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Hoover Archivists' Musings

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Barack Obama Sr. to Tom Mboya, May 29, 1962

HOOVER INSTITUTION, STANFORD UNIVERSITY

January 25, 2010 news

Hoover Archives Unveils Correspondence Between Kenyan Independence Leader and American Philanthropist Responsible for Helping Educate Hundreds of Kenyans Including Barack Obama Sr.

Kenyan university students arriving at Idlewild Airport, New York, 1959 (William X. Scheinman Papers, Box 49:10, Hoover Institution Archives).The Hoover Institution Library and Archives recently announced the opening of the papers of William X. Scheinman (1927–1999), a longtime friend of and correspondent with Kenyan independence leader Tom Mboya. The highlight of the collection is the rich correspondence between Scheinman and Mboya, which contains hundreds of letters, beginning in 1957 and ending only with Mboya’s untimely death from an assassin’s bullet in 1969. Mboya served in the first cabinet of Kenya after it achieved independence from Great Britain in 1963.

Scheinman, an American businessman and investment adviser, first met Mboya in 1956. In subsequent meetings the two men, realizing that the future development of an independent Kenya required an educated populace, developed a program to bring Kenyan students to the United States to pursue their university studies. Founded in 1959, the African American Students Foundation, with Scheinman as its president, helped make it possible for funding the education of hundreds of Kenyan students to study in the United States; among them was President Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr.

SOURCE

[25] Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson appeal letter, Aug. 24, 1959, box 3, Robinson Papers; Smith, “East African Airlifts of 1959, 1960, and 1961,” 25–43. Barack Obama wrote that his father “had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States,” but a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does not contain the name of the elder Obama. Tom Shachtman, working in the African-American Students Foundation (aasf) papers for a book on the airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from the aasf but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his way to the University of Hawaii. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, 1995), 9; “Eighty-One Kenya Airlift Students Arrived New York Sept. 9th 1959,” box 3, Robinson Papers; Tom Shachtman telephone interview by James H. Meriwether, Aug. 19, 2008, notes (confirmed via e-mail by Shachtman) (in James H. Meriwether’s possession).

SOURCE

WND - '62 letter from father ignores Obama, mom 'My wife is in Nairobi and I would really appreciate any help you may give her'

Posted: November 09, 2010

SOURCE

I think I get the picture now; the son of a kenyan goat-herder left the school at Maseno in 1953, married in 1954, and as he said at the interview in Hawaii in 1962, he hadn’t been back to Kenya for seven years, he must have left Kenya in 1955.

Right?

Not quite. His eldest child Malik was six years of age when he left Kenya, remember? How does that work?

I’ll try again.

The son of a kenyan goat-herder had a six year old son when he left Kenya in 1959, so he must have married when he was 17, and was working in Nairobi for an arab as a clerk...we all remember that, don’t we? And he was a friend of Mboya - wonder how they met? - but never mind, Kezia was pregnant when he left Kenya to go to Hawaii...and had a two year-old.

Hold it!

Didn’t the family in Kenya state at an interview that their son of a kenyan goat-herder relative went to the US, worked for an oil company and married a white woman named Anna Toot?

Yes, they did.

So we’ll have another go. The son of a kenya goat-herder - if we take him at his word, left Kenya seven years before he left Hawaii, and that makes it 1955, right? Ah! Beginning to see the light now...that’s why Kezia was confused, she must have married the son of the kenyan goat-herder in 1953, because at another interview she said her eldest was TWO years old when he left...

Getting closer?

In 2008 Kezia said her oldest son Malik was 50. But if the son of a kenyan goat-herder left Kenya in 1955 like he said at the Hawaii interview, Malik would have to be at least 55 if he was two years old when...

I’ve mucked up again, evidently.

It’s all too hard. Let someone else work it all out. What I can’t figure out is how could Mboya and the son of a kenya goat-herder be such good friends? If he left Kenya in 1955, he would have been around 19 years of age and Mboya who was five years older, was in England, studying at Oxford.

At least one thing seems clear. The son of a kenyan goat-herder was never part of the first airlift of students which landed at Idlewild three months before he showed up in Hawaii. And when he was first interveiwed in Hawaii in June 1959, he told the reporter he only had enough money for three semesters and needed to find work to support himself.

Just got lucky, I guess.

FOR THE RECORD

Box: 18-20African-American Students Foundation File, 1958-1963.

Scope and Content Note

Bulletins, clippings, contracts, correspondence, forms, press releases, printed matter, records, and reports, arranged alphabetically by physical form Box/Folder: 18 : 7-8General, 1960-1961.

Scope and Content Note

Bulletins, forms, memoranda, and printed matterBox/Folder: 18 : 9Clippings, 1960-1961
Box/Folder: 18 : 10Contracts, 1960
Box/Folder: 19 : 1Correspondence 1958-1959
Box/Folder: 19 : 2-3Correspondence 1960
Box/Folder: 19 : 4-5Correspondence 1961
Box/Folder: 19 : 6Correspondence 1962-1963
Box/Folder: 19 : 7Financial records, 1960-1961
Box/Folder: 19 : 8Press releases, 1960-1961
Box/Folder: 20 : 1Reports, 1960-1961
Box/Folder: 20 : 2Student records, 1960-1961

http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt0k4033gs;style=oac4;view=dsc#c01-1.3.6.5