TOM MBOYA: THE UNTOLD STORY
EXCERPT:
...In many ways, with the death of Mboya, the nascent enterprise that was “project Kenya” – the building of a nation from what American writer Paul Theroux once called “the querulous republic”, an assortment of ethnic communities fiercely competing for control of the centre – began to crumble.
The sense of optimism that had come with independence and somehow survived the ideological discord within KANU, was extinguished with the assassination of Tom Mboya on that Saturday afternoon. Nairobi, and Kenya as a whole, became a nation of silences, suspicions and secrets.
The tenuous ideas of solidarity and nation building disintegrated.
The uhuru nationalist project, not six years old, was effectively taken over by the forces of tribalism and ethnic patronage.
Only Mboya, whose personal and public life had transcended beyond the preoccupations of ethnic chauvinism and parochialism, had possessed the imagination to lead the country in a new direction.
Mahathir Mohamed, the Malaysian Prime Minister and architect of that country’s post-colonial renaissance, was later to comment: “when you killed Tom, you lost 30 years”.
1969 was in many ways a watershed year.
Rumours in late 1968 that President Kenyatta had suffered a heart attack brought home to the nation but especially to the close circle around Kenyatta –known as the Kiambu Mafia – that the founding President was not immortal.
The politics of succession, which would become the enduring theme of Kenyan politics, began to play out in earnest.
Having neutralised the left wing of KANU in the mid-60s, first with the assassination of Pinto in 1965 and then the sidelining of Jaramogi Odinga at the Limuru Conference in `66, Mboya, the obvious successor to Kenyatta, himself became a target for neutralisation by the Kiambu Mafia.
There had been an attempt on his life in early 1969.
By the middle of that year, Mboya found himself increasingly isolated on the domestic political scene.
Internationally, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, an intimate friend and perhaps his biggest champion in the United States, was a big blow to Mboya.
With the British already quite nervous of his strong links with the United States, the jostling around the Kenya presidency acquired added urgency, and rendered Mboya increasingly more vulnerable.
There were, in short, many reasons and many people who wanted Tom Mboya dead...
http://africanewsonline.blogspot.com/2009/07/tom-mboya-untold-story.html