The Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya and the African-American icon Martin Luther King Jnr, whose memorials were inaugurated in October, 40 years after both were assassinated, have one thing in common: Barack Obama. But the US president failed to make the connection, writes Peter Kimani.
Two separate but distinctly connected events happened in October in Kenya and the USA. In fact, the historical parallels between them are eerie: two men, whose singular strength lay in the persuasion of their words, were both resurrected four decades after they were felled by assas- sins’ bullets.The Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya was retrieved from history vaults to tow- er over a Nairobi street that now bears his name, in a life-size bronze monument – only metres away from the spot where he was killed in July 1969.
And in Washington DC, Martin Luther King Jnr’s granite monument hovered in the National Mall, on the fringes of the spot where he delivered the epochal I Have A Dream speech, now a revered signpost in America’s social and political evolution.
The import of these two events is not just underlined by their coincidences; Mboya and King’s lives did often in- tersect, more so in the late 1950s when they successfully launched what’s now immortalised as the student airlift. Un- der this programme, some 800 Kenyan students were dispatched to American universities to acquire the skills badly needed to develop the newly independ- ent Kenya. It was on the back of this airlift that the father of President Barack Obama, Obama Senior, would arrive on American shores to seek education, and in the process find love that culminated in the birth of the 44th president of the United States.
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