mid-1953, the federation became the ideal nationwide group for organizing African political ambitions. He elbowed his way to the top job, general secretary. He was 23.
Lesson in India. Tempers have cooled somewhat but many Kenya whites still agree with a crusty pioneer, Colonel Ewart Scott ("Grogs") Grogan, 85, who thinks the government should have strung Mau Mau bandits from every lamppost in Nairobi. Some, like Kenya's able, liberal ex-Minister of Finance Ernest A.
Vasey, believe that Mau Mauism is an ugly symptom of deeper illness. Industrious the white settlers may be, and hopelessly primitive the majority of Africans, but how long can the Africans be kept out of power in a land where they outnumber the Europeans 92 to one?
Under the new constitution for Kenya that British Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton introduced in 1954, one lone African was appointed to the Cabinet—but left out of important decisions and conferences. Young Tom Mboya rejected the new constitution, as did most Africans. Besides, he found himself being lionized by foreign labor leaders, who offered him encouragement, advice and, best of all, money. In 1954, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions paid Mboya's expenses to a labor seminar in Calcutta. There, he was shocked by a poverty even worse than Kenya's but much impressed by India's development projects. "What I saw made me completely aware that independence must be looked upon as a means to an end but not an end itself."
He liked the American trade unionists he met in Calcutta better than the British T.U.C. representatives, who considered him a cheeky, young know-it-all. Next year he won a year's scholarship at Ruskin College at Oxford, where he sat at the feet of such eminents as G.D.H. Cole, Kenneth Robinson, and Margery Perham, and breathed the heady socialism of Harold Laski's Grammar of Politics. "I still have the greatest feelings for Oxford," Mboya says. "It was a very impressive year." And, he adds, it impressed Europeans back in Kenya. With new confidence, he went to the U.S. for a lecture tour, met Walter Reuther, George Meany and David Dubinsky, and went home with a $35,000 A.F.L.-C.I.O. gift to build a new union headquarters in Nairobi.
He returned to find breathtaking changes under way. The government had just raised the number of Africans in the Legislative Council to eight out of a total of 58, and for the first time Africans were to be elected, not appointed. Restrictions against African political activities were relaxed slightly. In a free-swinging campaign, Mboya won a Nairobi seat against a rising young African hothead named C.M.G. Argwings-Kodhek, a lawyer since disbarred.
Already Mboya was developing a tactic successful for him and infuriating for his opposition: haggling, reaching agreement, then rejecting what had been agreed upon as not enough. Soon he was in London demanding more: one man, one vote, on a common roll. Fearing violence, the Colonial Office agreed to bring African membership up to parity with elected
Europeans on Legco (the legislative council). But appointed Europeans guaranteed a continued white majority, and Mboya led a boycott by the African members.
The Watershed. Mboya was forcing the pace. But probably not even he expected the overwhelming success that 1960 was to bring. Six weeks ago, Mboya and the entire African elected membership sat down at London's Lancaster House for a round-table conference with British and Kenya government officials and delegates of white and Asian settlers. Last week they arose with the outline of a totally new Kenya. Its main terms: ¶ A common voting roll and an expanded franchise that would raise the number of eligible African voters to perhaps a million in new elections next spring. ¶ A 65-member legislature in which Africans seem certain of 37 seats, a clear majority.
¶ A new Cabinet in which Africans are promised several ministries. ¶ A bill of rights, still to be drafted, guaranteeing equality and protection of property rights by judicial safeguard. But the old system of reserved lands for separate races (including the white highlands) would be swept away.
It is a crucial decision for Africa. Now, the certainty lies ahead that for the first time a large permanent white population will come under the rule of black men in Africa. "A death blow to the European community in Kenya," cried stunned Llewellyn R. Briggs, sometime R.A.F. Group Captain, Kenya landowner, and leader of the extremists in the London talks. At his 8,000-ft.-high home near Limuru, blond Farmer David Simpson sat staring into the flickering fireplace. "A bloody shame. This lovely country, 90% developed by European capital and sweat, is being completely buggered up."
Approximately 600 highland farms are up for sale, many of them at cut prices by owners who talk bitterly of leaving the country. Half a dozen of the angriest settlers were at Nairobi Airport to greet homecoming Michael Blundell (see box), the moderate who accepted the new plan in London and bravely agreed to try to sell it to his fellow whites. One kept booming through a bull horn: "Shame, shame; shame on you! We have been betrayed by you, Mr. Blundell!" Others cried, "You rat!," and their leader, wiry little highlands farmer, Major Jim Hughes, 63, hurled a handful of coins at Blundell's feet, shouting, "Here are 30 pieces of silver for you, Judas—go on, pick them up!" (Said Blundell later: "It's due to his living at 8,300 feet.")
Vote for Some. Tom Mboya was exultant: "We have exploded once and for all the myth of white supremacy." Now it was his task to sell the plan to the doubters and the angry among his own Africans. There were some of both, for Mboya and his delegation were not returning with all they had promised. He had sworn to settle for nothing less than one man, one vote, but in London he accepted a franchise still limited to those who can read or write, or are over 40, or are earning at least $210 a year. He had promised "Uhtiru today!," but he will not have full independence tomorrow, or perhaps for three or four years. Even the African majority will not take effect until early next year.
But Mboya had taken what he could get from Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, and he proclaimed, at his own big welcome-home, that the agreement was just "an instrument to use" in getting more—and getting it more quickly. "As to the future of white settlers, there's no room for anyone who does not believe in undiluted democracy. Those Europeans who hesitate have only one alternative, and that's to sell out and leave."
The violence of Mboya's language, delivered with a pleased smile, reflected his own increased self-confidence and his shrewd tactical awareness that he dares not let any African leader grab a more extreme position for independence than his. To the crowd of 20,000 gathered in Nairobi's African Stadium, Mboya pledged, to the biggest cheers of the day: "We will not rest until Kenyatta is back with us."
The big challenge to Mboya's leadership revolves around the famous exile in faraway Lodwar village. The legendary Kenyatta remains the idol of every Kenya African. If Kenyatta is angry with Mboya's compromise, Tom is in for trouble, for, after all, he is a mere youngster in the eyes of some Kikuyu politicians, who were fighting for African rights before Mboya was born. Cautiously, Tom says: "I have never represented myself as a replacement for Kenyatta. When he comes back, we will all accept him as our leader," and he adds: "It does not make much difference to me. I am not in this for personal gain." One Kenyatta associate says that Jomo, a man of harsh action, "does not like Mboya's talk-talk-talk way of doing things."
But those who have seen Kenyatta recently say that in his 60s he is an alcoholic wreck. There are younger challengers to Mboya too, and his Luo origin remains a handicap among the Kikuyu, who resent the fact that the Luos stayed out of the Mau Mau troubles and inherited good jobs in Nairobi.
Westerns & Thrillers. In the hope that he will get practice in governing, Colonial Secretary Macleod is trying to persuade Mboya to take one of the three major Cabinet posts that will be handed over to Africans after next year's elections. But Mboya will probably prefer to snipe from outside, from the security of the second-floor offices in Nairobi, which are the headquarters of his People's Convention Party and of the Kenya Federation of Labor.
Bachelor Mboya lives with a younger brother, 15, in a rented yellow-stucco duplex, and is one of the few Africans in Kenya who has a houseboy and a telephone. He gets up between 5 and 6 and dictates his correspondence and orders for the day into the fancy new Dictaphone he keeps at home. By the time he arrives at the office, smartly dressed, each morning around 9, the dingy hall outside is filling with long lines of visitors, 200 or 300 a day, who want his attention on union matters, advice on jobs or marriages, or seek scholarships to American colleges under the Jackie Robinson-Harry Belafonte fund that he runs (to date it has sent 81 students to the U.S.). He tries to see all comers, and his office is usually swarming with people talking at the same time. He sits at his green metal desk, sleepy-eyed but taking it all in. Sometimes, to get away, he goes off to an afternoon movie (favorites: westerns and thrillers).
At night, after dinner, he often goes to work alone in a hideaway upstairs office, where he can hear the sounds of the best dance band in Africa, arising from the first-floor exclusive Equator Club, which is open to white hunters, rich settler types, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Ruark, and Hollywood visitors—but not to Africans. Except on trips, Mboya has little time these days for the nightclubs and dancing he loves (he once shook the maracas in a dance band), or for the many girl friends, not all of them African, whom Tom has always attracted. His current flame is Pamela Odede, 21, slender, poised, and graceful daughter of Tom's former K.A.U. chief, Walter Odede (who after seven years is still being held without trial). They were secretly engaged long before she left last September for Western College in Oxford, Ohio, where she is a junior on a scholarship arranged by Tom.
Sensational in Swahili. By most who know him, Tom Mboya is respected but not loved, for the hard climb up the ladder has tempered his shy, modest personality with a clinically detached coldness and an occasional ruthlessness that angers enemies and saddens friends. He is courteous and correct, but a hard man to know. He lacks the warm, friendly charm of the African he admires most,
Tanganyika's Nationalist Julius Nyerere (see box). But on Legco's debating floor, few can match his organization of a case or his smooth command of English. And he is second only to Kenyatta as a Swahili orator, whipping African crowds into a frenzy of chants and shouts by the skillful rhythm of his speeches.
"Tom always acts as if he has a majority," says one of his rivals, "and he gets away with it." If he emerges as the head of an African-led Kenya, what then? In the new states of Africa, independence by no means brings a net gain in individual freedom, as the roughly handled opposition party in Ghana has come to realize. The one-party system is the predominant pattern so far in emerging Africa.
"Often there is no room at first for a 'loyal opposition,' for its sole aim after independence could only be overthrow of the independence movement itself," says Tanganyika's Nyerere. Mboya, too, is a professed democrat, but he does not guarantee that pure Western-style freedom can be achieved. "I am flattered by those who demand perfection from us," he says. "The paraphernalia of Western democracy are not necessarily best suited for Africa . . . New nations are bound to experiment with the institutions they inherit."
Mboya is firmly committed to a land-reform program that would split up the idle portions of large estates, but not to the wholesale expulsion of Europeans from the 12,700 sq. mi. of white highlands. "We must treat land as a national asset, encourage African ownership and cooperatives where necessary. We hope to acquire the land voluntarily—and pay fair value," he says, but he opposes specific constitutional guarantees to protect the minority whites. A strong bill of rights, he insists, is all that is needed: "Either people trust us that we are sincere or there is very little that can be done."
Future Republic? He sees the Kenya of the future as a republic (within the British Commonwealth "unless something very drastic happens"), committed politically to neither East nor West but guided by the Western principles of freedom, which have molded his own rise to influence. For all his forays into British socialistic thinking, he knows the need for Kenya to attract capital investment.
When he is off the platform and not being demagogic, he seems well aware of the lack of trained Africans to run the country, the need for the good will, the energy and skill of the European settlers, and the necessity to deserve, in order to get, large injections of foreign aid. Tom Mboya hopes the Europeans will stay in an African-run Kenya, developing a Kenya loyalty (why should they remain Europeans, he asks, when in Canada they become Canadians?).
Mboya speaks as a man of good intentions. But even if Mboya's intentions are to be trusted, there is no assurance that wilder men like Argwings-Kodhek, or Kenyatta's fierce activists, will not rise to power, hurling democratic principles out the window. As Michael Blundell puts it: "It requires a lot of faith."
But the uncertainty is, in many ways, the white man's own fault. Everywhere in Africa, the European has waited too long before giving a share of responsibility to the black man. In the Congo, the Belgians have trained not one single African lawyer or administrator who might move into high office with skill and confidence; yet the Congolese become completely independent on June 30. There, and in other areas, the danger of bloodshed, violence, and retrogression is great as the scramble for leadership and power begins. But Africa no longer will accept such doubts as a valid reason for putting off independence. From millions of throats came the over whelming message—here we come, ready or not.
*Actually clitoridectomy, practiced for generations to reduce tribal maidens' sex urges in order to promote chastity before marriage.
Then a mighty roar went up, and there came Tom Mboya on the shoulders of his excited supporters. Around his shoulders was a black skin cape. The sleepy eyes danced with pleasure, and a grin split the gleaming, satin-smooth black face.
With a wave of his fly switch, Tom brought the throng to sudden silence. "My brothers," he cried, "today is a great day for Kenya. When we left for London, the government was in the hands of the Europeans. Now it is we who can open or close the door. Kenya has become an African country!" With one voice, the crowd roared "Uhuru!" (Swahili for freedom).
"Whose Kenya is it?" shouted Tom. "Ours!" shrieked 20,000. Now the mob's chant was in throbbing rhythm. "Are you tired of asking for freedom?" asked Tom. "No!" came the resounding answer.
As he left the stadium, thousands followed, pressing around his open Land Rover, which led the way toward the African locations. Alarmed, the police read the Riot Act through a loudspeaker, hurled tear-gas bombs, and advanced in a baton charge, finally dispersing the crowd in a hail of stones. But all that night in the dark streets of the African sections, the familiar cry echoed: "Uhuru!"
Sleepers Awake. In Nigeria, the cry was "FreeDOM!" and the Congolese yelled " 'depenDANCE!" Whatever its label, the spirit of self-rule was sweeping at gale force across Africa, last of the continents to awaken from the sleep of centuries.
On Africa's broad western bulge facing the Atlantic, freedom is already established or imminent almost everywhere. There, independent Ghana, Guinea and Liberia will soon be joined by the rest of France's fragmenting African empire. At least seven new sovereign African states will come into existence in 1960. First on the timetable was Cameroon; soon to come: Togoland, the sprawling, wealthy Belgian Congo, the Mali Federation of Senegal and French Sudan, little Somalia, and Madagascar. On Oct. 1, the 35 million people of Nigeria, most populous of all, will get formal independence. By year's end, 180 million of the continent's 240 million people will be under black rule.
For Africa's 5,700,000 pioneering whites, it is a time of foreboding and doubts. "But are they ready for independence?" is the common question. A.D. 1960, the Africans have a quick and emphatic reply: Here we come, ready or not.
The Self-Assured. Many perils lie ahead as African colonialism gives way to the ferocity of raw new nationalism across a continent so large that the U.S., India, Pakistan and China together could fit within its boundaries. How it all turns out will depend largely on the new crop of young leaders rising to prominence in the peaceful revolution's wake. They are a mixed lot: clerks, teachers, village firebrands, and bush politicians with considerable native talent but little background or experience for the task of nation-building. Yet they walk onto the world stage with uncommon self-assurance. A Patrice Lumumba, onetime postal clerk and jailbird in the Congo, debates Congolese independence on even terms with the skilled ministers of Belgium in Brussels' Palais des Congrès. Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika enraptures sophisticated U.S. audiences on a coast-to-coast lecture tour. Kenya's Tom Mboya, 29, who used to be courted only by English left-wingers, now holds forth suavely as honor guest in the private dining rooms of London's largest banks and casually keeps a colonial governor waiting while he takes a shower.
Twenty years ago, handsome Tom Mboya was just another barefoot child in the untamed highlands of East Africa, where his people had only recently discovered the uses of the wheel. He was born to illiterate parents on the dried cow-dung floor of a grass-roofed hut on the sisal (hemp) estate of Sir William Northrup McMillan, who, a local yarn has it, won his 34,000 acres of Kenya highlands with a throw of the dice in Nairobi's Norfolk Hotel bar.
Tom Mboya has come a long way from his origins, but he remembers them and their rigid social order: at the bottom were the African workers, earning $3 a month in the sisal fields; then came the Indian shopkeeper, who sold them kerchiefs, trinkets and tobacco; on top were the few whites around.
"Do not set yourself against the white man," warned Tom Mboya's father, a sober, hard-working Jaluo tribesman who was the African headman at the farm's sisal-processing plant. "He is too powerful, and you cannot change him." But Tom Mboya recalls how riled he was at the sight of the stern estate manager, whom the Africans in fear called Bwana Kiboko—the boss who carries the hippo-skin whip.
Scrawling in the Sand. Making the princely local sum of $7 a month as headman, his father could afford the luxury of school for Tom at Kabaa mission, 25 miles away, where Roman Catholic priests were Irish and the fees were $14 a year. There, at nine, Tom scrawled his lessons in the sand under a shade tree, for classrooms were crowded and blackboards nonexistent. At his next school, St. Mary's, near Lake Victoria, the lessons for the first time were in English. He was no prodigious scholar, and no leader, but he liked singing, acting, and especially debating. His teachers noted another characteristic, a deep aversion to violence. No one recalls a single fist fight or angry argument; when the kids ribbed him about his soprano voice and his chubby figure, he laughed it away.
He barely passed in history, but he did absorb a few ideas: the American revolutionary slogan, "No Taxation Without Representation," echoed in his mind, and he wrote an enthusiastic paper on Napoleon—"Here was a man who defied the whole world." Later, at the Holy Ghost College (high school) at Mangu, he learned about Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington. But the missionaries discouraged his political questions and, irritated, he abandoned his plans to enter a seminary, forming a bitterness toward the church that he retains to this day, though he still considers himself Catholic ("My disagreements are not with the faith, but the church has been very weak in its position on the colonial question; it has tended to defend the status quo").
The Voice of Kenyatta. Tom's high school days ended when his father could no longer afford to help with the fees. But this shock was to give him his political start. He took a free, three-year public-health course in Nairobi to qualify as a sanitation inspector with the city government, and began slipping off to hear the fiery political speeches of Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta, the famed Kikuyu leader. As a city official, Tom Mboya noted bitterly, his job paid $30 a month for work that brought white inspectors $140, and the whites drove official cars and wore street suits, while Tom was expected to go about his duties on a bicycle and dressed in uniform.
Nor was he pleased when one day a white woman walked into the health-office laboratory to have a bottle of milk examined. "Is nobody here?" she asked of Tom, who was alone in the lab. "Madam, something is wrong with your eyes," replied Mboya. Stomping out, the woman huffed: "I must have my work done by Europeans. This boy is very rude."
From then on, say his former official superiors, Mboya had little time for his job. Instead of going out on inspections, he held court in his office, taking up and then taking over the Africans' municipal union. Jomo Kenyatta's scowling photo hung in the most conspicuous place on Tom Mboya's office wall.
Hard Work & Play. Dark storm clouds were gathering over Kenya's lovely land of smoke-blue mountains, deep forests and lush green pastures. For the white landowners, some of them from England's titled families, carving farms out of virgin bush had been hard but rewarding work, producing some modest fortunes. They lived well, and when the sun went down, they played hard. Upcountry, there was cricket, polo, and pink gins on the terrace for the retired military and naval officers, whose modest pensions stretched farther in Kenya than they did in the changing social order back home in England. In the free and easy atmosphere, few of the 30,000 whites (in a land of 6,000,000 Africans) made much note of the brooding hatred of the million-strong Kikuyu people, Kenya's largest tribe, who fiercely resented the white intrusion.
The Kikuyu are a people of dark and mystical dreams whose legend relates that when Ngai (God) first divided up the world, he held Kenya in such affection that he kept Mount Kenya as his favorite resting place. He told Gikuyu, the first Kikuyu, that if difficulty ever arose, Gikuyu should make a sacrifice and raise a hand toward Mount Kenya, and Ngai would help. Not far away, under a fig tree, Gikuyu found a beautiful woman, Moombi, to be mother of the Kikuyu race. Later, when their nine beautiful daughters needed husbands, Gikuyu sacrificed a lamb and a kid under a fig tree, smeared their blood on its bark, faced Mount Kenya, and saw his daughters' wishes come true.
From this legend came the Kikuyu deep veneration of their mountain and the earth of its endless slopes. The Kikuyu looked with bitterness on the 12,700 sq. mi. of land especially reserved for European settlers, the rich "white highlands" whence comes most of Kenya's lucrative coffee, tea, sisal and pyrethrum. The whites in rebuttal said that their highlands were never Kikuyu territory but a neglected no man's land between contending tribes, and that the Kikuyu had badly farmed their own reserve north of Nairobi, leaving it poor and eroded.
Return of the Native. In 1929, fierce, bearded Jomo Kenyatta, wild-eyed Kikuyu spokesman and student of telepathy, magic spells and Kikuyu lore, journeyed to London to demand the white man's land and political rights for his people. After 15 years in London and two in Moscow, he returned to Kenya to set up a network of bush schools, which spread antiwhite propaganda and upheld such barbaric Kikuyu rites as female circumcision,* which the missionaries and government officials had tried to stop. District officers stumbled onto fanatic ritual meetings in forest clearings. Later, word spread that tens of thousands of Kikuyu were taking fierce oaths of loyalty to a strange creed called Mau Mau, sealing the bond by drinking blood and waving cat corpses in the air as they sat facing the holy mountain.
In 1952, marauding Mau Mau gangs began darting out of the Aberdare hills to slaughter white farmers and hack their cattle to death, and the government declared a national emergency. It is generally agreed that Mboya played no part in the savage three-year revolt. But he had been an active member of Kenyatta's Kenya African Union.
When Kenyatta, accused of fostering Mau Mau, was sent to serve a seven-year prison term in the Northern Frontier
Province, Tom Mboya volunteered to help out, and Kenyatta's successor as K.A.U. president, Walter Odede, recognizing a talented propagandist, made him public-relations officer of the party. Odede, in turn, was locked up in March 1953, and Mboya became acting treasurer, despite an order from Kenyatta sent through clandestine channels: "He is a very young man and I've only met him once, so do not confirm the appointment."
As K.A.U. treasurer Tom helped raise funds for Jomo's defense, and still insists that Kenyatta was not guilty of engineering the Mau Mau terror, which before it ended took the lives of 84 whites, of more than 1,500 Kikuyu who fell under the Mau Mau pangas for failing to support the movement, and of 10,500 terrorists, killed by police and soldiers. Mboya himself had a close call when police raiders stormed into his office during a roundup and opened fire, wounding a colleague sitting next to him. The government's ruthless countermeasures (including the arrest of 35,000 people in one day) disturbed Tom as much as did the revolt itself.
Moving Up. With so many Africans being arrested, Mboya rose to increasing prominence. "All of a sudden I was just in it," he recalls. "People looked to persons like myself, for after all, we had no elected members in the government to speak up for the Africans." Tom's Luo tribal origins saved him from landing in jail—the police were scouring Nairobi for the Kikuyu, and their Embu and Meru allies. Technically still on the city payroll, he spent most of his time expanding his local union to a Kenya-wide municipal workers' organization and had a sharp eye on the big Kenya Federation of Labor, with which he affiliated his expanding group. When K.A.U. was finally banned in mid-1953, the federation became the ideal nationwide group for organizing African political ambitions. He elbowed his way to the top job, general secretary. He was 23.
Lesson in India. Tempers have cooled somewhat but many Kenya whites still agree with a crusty pioneer, Colonel Ewart Scott ("Grogs") Grogan, 85, who thinks the government should have strung Mau Mau bandits from every lamppost in Nairobi. Some, like Kenya's able, liberal ex-Minister of Finance Ernest A.
Vasey, believe that Mau Mauism is an ugly symptom of deeper illness. Industrious the white settlers may be, and hopelessly primitive the majority of Africans, but how long can the Africans be kept out of power in a land where they outnumber the Europeans 92 to one?
Under the new constitution for Kenya that British Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton introduced in 1954, one lone African was appointed to the Cabinet—but left out of important decisions and conferences. Young Tom Mboya rejected the new constitution, as did most Africans. Besides, he found himself being lionized by foreign labor leaders, who offered him encouragement, advice and, best of all, money. In 1954, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions paid Mboya's expenses to a labor seminar in Calcutta. There, he was shocked by a poverty even worse than Kenya's but much impressed by India's development projects. "What I saw made me completely aware that independence must be looked upon as a means to an end but not an end itself."
He liked the American trade unionists he met in Calcutta better than the British T.U.C. representatives, who considered him a cheeky, young know-it-all. Next year he won a year's scholarship at Ruskin College at Oxford, where he sat at the feet of such eminents as G.D.H. Cole, Kenneth Robinson, and Margery Perham, and breathed the heady socialism of Harold Laski's Grammar of Politics. "I still have the greatest feelings for Oxford," Mboya says. "It was a very impressive year." And, he adds, it impressed Europeans back in Kenya. With new confidence, he went to the U.S. for a lecture tour, met Walter Reuther, George Meany and David Dubinsky, and went home with a $35,000 A.F.L.-C.I.O. gift to build a new union headquarters in Nairobi.
He returned to find breathtaking changes under way. The government had just raised the number of Africans in the Legislative Council to eight out of a total of 58, and for the first time Africans were to be elected, not appointed. Restrictions against African political activities were relaxed slightly. In a free-swinging campaign, Mboya won a Nairobi seat against a rising young African hothead named C.M.G. Argwings-Kodhek, a lawyer since disbarred.
Already Mboya was developing a tactic successful for him and infuriating for his opposition: haggling, reaching agreement, then rejecting what had been agreed upon as not enough. Soon he was in London demanding more: one man, one vote, on a common roll. Fearing violence, the Colonial Office agreed to bring African membership up to parity with elected
Europeans on Legco (the legislative council). But appointed Europeans guaranteed a continued white majority, and Mboya led a boycott by the African members.
The Watershed. Mboya was forcing the pace. But probably not even he expected the overwhelming success that 1960 was to bring. Six weeks ago, Mboya and the entire African elected membership sat down at London's Lancaster House for a round-table conference with British and Kenya government officials and delegates of white and Asian settlers. Last week they arose with the outline of a totally new Kenya. Its main terms: ¶ A common voting roll and an expanded franchise that would raise the number of eligible African voters to perhaps a million in new elections next spring. ¶ A 65-member legislature in which Africans seem certain of 37 seats, a clear majority.
¶ A new Cabinet in which Africans are promised several ministries. ¶ A bill of rights, still to be drafted, guaranteeing equality and protection of property rights by judicial safeguard. But the old system of reserved lands for separate races (including the white highlands) would be swept away.
It is a crucial decision for Africa. Now, the certainty lies ahead that for the first time a large permanent white population will come under the rule of black men in Africa. "A death blow to the European community in Kenya," cried stunned Llewellyn R. Briggs, sometime R.A.F. Group Captain, Kenya landowner, and leader of the extremists in the London talks. At his 8,000-ft.-high home near Limuru, blond Farmer David Simpson sat staring into the flickering fireplace. "A bloody shame. This lovely country, 90% developed by European capital and sweat, is being completely buggered up."
Approximately 600 highland farms are up for sale, many of them at cut prices by owners who talk bitterly of leaving the country. Half a dozen of the angriest settlers were at Nairobi Airport to greet homecoming Michael Blundell (see box), the moderate who accepted the new plan in London and bravely agreed to try to sell it to his fellow whites. One kept booming through a bull horn: "Shame, shame; shame on you! We have been betrayed by you, Mr. Blundell!" Others cried, "You rat!," and their leader, wiry little highlands farmer, Major Jim Hughes, 63, hurled a handful of coins at Blundell's feet, shouting, "Here are 30 pieces of silver for you, Judas—go on, pick them up!" (Said Blundell later: "It's due to his living at 8,300 feet.")
Vote for Some. Tom Mboya was exultant: "We have exploded once and for all the myth of white supremacy." Now it was his task to sell the plan to the doubters and the angry among his own Africans. There were some of both, for Mboya and his delegation were not returning with all they had promised. He had sworn to settle for nothing less than one man, one vote, but in London he accepted a franchise still limited to those who can read or write, or are over 40, or are earning at least $210 a year. He had promised "Uhtiru today!," but he will not have full independence tomorrow, or perhaps for three or four years. Even the African majority will not take effect until early next year.
But Mboya had taken what he could get from Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, and he proclaimed, at his own big welcome-home, that the agreement was just "an instrument to use" in getting more—and getting it more quickly. "As to the future of white settlers, there's no room for anyone who does not believe in undiluted democracy. Those Europeans who hesitate have only one alternative, and that's to sell out and leave."
The violence of Mboya's language, delivered with a pleased smile, reflected his own increased self-confidence and his shrewd tactical awareness that he dares not let any African leader grab a more extreme position for independence than his. To the crowd of 20,000 gathered in Nairobi's African Stadium, Mboya pledged, to the biggest cheers of the day: "We will not rest until Kenyatta is back with us."
The big challenge to Mboya's leadership revolves around the famous exile in faraway Lodwar village. The legendary Kenyatta remains the idol of every Kenya African. If Kenyatta is angry with Mboya's compromise, Tom is in for trouble, for, after all, he is a mere youngster in the eyes of some Kikuyu politicians, who were fighting for African rights before Mboya was born. Cautiously, Tom says: "I have never represented myself as a replacement for Kenyatta. When he comes back, we will all accept him as our leader," and he adds: "It does not make much difference to me. I am not in this for personal gain." One Kenyatta associate says that Jomo, a man of harsh action, "does not like Mboya's talk-talk-talk way of doing things."
But those who have seen Kenyatta recently say that in his 60s he is an alcoholic wreck. There are younger challengers to Mboya too, and his Luo origin remains a handicap among the Kikuyu, who resent the fact that the Luos stayed out of the Mau Mau troubles and inherited good jobs in Nairobi.
Westerns & Thrillers. In the hope that he will get practice in governing, Colonial Secretary Macleod is trying to persuade Mboya to take one of the three major Cabinet posts that will be handed over to Africans after next year's elections. But Mboya will probably prefer to snipe from outside, from the security of the second-floor offices in Nairobi, which are the headquarters of his People's Convention Party and of the Kenya Federation of Labor.
Bachelor Mboya lives with a younger brother, 15, in a rented yellow-stucco duplex, and is one of the few Africans in Kenya who has a houseboy and a telephone. He gets up between 5 and 6 and dictates his correspondence and orders for the day into the fancy new Dictaphone he keeps at home. By the time he arrives at the office, smartly dressed, each morning around 9, the dingy hall outside is filling with long lines of visitors, 200 or 300 a day, who want his attention on union matters, advice on jobs or marriages, or seek scholarships to American colleges under the Jackie Robinson-Harry Belafonte fund that he runs (to date it has sent 81 students to the U.S.). He tries to see all comers, and his office is usually swarming with people talking at the same time. He sits at his green metal desk, sleepy-eyed but taking it all in. Sometimes, to get away, he goes off to an afternoon movie (favorites: westerns and thrillers).
At night, after dinner, he often goes to work alone in a hideaway upstairs office, where he can hear the sounds of the best dance band in Africa, arising from the first-floor exclusive Equator Club, which is open to white hunters, rich settler types, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Ruark, and Hollywood visitors—but not to Africans. Except on trips, Mboya has little time these days for the nightclubs and dancing he loves (he once shook the maracas in a dance band), or for the many girl friends, not all of them African, whom Tom has always attracted. His current flame is Pamela Odede, 21, slender, poised, and graceful daughter of Tom's former K.A.U. chief, Walter Odede (who after seven years is still being held without trial). They were secretly engaged long before she left last September for Western College in Oxford, Ohio, where she is a junior on a scholarship arranged by Tom.
Sensational in Swahili. By most who know him, Tom Mboya is respected but not loved, for the hard climb up the ladder has tempered his shy, modest personality with a clinically detached coldness and an occasional ruthlessness that angers enemies and saddens friends. He is courteous and correct, but a hard man to know. He lacks the warm, friendly charm of the African he admires most,
Tanganyika's Nationalist Julius Nyerere (see box). But on Legco's debating floor, few can match his organization of a case or his smooth command of English. And he is second only to Kenyatta as a Swahili orator, whipping African crowds into a frenzy of chants and shouts by the skillful rhythm of his speeches.
"Tom always acts as if he has a majority," says one of his rivals, "and he gets away with it." If he emerges as the head of an African-led Kenya, what then? In the new states of Africa, independence by no means brings a net gain in individual freedom, as the roughly handled opposition party in Ghana has come to realize. The one-party system is the predominant pattern so far in emerging Africa.
"Often there is no room at first for a 'loyal opposition,' for its sole aim after independence could only be overthrow of the independence movement itself," says Tanganyika's Nyerere. Mboya, too, is a professed democrat, but he does not guarantee that pure Western-style freedom can be achieved. "I am flattered by those who demand perfection from us," he says. "The paraphernalia of Western democracy are not necessarily best suited for Africa . . . New nations are bound to experiment with the institutions they inherit."
Mboya is firmly committed to a land-reform program that would split up the idle portions of large estates, but not to the wholesale expulsion of Europeans from the 12,700 sq. mi. of white highlands. "We must treat land as a national asset, encourage African ownership and cooperatives where necessary. We hope to acquire the land voluntarily—and pay fair value," he says, but he opposes specific constitutional guarantees to protect the minority whites. A strong bill of rights, he insists, is all that is needed: "Either people trust us that we are sincere or there is very little that can be done."
Future Republic? He sees the Kenya of the future as a republic (within the British Commonwealth "unless something very drastic happens"), committed politically to neither East nor West but guided by the Western principles of freedom, which have molded his own rise to influence. For all his forays into British socialistic thinking, he knows the need for Kenya to attract capital investment.
When he is off the platform and not being demagogic, he seems well aware of the lack of trained Africans to run the country, the need for the good will, the energy and skill of the European settlers, and the necessity to deserve, in order to get, large injections of foreign aid. Tom Mboya hopes the Europeans will stay in an African-run Kenya, developing a Kenya loyalty (why should they remain Europeans, he asks, when in Canada they become Canadians?).
Mboya speaks as a man of good intentions. But even if Mboya's intentions are to be trusted, there is no assurance that wilder men like Argwings-Kodhek, or Kenyatta's fierce activists, will not rise to power, hurling democratic principles out the window. As Michael Blundell puts it: "It requires a lot of faith."
But the uncertainty is, in many ways, the white man's own fault. Everywhere in Africa, the European has waited too long before giving a share of responsibility to the black man. In the Congo, the Belgians have trained not one single African lawyer or administrator who might move into high office with skill and confidence; yet the Congolese become completely independent on June 30. There, and in other areas, the danger of bloodshed, violence, and retrogression is great as the scramble for leadership and power begins. But Africa no longer will accept such doubts as a valid reason for putting off independence. From millions of throats came the over whelming message—here we come, ready or not.
*Actually clitoridectomy, practiced for generations to reduce tribal maidens' sex urges in order to promote chastity before marriage.
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