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America Votes Obama’s father was plagued by fears after Mboya’s death
Posted Wednesday, November 5 2008 at 19:44

Details gathered from a series of interviews with Barack Obama Sr’s confidants in the US reveal that at some point of his life, the controversial yet brilliant man claimed that Mboya’s killers also “had me in their list of targets”.

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As an ardent critic of former President Jomo Kenyatta, Obama Sr believed that he was in the Government’s bad books for his voluble criticism of the style of governance in post-independent Kenya.

Pake Zane, who was with Obama Sr at the University of Hawaii, says: “Obama told me that he strongly believed that the people who killed Mboya were the same ones who had hit him (Obama) with a car and left him for the dead a few years before Mboya died.”

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The 66-year-old Chinese Hawaiian speaks of Obama Sr as a careerist who was ultimately consumed by alcohol and women.

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Even though it is never mentioned in his son’s book, “Dreams From My Father”, Obama Sr, according to his comrades, may have had his fate sealed when he agreed to testify before the commission that looked into the killing of Mboya.

Whereas his decline was fast and tragic, it is the veil of mystery that still clouds Obama Sr that has not been discussed in public domains.

According to press accounts at that time, the elder Obama did not handle his political exile well while in the United States as a student. A variety of microfilmed newspaper cuttings show that he was involved in a series of car crashes, often involving drunk-driving.

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Besides his elegant style of dressing, Obama Sr, recalls Richard Hook, who worked with him as a development adviser for Harvard University’s Institute for International Development in Kenya had a deep resonant base with a timbre you could not forget.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/09/21/a_fathers_charm_absence/?page=1

On a hot July weekend nearly 40 years ago, Barack Obama Sr. was shopping on a busy Nairobi street when he ran into his friend and mentor Tom Mboya, one of Kenya’s most charismatic political leaders. The two chatted for several minutes and Obama kidded him that his car was illegally parked.

“I told him, ‘You are parked on a yellow line. You will get a ticket,” Obama, the late father of the US presidential candidate, would later testify, according to press accounts at the time. And then the two men parted.

Minutes later, Mboya was shot twice and died in a pool of blood. It was a crime that convulsed the newly independent nation and would, in Obama’s eyes, trigger a steep decline in his own promising career. Then 33, and a freshly minted government economist, he testified in the ensuing trial, an act which probably enraged those responsible for Mboya’s assassination.

Obama, according to one friend, was convinced he had been targeted for murder after his testimony.

“He said he had been hit by a car not long ago and left for dead,” said Pake Zane, 66, who attended the University of Hawaii with Obama and had not publicly discussed their 1974 conversation until now. “He did not say specifically who had done it, but he said it was the same people who killed Mboya.”

http://www.billwarnerpi.com/2008/10/if-sen-john-mccains-father-had-been.html

As the Kenyatta regime became the subject of increasing controversy, Obama Sr found many of his colleagues distancing themselves from him. And then, on the morning of July 5, 1969, things got infinitely worse. Tom Mboya’s assassination threw the country into political chaos. And for Obama, it was a personal disaster. Not only had he lost his friend and mentor, but because he happened to have been at the scene he was called upon to testify.