...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." ...
MALCOLM X - BARACK OBAMA (snr)- OGINGA ODINGA
By Norman (Otis) Richmond
El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) was assassinated 44 years ago, on February 21, 1965, because of his attempt to internationalize the African American struggle for self-determination.
Malcolm would have been 84 years old on May 19, 2009. Africans in New York City have made a pilgrimage to Malcolm's gravesite every year since February 21, 1966. While it is unlikely that U.S. President Barack Obama will acknowledge Malcolm’s joining the ancestors, people from Cape Town to Nova Scotia and Brazil to Brixton definitely will.
Unlike other U.S. presidents, President Obama knows who Malcolm was and what he stands for. Like many males with African roots President Obama was moved by Malcolm’s life story. A cursory reading of his autobiography, Dreams from My Father will prove this point.
President Obama is truly an African American; parts of his roots are with the Luo people in East Africa. The Luo are an ethnic group in Kenya, Eastern Uganda, and Northern Tanzania. The Luo are the third largest ethnic group (13%) in Kenya, after the Kikuyu (20%) and the Luhya (17%). The Luo and the Kikuyu inherited the bulk of political power in the first years following Kenya's independence in 1963.
When Malcolm visited African in 1964 he visited Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It was during that trip that he met with Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, Uganda’s president Dr. Milton Obote, President Julius K. Nyerere and Muhammad Babu of Tanzania. Babu, Malcolm and Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) held a meeting during this period in New York City. Malcolm talked about meeting President Kenyatta, Malcolm however, was also aware of Kenya ’s Oginga Odinga.
When Malcolm was killed in 1965 Kenyatta was still in power and Odinga and Kenyatta were still comrades. Jaramogi Ajuma Oginga Odinga (1911 –January 20, 1994) was a Luo Chief, who became a prominent figure in Kenya's struggle for independence...