The world kills those it can't break

By: Dominic Odipo
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[ Posted On: 2008-07-15 ]

There is a little story, almost certainly apocryphal, about the late Barack Obama Sr and the President, Mwai Kibaki, which goes somewhat like this:

It was lunchtime at Tina's, a restaurant that used to be located near where the Tuskys Moi Avenue branch is situated in Nairobi today. This was in the early 1970s, when both men were then serving at the Treasury Building, today the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Kibaki was then serving as Finance Minister, while Obama was a senior economist. The latter was having his usual 'liquid lunch' when Kibaki walked in.

"What will you have?" Kibaki asked, to which Obama replied: "A double whiskey."

"What will you have it with?"

"Another double whiskey!"

The Harvard-educated Obama Sr was part of a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the US organised by Tom Mboya. The 29-year-old Mboya, already a brilliant union organiser, had approached the US State Department to fund the airlift without success. That first effort only succeeded thanks to harambees and the help of the African-American Students Foundation.

In July 1960, Mboya visited Senator John F Kennedy at Hyannis Port with a request to provide an airlift for more than 200 African students who had received US scholarships. Kennedy arranged for the Joseph P Kennedy Jr Foundation, established in the memory of his older brother (who was killed in World War II), to finance the airlift.

To keep the project out of politics surrounding the presidential race Kennedy was involved in, no public announcement was made of the $100,000 grant. Among the students who benefited from the airlifts was Pamela Odede (who was later to become Mboya's wife).

Star Power

Thirty-nine years after Mboya was shot dead on a Nairobi street, his star has stubbornly refused to dim. If anything, it probably shines brighter today than it did in 1969. Like those of JFK and his brother Robert, who also fell to an assassin's bullet, Mboya's star probably shines brighter in death than it did in life.

Consider just some of the facts: Mboya was brilliant, brave, articulate, charismatic, youthful and very rich, all at the same time. He was a masterful political orator and organiser who could communicate clearly and effectively in six of Kenya's major languages: Luo, Kikuyu, Kamba, Luhya, Swahili and English.

He was highly attractive to both men and women and a master parliamentary performer and strategist. In its entire parliamentary history, Kenya has never produced an MP or a Cabinet minister quite like Tom Mboya.

By the time of his death in July 1969, it was an open secret that Mboya was gunning for nothing less than the presidency.

And it was also an open secret that nobody quite knew how to stop him legally or constitutionally. The only way to stop him was to kill him.

Those who wanted to retain the presidency at all costs were prepared to go to any lengths to ensure that Mboya did not live to oppose them.

In one of his most revealing insights into human existence, Ernest Hemingway, the late American novelist, wrote: "If people bring so much courage to this world, the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

"But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially."

Those who could not break Mboya killed him. Six years later, realising that they could not break JM Kariuki (the MP for Nyandarua North) either, they murdered him too.

Those forces of brutal reaction have not dissipated. They are still lurking in the innards of our society and on the periphery of the periphery.

They could strike again tomorrow against those they believe they cannot break.

State Impunity

What might have happened had Mboya lived?

That is, of course, a highly hypothetical question.

The answer is that nobody really knows. But we can make some informed guesses.

In Parliament, Mboya would almost certainly have outmanoeuvred his opponents in the race for the Kenyatta succession. The Constitution would almost certainly have been amended to make it easier for him to run for the presidency. And, most important of all, Daniel arap Moi would probably never have made it to the presidency.

The history of State impunity in this country started a long time ago. Today it marches on and tomorrow you will see it in even fuller bloom. Take care.

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

About The Author: Dominic Odipo is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi, Kenya

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