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Tom Mboya: What Kenya Lost By Taking Out Its Brightest Star
Jul 15, 2020
July 1969 was a month when history changed forever. For much of humanity, eyes were firmly fixed on the skies. Far above them, for eight days starting on the 16th, three men left the bounds of earth, on their way to set foot on the surface of the moon. In Kenya, though, eyes and thoughts were not cast skywards. Ten days before the moon landing, all attention was on a little patch of ground on a small island on Lake Victoria. On July 10, 1969, Tom Mboya was buried on Rusinga Island. Five days before that, on a Saturday afternoon in Nairobi, Tom Mboya had walked into a chemist’s shop. He had bought a bottle of lotion and chatted to the Chhanis, the proprietors of the pharmacy. He had then stepped out, straight into a gunman who fired two bullets into him. Mboya was dead within the hour.
SHAKEN
With his murder, Kenya was shaken as it had never been before, and hasn’t since. A certain innocence was shattered. There had been political murder before — Pio Gama Pinto had been shot dead four-and-a-half years before. But Mboya’s killing shifted something fundamental in the Kenyan political firmament. Before July 5, 1969, one could console oneself about the possibilities of reconciliation among a not-quite-fully-formed Kenyan political elite. After July 5, 1969, all myths were shattered. Whoever ordered the killing — and until today this mystery has never been solved conclusively — had decided that they were no longer taking chances on the succession of a president who was suddenly showing his mortality. Jomo Kenyatta had been stricken the previous year. Mboya’s biography, written a decade after his murder, is subtitled The Man Kenya Wanted to Forget. It is an apt title. Mboya is now, in the public imagination, merely a street and a monument. What is perceived as his memory is perhaps a misremembering? Who, then, was Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya? Why was it said of him that his death was when Kenya’s train came off the rails? Why, 50 years later, must we cast a gaze back with great interest? Mboya was a young man in a hurry. Even as he jostled politically with his cohort as Kenya came to independence and after, he stood head and shoulders above them. His politics was essentially forward-looking. He had used his positions of leadership in the labour movement to forge strong links within Africa and beyond, giving him access to powerful networks, significant amounts of financial resources, and an international profile that put him right at the forefront of global affairs.
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