Thomas Mboya

Labor leader and pan-African Visionary, he moved a generation to self-improvement and liberation.

Tom Mboya
1930–1969, b. Kilima Mbogo, Kenya
Worked in Nairobi

I have news for you. There is no Superman. It’s up to us.
—Tom Mboya

Pan-Africanism is changing the arbitrary and often illogical boundaries set up by the colonial powers in their mad scramble for Africa. Many . . . are asking us what sort of governments we hope to set up when our freedom is won…What we shall create should be . . . enriched by our ability to borrow . . . what is good from other systems, creating a synthesis of this with the best of our own systems and cultures.
—Tom Mboya, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, 1958

• A labor activist from an early age, Mboya organized his fellow Nairobi civil servants into the Kenya Local Government Workers’ Union in the early 1950s. Mboya became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour, where he won an international profile by helping striking dock workers in Mombasa get a 33 percent pay raise.
• Mboya joined the nascent independence party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU). When the British banned the party and most of its leaders during the Mau Mau conflict, Mboya was entrusted with the party’s control.
• Mboya is celebrated for organizing the initial “airlifts” that provided scholarships to young Kenyans seeking to study in the United States—a program with an impressive legacy of achievement.
• An outspoken critic of government corruption, Mboya was serving as a government minister when he was assassinated in 1969. The full story of his murder has never been determined.