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Watching the Too Early for Birds Tom Mboya edition at the Visa Oshwal auditorium on the last Saturday of January, one thing that stood out was Tom Mboya’s casual greatness. It was possible to trace its genesis. Raised by a father who rejected the mediocrity of the local school in the Thika sisal fields where they lived (this was at a time when there were probably fewer than 50 schools in the country), Mboya was transferred to a better school in Ukambani.
For Leonardus Ndege to recognise the difference between inferior and quality education, then to conceive of the idea that his offspring was no riffraff and must have only the best, and then to make the effort to transfer him there, he must have been a man of exceptionally high standards.
Almost a century after his birth – if the 2024 Gen Z protests and the staging of the play are anything to go by – Tom Mboya’s spirit is back and determined to take root in the land with a vengeance.
Generational responsibility was the second theme that was brought out in the play, the cast artfully connecting the killing of the young patriots on June 25, 2024, with the assassination of Tom Mboya on July 5, 1969, at the young age of 39.
The performance abounded with call and response of “Gen Z Hoyee!!!” (which the audience gleefully participated in), and generous reminders to those outside that age category that Gen Z is a state of mind. The urgent insistence on the theme of generational responsibility brought to mind Franz Fanon’s observation that “each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it, in relative opacity”.
Tom Mboya was not just a star. The man was a galaxy, a universe, a cosmos. Only in his 20s, he strode the world like the proverbial colossus. He had global governments eating out of his hand, waiting with bated breath for his every statement, mesmerised and dazzled. And it was not the fake spin, polished PR, big talk, hot air, vacuous razzle-dazzle that we see in politics today. It was the real deal; well thought out, grounded, well executed, and impactful programmes. The power of his plans was in their simplicity, their efficacy and their humanity.
While some may believe that the repertoire of greatness includes shouting, shrieking, and running around like a headless chicken, Tom Mboya’s greatness was manifest in his calm and easy mien. The actor Ywaya Xavier ably transmitted Tom Mboya’s amiable essence, his cool, laid-back, easy-going, man-about-town energy.
Barely in his 20s, Tom Mboya was a global star, not just rubbing shoulders with, but BFFs with the global glitterati. He was on first names with presidents, billionaires, the sports and Hollywood elite, featured on the cover of Time Magazine and Drum, no less. His wedding to Pamela Odede was a global event attended by and the international who’s who.
Tom Mboya counted among his friends Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Baptist Christian ministers, baseball player Jackie Robinson, social justice activist Cora Weiss, Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah, American president John F Kennedy, singers Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte, actor Sidney Poitier, and philanthropist William Scheinman among others. He was in constant communication with these public figures, many of whom enthusiastically helped towards the actualisation of the student airlifts to America and Canada that benefitted almost 800 East African students, many returning to become pivotal figures in their countries of origin.
Even in Kenya, those whom Mboya worked with on the local committee for the airlifts were people of high gravitas, including Dr Munyua Waiyaki and Mwai Kibaki. At the time of the airlifts, Tom Mboya was a strapping 26-year-old lad.
The play took us across a variety of locations – Montgomery (Alabama), Oxford, Nairobi, Mombasa… demonstrating Mboya’s brilliance in different places, among different groups of people. Indeed, even the place where he grew up, William Northrup McMillan’s sisal plantation (he after whom the McMillan library on Banda Street is named), was a theatre of national and global affairs; American President Theodore Roosevelt had been a guest at the farm numerous times; McMillan had played a key role in the First World War, later becoming a member of the Legislative Council for the Ukambani constituency. McMillan was originally American but changed his nationality to British in order to fight in the war. He embodied personal agency, adventure, and visions of immense possibilities. Growing up in the backdrop of McMillan’s large life, one can see how this spirit could have draped itself around Mboya.
Growing up at a time of racial segregation where African people were equated to animals (hotels had signs barring dogs and Africans), racism was a key issue that Tom Mboya faced. As a sanitary inspector in the Nairobi City Council, Mboya’s activism in demanding equal pay and decent treatment for African workers led to his eventual sacking, liberating him to become a full-time trade unionist. Mboya became Secretary General of the Kenya Federation of Registered Trade Unions (subsequently the Kenya Federation of Labour) in 1953 at the age of 23.
Success and impact are what differentiates greatness from mediocrity, and Mboya achieved both. Taking on colonial administrators at a time when this was unimaginable, he achieved wild success in his trade union work. His interventions led to pay increases, better working conditions and rousing sentiment of the need for independence from colonial rule. His opponents threw obstacles in his path at every turn (even setting up Joint Industrial Council to counter Mboya’s trade union work), but Mboya neatly sidestepped all of these.
Mboya’s attendance at the Third World Conference of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Sweden in 1953 saw him ascend to the global stage. The ’50s saw him join Ruskin College at Oxford, undertake speaking tours in America, become a member of the Legislative Council, become elected chairman of the All African Peoples Conference in Accra, Ghana, and begin steps towards getting the student airlifts on course, all this while still in his twenties. Ruskin College had strong connections to the British Labour Party, labour unions, and other workers’ movements. Before long, Western media was reporting Mboya as Kenya’s probable independence leader.
The play served us with snippets of Kenya’s history; the unfolding of the state of emergency, Operation Jock Scott, Operation Anvil which saw African leaders arrested in large numbers and censorship laws operationalised to weaken African agency. It took us through the setting up of Kenya’s first political parties and all the accompanying intrigues. Mboya had his own outfit, the Nairobi People’s Convention Party (NCPC) which eventually merged with KANU, where he was elected secretary-general.
Tom Mboya was not averse to political mischief, he was no moral ideologue. He may have used political cunning a bit too much, employing untoward methods to edge out political rivals (notably Argwings Kodhek and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga) and achieve his goals, creating enemies along the way.
The play revealed some of Mboya’s other achievements: designing the flag of Kenya, assisting in the founding of Gor Mahia Football Club, setting up the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF), participating in negotiations for Kenya’s independence and for the formation of the East African Community. Mboya would become cabinet minister in the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, and the Ministry for Economic Planning and Development.
Mboya could easily have ended up as just another nondescript politician. What brought all the elements together and made them explode was his workaholism. As the play puts it, Mboya worked himself out of job after job. Not content to occupy a position and wait to retire and collect his pension, Mboya was a man on a mission. Handed the blandest and most lacklustre of dockets, his star outshone his contemporaries. Indeed, if the play’s portrayal is to be believed, his seniors in government were so exasperated by his excellence that they tried to send him off to the United Nations, without success.
The 1960s were a grievous time in world history, when a lot of global political luminaries died by assassination or mysteriously: Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Pio Gama Pinto, Patrice Lumumba, Fred Hampton, Dag Hammarskjold. Many of them were Mboya’s personal friends. Others that would suffer the same fate for their greatness years later include JM Kariuki, Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, Muammar Gaddafi, and the numerous South African activists in the anti-apartheid struggle.
One of the saddest things about Tom Mboya’s death was the manner in which it further entrenched ethnic animosity in Kenya (his alleged killer, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, was Kikuyu), despite Mboya having lived his life trying to rally Kenyans around a nationalist vision. Not only did he not play the tribal card, his most fervent supporters were from the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru communities. Segregation in the colonial time was not only racial but also ethnic. Luos predominantly populated Kaloleni, while the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru lived in Bahati. So highly affiliated was Mboya with the latter groups that the colonial government moved him from Kaloleni to Bahati where it could keep a close watch on him and his fellow “trouble makers”.
The play ended on the chilliest note possible. The cast called out one by one the names of all the Gen Zs killed during the protests, fists raised, Kenyan flag aloft. Indeed, just as we ask what Kenya would have become had Tom Mboya lived, we also ask what Kenya would be if those 61 young Kenyans had not been killed. The stage darkened and chills ran through my body as I watched black and white footage of mourners wailing outside Nairobi Hospital and Mboya’s funeral procession taking him to his final resting place on Rusinga Island.
Connecting Mboya’s senseless death with the Gen Z protests, you get the feeling of a people’s yearning, hungering and craving for something better at a time when baseness, degradation, depravity and profaneness rule the land.
The play received a standing ovation, not a single person remained in their seat.
As last year’s Gen Z protests demonstrated, greatness still has a lot of unfinished business in this land. We have normalised mediocrity, ratchetness, and baseness. As a collective, we are content to keep wallowing in the mud as we groan, whine, complain, imprison ourselves in victimhood, forgetting that the stars are still shining above us, showing us the way. But art is both provocative and prophetic. Productions such as these herald the beginnings of getting out of the murk, and stepping onto the road to greatness.
