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.
Saturday, July 05, 2008 The Big Mistake TJ And Jomo Made
Tom Mboya is welcomed aboard a British navy battle ship in this undated photo.
We miss you Tom Mboya… Oh How Kenya misses you!
39 years ago on a Saturday just like today a few minutes to one o’clock PM, two revolver bullets rung out loudly on Moi Avenue Nairobi.
A Handsome well built man in an immaculate designer suit stopped those two bullets. He fell back towards the door of the Chemist from where he had just emerged a split second before. His name was Tom Mboya.
Tourists seated at the popular Thorn Tree Bar (the restaurant next to the street at the New Stanley Hotel along Kimathi street heard the loud gun fire and silence and panic fell in the bar area...
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Hoover Archives Unveils Correspondence Between Kenyan Independence Leader and American Philanthropist Responsible for Helping Educate Hundreds of Kenyans Including Barack Obama Sr.January 25, 2010
Accra, Ghana, 1958: William X. Scheinman, seated second from right, with Tom Mboya, third from right (William X. Scheinman Papers, Box 49:2, Hoover Institution Archives).
Kenyan university students arriving at Idlewild Airport, New York, 1959 (William X. Scheinman Papers, Box 49:10, Hoover Institution Archives).
Washington, D.C., 1959: From right to left, William X. Scheinman, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, Tom Mboya, unidentified (from William X. Scheinman Papers, Box 49:1, 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.
In addition to the Mboya correspondence, the William X. Scheinman papers contain records of the African American Students Foundation, documenting fund-raising efforts, led by such personalities as Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson, and records of the foundation’s various activities from 1959 to 1963. Also included are extensive correspondence files that record Scheinman’s long-standing interest in Africa, as seen in letters to and from African political and cultural leaders such as Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi, Zimbabwean independence leader Joshua Nkomo, longtime Zambia president Kenneth Kaunda, and Malawian independence leaders Henry Chipembere and M.W. Kanyama Chiume, as well as South African singer and human rights activist Miriam Makeba.
Hoover Institution, Standforn University