Forty years ago, on the first Saturday of July 1969, Tom Mboya was gunned down in Nairobi. He had unexpectedly jetted into the country the night before, instead of going to Europe as planned. His explanation was that he was busy in the country.
It was not unusual for Mboya to drop in unexpectedly even in the United States and immediately command attention. The attention he commanded on that Saturday, however, was shocking and it cast clouds over Kenya.
Signs of trouble, both international and domestic, had started showing up long before July 1969. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as far as the West was concerned, Mboya had been the acceptable leader of Africans as opposed to those politicians in jail or exile.
A darling of the West, he hobnobbed with potential US presidents Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
Brilliant, hard working, and media-genic, he at times appeared to compete with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah for attention on African issues, particularly where African trade unions should lean. His international star seemingly shone most in 1960 when his activities supposedly favoured Kennedy over Nixon in the presidential campaign.
That star started declining after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, barely three weeks to Kenya’s independence, never to rise again.
He, thereafter, lost entrée to Washington’s corridors of power, especially after two of his influential American friends, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy,were also assassinated in 1968. Kennedy had been Mboya’s guest in Nairobi and, after winning the California primary, was poised to capture the Democratic nomination.
In November, Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Having no room for Kennedites, Nixon wanted to groom his own “African” leaders and Mboya was not one of them.
Developments in the United States coincided with those in Kenya where Mboya, master of political intrigues, was outwitted by rivals. He had constitutionally outfoxed Oginga Odinga and, in case Kenyatta died, appeared poised to take the presidency.
Political rivals had then ganged to impose an anti-Mboya constitutional amendment in 1968. In case of vacancy in the presidency, the amendment made the vice-president an acting president for 90 days.
It also barred independent candidates by requiring the endorsement of political parties. Still, the rivals were worried.
Some of them started organizing oathing ceremonies early in 1969, euphemistically called “buying land” and “taking tea.” Although the oaths reportedly varied depending on one’s geographic identity, whether north or south of Chania River, the thrust was the same.
Having been short-changed after the Mau Mau oaths, many were sceptical about the short-sightedness of the new oaths. And with subsequent allegations of politicians “eating” Gatundu money, people’s of Mount Kenya were split over the issue of “tea.”
As resistance to seemingly intensified oaths increased, Mboya died. Although the churches became vocal in challenging the exercise and seemingly forced an end to it, the political air had been poisoned. Mboya was transformed into a hero.
Alive, Mboya was larger than ordinary life itself but in death he went through two developments.
First was the period of adulation and praises accompanied by condemnations and anguished questions.
People shed tears, genuine and crocodile, as they speculated on why he had died before reaching 40, like King and Malcolm X before. Many theories were bandied around while extolling of Mboya’s potential “greatness”, terminated by an assassin’s bullets.
The second development was Mboya’s disappearance into the world of myths. He was subsequently remembered only through scattered monuments or stories by old timers like veteran journalist Joe Kadhi.
If foreigners praise you excessively, Mboya reportedly told Kadhi, then find out what wrong you are doing to your people.
He would know. For their purpose, foreigners had virtually built him up, till he outlived usefulness. He died and faded away into myth.
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