Tom Mboya

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Tom Mboya (left)

Tom Mboya (* Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya August 15, 1930 on the island of Rusinga , Kenya ; † July 5, 1969 in Nairobi ), from the Luo people , was an influential Kenyan trade unionist and independence politician in Kenya's transition from a British colony to an independent republic.

Live and act

Tom Mboya attended several Catholic mission schools and after graduating from high school from 1948 to 1950, the Royal Sanitary Institute's Medical Training School for Sanitary Inspectors in Nairobi.

In 1950, when he started working as a medical inspector in Nairobi, he also turned to trade union politics. In 1951 he joined the African Staff Association , an association of black government employees, of which he was elected president, and in 1952 operated its transformation into a nationwide union, the Kenya Labor Workers Union . In 1953 he therefore lost his job and now devoted all his energy to the KLWU as its general secretary. In 1955 he went to Ruskin College at the University of Oxford on a grant from the British Trade Union Confederation . There he studied politics and economics. With a degree in industrial management , he returned to Kenya in 1956, while the British colonial government was putting down the Mau Mau uprising, and became the first African to win a seat on the colony's Legislative Council .

Dissatisfied with the minority of African MPs, he founded the Kenyan People's Congress Party . With pan-African goals, he sought cooperation with Kwame Nkrumah , the president of the first African republic, Ghana, to emerge from a British colony . In 1958, at the age of 28, he was elected chairman of the All-African Peoples' Conference in Ghana, which was founded in Accra .

In 1960, the People's Congress Party joined forces with the Kenya African Union and the Kenya Independent Movement to form the Kenya African National Union (KANU) to appear across the country's tribal borders at the Lancaster House Conference in London, which prepared Kenya's independence . Mboya, who was General Secretary of KANU from 1960 to 1969, led the Kenyan delegation in this capacity.

In 1963 Kenya gained independence. Mboya was elected to parliament for the constituency of Nairobi as early as 1961 and was first minister for justice and constitutional affairs, then for economic planning and development. During this time he wrote several programmatic texts for an "African Socialism", which can be conceptually compared with Nkrumahs, Nyereres and Kaundas early programmatic approaches and was adopted by the Kenyan parliament in 1964.

In 1966 the US state of Kansas made him its honorary citizen.

In the middle of a career that was likely to overshadow even the freedom hero and President Jomo Kenyatta , 38-year-old Tom Mboya was gunned down on July 5, 1969 in Nairobi by Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, who was then convicted and hanged for the murder. Speculation about the reasons for this attack and the people behind it are still present.

Afterlife

At his funeral there was a demonstration with riots and two dead. He left a widow, Pamela Mboya († 2009), and five children and was buried in a mausoleum on the island of Rusinga .

In the mausoleum u. a. Mboya's personal belongings are kept and exhibited.

In Nairobi, a street is named after Mboya; In 2011 a memorial was erected in his honor.

Fonts

  • Freedom and After . Little, Brown & Co., Boston 1963.

literature

  • David Goldsworthy: Tom Mboya. The man Kenya wanted to forget . Heinemann Educational Books, Nairobi 1982.
  • Art. On Tom Mboya by Stephan Löffler in biographies on world history , VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1989, p. 375.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,901644,00.html (link not available)
  2. ↑ Tom Mboya Mausoleum. In: Elimu Asilia. Kenya's Indigenous Knowledge. Retrieved February 7, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Kiundu Waweru: Monument immortalises Mboya. (No longer available online.) In: standardmedia.co.ke. August 4, 2011, archived from the original ; accessed on February 7, 2018 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Mboya, Tom
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mboya, Thomas Joseph Odhiambo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kenyan trade unionist and politician
DATE OF BIRTH August 15, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Rusinga island
DATE OF DEATH 5th July 1969
Place of death Nairobi , Kenya