Word: luo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ironically, his sudden death by a still un known assassin aroused Kenya's tribal rivalries. As his body lay in state in his Nairobi home last week, his fellow Luo tribesmen closed ranks against the rest of Kenya. Any mourner who was a Luo was welcomed, even if he had been an opponent of Economic and Development Minister Mboya. As the day wore on, Luo bitterness increased and even Mboya's close friends, if they were Kikuyus, Tugens or of any other tribe, were turned away with taunts and stones...
...Requiem High Mass for Mboya in Nairobi's Holy Family Cathedral be came a shambles. A crowd of 20,000, mostly Luo, jammed the cathedral square. When venerable President Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, arrived in his black, bulletproof Mercedes, the car was pelted with anything handy, even shoes. The police reacted with flailing batons and white-foaming tear-gas grenades. The gas penetrated the cathedral, and its sting set children wailing. Some of the harried congregation used holy water to rinse their eyes, and one retired government official died the next day of the gas's aftereffects...
...progress through Luo-land was agonizingly slow. Women in vividly patterned dresses flung themselves onto the road ahead of the hearse; men and boys clung to the hood and the body. Other Luos sat half naked by the road, smeared with the traditional clay of mourning, while witch doctors in white ostrich feathers and monkey-skin skirts pranced among them. Trucks, cars and buses decorated with palm fronds and jacaranda branches brought thousands more to vantage points along...
...Western, with close ties both to the U.S. and Britain (he spent a year at Oxford), Mboya had no use for Soviet and Chinese efforts to gain a foothold in Kenya. It was on that issue that Mboya and his principal political enemy, Oginga Odinga, collided. Odinga, a Luo like Mboya, is an emotional, radical tribalist with Communist leanings and support. Mboya helped oust Odinga as Vice President...
Mboya had many political enemies on the right as well as the left. He also had personal enemies, for he could be arrogant, brittle and ruthless in political infighting. As a Luo, Mboya was given only a scant chance to succeed Kenyatta, a member of the country's dominant Kikuyu tribe. His talents were such, however, that he might have been assassinated to head off any possibility of his presidency. Kenyatta described his death as "a loss to Kenya, to Africa and the world...