Tom Mboya

Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya was born in Kilima Mbogo, Kenya, on the fifteenth of August 1930, the son of a Luo sisal-plantation foreman. He took his secondary education at Mangu High School and a labor-economics certificate at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1956, returning to lead the Kenya Federation of Labour at twenty-three. He was the youngest delegate to the All-African People's Conference in Accra in 1958 — at twenty-eight, the chair of the conference.

His most consequential project was the Airlift Africa program. Between 1959 and 1963 Mboya raised funds to bring eight hundred Kenyan students to American universities — including Barack Obama Sr., who travelled in the 1959 cohort. The Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation provided emergency funding in 1960 when the U.S. State Department refused to support the program; Senator John F. Kennedy authorized the grant personally one month before his presidential nomination.

He was Kenya's first Minister of Labour at independence in 1963 and Minister of Economic Planning and Development from 1964. He drafted the 1965 Sessional Paper No. 10 — African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya — that established the post-independence Kenyan economic framework.

He was assassinated on Government Road in Nairobi on the fifth of July 1969, age thirty-eight, by a gunman in the pay of factions inside the Kenyatta administration. The assassination ended the principal Luo political voice in the national leadership and produced the rupture between Kenya's two largest ethnic communities that has shaped Kenyan politics for the following five decades.

He is honored here as the labor leader whose Airlift Africa scholarships shaped a generation of African political leadership in the United States.