Tom Mboya

Tom Mboya’s statue stands where he was killed
Fifty metres away from where his life was ended prematurely will stand a Sh20 million monument built to honour him. Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya’s sculpture was hoisted on Monday, August 1, just a fortnight to the day he would have been celebrating his 81st birthday on August 15.  It was also 42 years after the man popularly known as TJ was shot in cold blood on July 5, outside Commonwealth House on today’s, Moi Avenue.
read on: http://www.nation.co.ke/News/Tom+Mboya+back+to+stay+on+city+streets

Time Magazine cover page Mar. 7, 1960

Kenya: Ready or Not
Time Magazine, Monday, Mar. 07, 1960
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!"
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,894716,00.html#ixzz1bQ7ZM5m0

One of six leaders of Black Africa
Time magazine: Monday, Feb. 16, 1959
Tom Mboya, 28, most powerful political personality of Kenya, land of the gory Mau Mau uprisings. The Mau Mau were Kikuyus; Mboya is a Luo, the second largest tribe. Son of a sisal plantation worker, round-faced young Mboya learned most of his ABCs by writing in the sand for lack of books and slates. In 1953, the year he got fired as a sanitary inspector in Nairobi, he was elected general secretary of the powerful Kenya Federation of Labor. Elected to Kenya's Legislative Council, he now boycotts its sessions in protest against the kind of equality in which the blacks hold 14 seats to represent 6,000,000 people and the whites have the same number for 60,000. "We offer the Europeans the hand of friendship," he says, "but let them make no mistake about our determination to win our freedom."
source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,894174,00.html#ixzz1bQDpyykE

Tom Mboya & Dr. Martin L King at a Civil Rights Rally in DC

Death in the Afternoon
Time magazine, Friday, July 11, 1969
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."
source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,900985,00.html#ixzz1bQ5vucZC