The African Airlift

Nairobi

Of all the African leaders of the 1960s independence era, none was more appealing than Tom Mboya. When he visited American colleges, Mboya generated rock-star adulation, and he counted Martin Luther King Jr. and Harry Belafonte among his admirers. Mboya was assassinated in 1969, but he left behind a remarkable legacy that is the subject of a just-published book, Airlift to America. It tells the story of how Mboya and a handful of Americans helped bring nearly 800 African students, mainly from Kenya, to the United States to attend college fifty years ago. The "airlift," as it became known, not only helped Kenyans prepare to take over from British colonial officials but also, as Tom Shachtman, the author, reveals, it had an effect--probably small, but possibly critical--on the 1960 US presidential election.

The Kenyan airlift veterans are a remarkable group. They include Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, who attended Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas; Kenya's best-known columnist, Philip Ochieng, who received his BA from Roosevelt University in Chicago; and Perez Olindo, the first African head of Kenya's national parks, who studied at Central Missouri State. President Obama's father was not technically part of the airlift, since he had private funding for his travel to the University of Hawaii, but he and other African students who went to the United States at that time were regarded as members of the "airlift generation." Owino Okong'o, an airlift student who went on to become a professor of medical physiology, later described the airlift as having "transformed the elite culture of Kenyans from the British model to the American model in which performance is more important than where you went to school."

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