Book Read Free

The Other Barack

Page 11

by Sally Jacobs


  Soon enough, another consuming interest united Obama and Mooney, one that was sweeping the country. By the beginning of 1959, just as Obama was completing the second Otieno book, the drive for advanced education for Kenyans had begun in earnest. Education was not only an ideal; it was a practical necessity if the country was to govern itself. As independence loomed and the handover of the reins of government from the British administrators to Kenyans inched ever closer, the need for Africans trained in a host of professions became urgent, as Mboya often emphasized. In the tumultuous months of 1959 literacy became a subject central not only to Kenya’s future but also to the expanding reach of the Cold War.

  The numbers told part of the story. Although European missionaries had helped to spread reading and writing throughout the country since their arrival in the mid-1800s, educational opportunities for Kenyans remained extremely limited well into the twentieth century. Just as the missionary schools were devoted largely to evangelical aims, the British government schools had their own self-serving design. Most schools the colonists inaugurated were intended to produce a low-level workforce that would supply semiskilled laborers to assist the white-run farms or civil servants to aid in government administration. The last thing the colonists wanted—or so most Kenyans believed—were independent or critical thinkers.12

  Most Kenyans were lucky to get several years of schooling before encountering a bottleneck in the educational system. In 1958, of those completing eight years of school, only 13 percent were able to continue on to secondary school because there were neither the schools nor the teachers to accept them, as Mboya wrote in his biography, Freedom and After.13 For the few who did manage to make it through secondary school, the opportunities for undergraduate, let alone graduate-level education, were virtually nonexistent.

  At the end of the 1950s there were two institutions of higher learning available to Kenyans: Makerere University in Kampala and the Royal Technical College of East Africa in Nairobi, which only began admitting students in 1956. But both Makerere and the Technical College, later to be called the University of Nairobi, were two-year institutions and offered the equivalent of a high school diploma only. Nor were their enrollments substantial. In 1955 Makerere, then the only college in East Africa, admitted a total of 205 students from the entire region. In 1957 there were a total of 251 students at Makerere, and another 57 students were admitted to the Royal Technical College in Nairobi.14 Those who wanted higher education had to go overseas, but few had the finances or ability to do so.

  By 1958 fewer than two hundred Kenyans were studying for university degrees outside the country, seventy-four in Great Britain, seventy-five in India and Pakistan, and a few dozen in the United States.15 Kenyan students began to trickle into the United States during the mid 1950s, and by 1957 there were at least thirty-four enrolled in colleges or universities, and in 1958 another thirty-nine arrived. However, all but a handful of those were privately sponsored students. In 1957 only seven U.S. scholarships were given to Kenyan students, with another nine were awarded in 1958.16 All told, only several hundred Kenyans had university degrees out of a population of just over eight million toward the decade’s end.17 This tiny group was hardly enough to supply the doctors and lawyers and bankers and teachers and the thousands of other professionals that would be needed to run the country when independence arrived. Critics among the rising tide of nationalists argued that this was no accident. They charged that the colonists had deliberately crafted an educational system that served their labor needs while keeping the bulk of Kenyans chained by their own illiteracy to brute labor or low-level administrative tasks.

  Part of the problem was the shortage of Kenyan secondary schools, the equivalent of American junior high schools. Another impediment to those few who had managed to get a secondary school certificate was the British government’s reluctance to have Kenyan students study in U.S. schools, which it considered inferior to its own.18 That prejudice had taken cultural hold within Kenya, and a British education was generally regarded as superior to any other well into the 1950s. But as the first graduates of American institutions began to trickle back home to Kenya and then swiftly rise to the highest posts an African was afforded, the thinking began to change. Here were Africans with university degrees who looked the white man right in the eye. Their arrival fanned mounting frustration with the colonial regime, and this was swiftly translated into political expression. America, it now seemed, might be an option after all.

  Although few in number, their impact was profound. The return of these students, fresh with stories of America’s relative freedom and modern ways, coincided with an accelerating urgency in the tenor of Kenyan politics. In 1957 the first LEGCO elections open to Africans had introduced a new generation of Kenyan politicians to the scene. They included Mboya; Oginga Odinga of Central Nyanza, a former teacher and president of the Luo Union; Ronald G. Ngala of the Coast, also a former teacher and a member of the Mombasa Municipal Board; and Daniel T. arap Moi, a member of the Kalenjin tribe who was already a LEGCO member representing the Rift Valley. Upon their election, the group of eight immediately formed the African Elected Members Organization (AEMO) and went on the offensive.

  Just days before the Kenyan elections, a critical African milestone had been reached after the Gold Coast achieved independence from Great Britain on March 6, 1957. The country was given the African name Ghana, which was chosen to reflect the ancient empire of Ghana that had once covered much of West Africa. Kwame Nkrumah was appointed Prime Minister as he trumpeted that Ghana “our beloved country is free forever.” It was the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonial rule, and it galvanized countless others across the continent to persevere against their imperial rulers. Coupled with the stirring stories of the students returning from the United States, the Ghanian triumph inspired the Kenyan nationalists like nothing else. As Mboya wrote to friends in London, “The battle is on.”19

  AEMO had a short but determined list of demands. Members of the group would not accept any ministerial posts unless the Africans were granted a legislative majority over the European and Asian members. They also wanted a clear articulation of the British government’s plans for Kenya’s future. Although the African representation was subsequently increased to fourteen seats under the Lennox-Boyd Constitution in October 1957, AEMO rejected that as well, opting instead to hold out for a more complete response to their demands.

  By 1959 the tide begun to shift in favor of the African nationalists. Determined to move the government’s hand, the entire group of African and Asian members of the LEGCO walked out and formed a united front behind the Constituency Elected Members Organization (CEMO). As the tempo of the political debate grew ever more aggressive, the group sent a delegation to London headed by Odinga to demand an immediate end to the Emergency and a release of all veteran political leaders. Although the British government remained noncommittal on some of their demands and refused to discuss Kenyatta’s release, it consented to the need for a constitutional conference. The colonial government, it seemed, was in retreat.

  Mboya would normally have been a part of the delegation, but he had earlier accepted an invitation from the American Committee on Africa, which had sponsored his first visit to the United States, to return for an April speaking tour. By not going on the trip to London, Mboya risked the possibility that Odinga, who was clearly emerging as a rival in the bid for national leadership, would benefit politically at home if the discussions were fruitful—and even if they were not. It was a risk he was willing to take. Being a politician blessed with an astute sense of timing, Mboya seized the moment for a return to the United States.

  In April 1959 Mboya made his second visit to the United States, landing in New York to a hero’s welcome. He was by now a figure of immense global popularity, and his first few days in the United States were crammed with speeches, press conferences, and meetings with Vice President Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, and Senator John Kennedy. Hands
ome, a centrist compared to some of his rivals back home, and intellectually astute, Mboya was clearly an African that Americans could love.

  With the flames of Pan-Africanism sweeping the globe and the embryonic seeds of the civil rights movement beginning to take root at home, U.S. leaders were keeping a close eye on the creep of independence across Africa. As tensions between the United States and Soviet Union rose steadily, the British colonies emerging from domination were seen as being up for grabs politically. Determined that those new nations not fall under Communist rule, the government was poised to intervene in any way that might bolster its posture in the simmering Cold War. In his increasingly fiery oratory before labor leaders and rapt college students, Mboya repeatedly drove home the link between education and political self-determination for the African nations. “A main theme in Mboya’s speeches was the lambasting of the European powers’ attempts at continuing their domination in Africa through denying Africans access to higher education, which, he contended, prevented the training of the sort of educated leaders who could take new African nations through independence and to stability,” Tom Shachtman wrote in Airlift to America.20

  Mboya had a vision that he had been nursing for years. What he wanted to do was create an educational airlift of Africa’s best and brightest students, an airplane that would transport these students to the doors of American colleges and universities. All he needed was the help of his American friends. Riding the swell of his popularity, Mboya reconnected in New York with businessman William X. Scheinman, president of Arnav Aircraft Associates, and George Houser, the executive director ACOA, whom he had met on his first trip. Scheinman and Mboya had exchanged countless letters about specific students in particular and a possible scholarship program in general over the years. Now they were ready to take action, and the specific shape of an airlift began to emerge.

  Together, they formed the African American Students Foundation (AASF) and assembled an impressive board of prominent African Americans, including Theodore W. Kheel, a nationally known labor lawyer and president of the National Urban League, and Jackie Robinson, the former baseball star. By the end of Mboya’s five-week visit, the group had received pledges of more than fifty scholarships and had collected $35,000, according to the AASF.21 Though Scheinman became consumed with business interests in later years, he remained fascinated with Africa for the rest of his life. After his death in 1999, he was buried on Rusinga Island next to Tom Mboya’s grave.

  Mboya headed back to Kenya to start making arrangements for an aircraft. So began the first phase of one of the greatest achievements of his career. The airlift, which would turn out to be a series of flights, not only greatly enhanced Mboya’s stature back home but it also produced a generation that would help shape the independent nation of Kenya. They were not large in number. At the time of independence, there were fewer than five hundred Kenyans with university degrees from overseas, one of the most poignant legacies of the colonial era.22 But the scope of their achievement made up for their diminutive ranks. Over the next quarter of a century the graduates would make up half of Kenya’s parliaments and cabinet ministries and would dominate the highest ranks of business. Today, they continue to comprise a select, albeit graying group with a unique collective memory of their country’s historic formation.

  Ever since the name Barack Obama first filtered into the American political lexicon in 2004, it has been said that his father was one of the students on the famous first airlift. President Obama declared it while campaigning in 2007, and it has been repeated many times since he became president. But Obama Sr. was not a member of the student airlift. Obama, in fact, was turned down for the much-coveted seat. And the man who rejected him was an enthusiastic young American named Robert F. Stephens.

  From 1957 to 1959 Stephens was the cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Information Service (USIS) in Nairobi. An amiable Michigan native, Stephens counted among his many responsibilities the task of interviewing students to determine if they met the criteria for the airlift. Despite being a mzungu with a significant degree of power, Stephens was well liked by the African nationalists. Not only was he conversant in Swahili, he was an avid supporter of the drive for African education and did much to facilitate the students’ success.

  Stephens and others in the U.S. Consulate in Nairobi had long objected to the U.S. requirement that a Kenyan student have two years of additional schooling after high school in order to be eligible for a U.S. scholarship. He reasoned that Americans needed only a high school degree to get into college, so why should the bar be higher for Africans? He was the one who helped convince Washington officials to drop the requirement so that Kenyans needed only a Cambridge School Certificate, the equivalent of a high school diploma, in order to apply.

  A thirty-four-year-old father of three at the time he interviewed Obama, Stephens became an unofficial mentor for many Kenyan students eager for a chance to travel to America. Young men and women stood for hours outside his second-floor office on Government Road waiting to hear his advice. While interviewing them to determine their eligibility, Stephens often had to raise his voice to be heard above the buses and bodies churning outside his open window.

  Stephens maintained a library of more than six hundred American college catalogues. Students—Obama among them—were constantly dropping in to thumb through their well-worn pages, never mind that they had never heard of either the schools or the cities in which they were located. Stephens also held some informal orientation sessions on American ways for prospective students. A chief subject was gender relations and sexual mores, which differed vastly from African habits. In the category of hygiene, clean socks were high on the agenda. “I told them they must always remember to change their socks and to wash them out,” recalled Stephens, now retired in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

  When Mboya arrived back in Nairobi, the exhausting process of selecting the eighty-one students who would fill the first charter plane began. Mboya, Kiano, Njiiri, and Stephens formed the selection committee. Often the four men would pour over the student lists long into the night in the living room of the Stephens’s Muthaiga home, trying to make the difficult choice of who would get to go. The chance of boarding the Britannia aircraft that had been chartered for the trip had become a dream that infected young people from the shores of Lake Victoria to the rough-hewn docks of Mombasa. “Going to America was the thing to do,” said Philip Ochieng, one of Kenya’s most prominent journalists and a drinking pal of Obama’s in later years. “If you didn’t have an education, you’d never rise higher than a senior clerk.”

  Obama was determined to be one of the chosen ones. He talked about it constantly, sometimes comparing notes with other applicants. Thinking his friendship with Mboya was his ace in the hole, Obama headed into his interview with Stephens bristling with certainty.

  Stephens recalls his meeting with Barack Obama well, not because he was so impressed with him but because he was not. Dapper in suit and tie, Obama appeared in Stephens’s office one morning with his paperwork in hand. Stephens was put off by the younger man’s manner from the start. Obama seemed cocksure, far more confident than his résumé merited. Concerned about Obama’s abrupt separation from the Maseno School, Stephens asked him what had happened. “He really prevaricated about his school record,” recalled Stephens. “He reassured me that he had gotten all the proper certification that he needed, that there was no problem.”

  But as Stephens examined Obama’s file, he found that there was indeed a problem. Obama had somehow managed to get a Cambridge School Certificate, the British examination certificate required in order to pursue higher education, but he had earned only a third-division pass, the lowest score possible. Why he did so poorly is difficult to understand given Obama’s obvious intellectual gifts. Perhaps he took his performance for granted and failed to apply himself as he had often done as a younger student. In any case, acceptance in an American institution of higher learning required a Cambridge certificate with a firs
t-division pass. In some cases a seconddivision pass was acceptable, but almost never a third division.23 Stephens told Obama he was sorry, but he could not recommend him for consideration for the airlift. “He was a very good talker and he tried to talk me out of it, but there was nothing I could do,” explained Stephens. “He just did not have the grade. I explained that to him and he got up and left. When I heard later that he’d made it to America another way, I was pretty surprised.”

  For Obama, the news was devastating. Despite his difficulties at Maseno, he had never for a moment thought he would get turned down for the airlift. Adding to his humiliation was the fact that many of his friends were already rejoicing over their acceptances. Ochieng, an Alliance School graduate who had met Obama in Mboya’s office when they checked on the status of their applications, was headed to Roosevelt University in Chicago. Jackson Isigie, who had spent years saving the 7,000 shillings he needed for his first year abroad, had been accepted at Wisconsin State College in Steven’s Point, Wisconsin. And Pamela Odede, the daughter of a Nairobi politician and the woman who would eventually marry Tom Mboya, was going to Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. The list was growing steadily. Obama complained bitterly to Kezia and a handful of others that he was being unfairly denied this golden opportunity. “Barack was crushed that he was not to be on the airlift,” recalled Olara A. Otunnu, president of the Uganda People’s Congress party and formerly Uganda’s Minister for Foreign Affairs as well as a close family friend of Obama’s. “He wanted this very much and he was not used to being turned down. It was embarrassing to him.”

  Some who had not made the cut refused to accept the news. They wanted to go so badly that they would hover hopefully at the airport right up until the plane took off. As Gordon Hagberg, director of the USIS office and later the director of the Nairobi office of the Institute of International Education, wrote of the students who were turned down for some of the later airlifts: “They were unsuccessful candidates who nevertheless persisted in standing around hoping for a last minute change of fortune. Their tearful vigils were sometimes punctuated by more dramatic pleas, such as that of one boy who got down on his knees and begged to be allowed to go.”24

 

‹ Prev