Word: mboya
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...boost from the feeling that others were with them. For all the fiery phrases about "solidarity and fraternity" and for all the placards reading, "Forward to Independence Now!" this was no gathering of obedient line followers. They accepted as conference chairman Kenya's flashy young (28) Nationalist Tom Mboya-a good choice, everyone agreed, though many delegates bristled at the way Nkrumah railroaded his selection. The race for Africa's future, of which Le Figaro spoke, was still very much an open...
...Nkrumah's conference got under way, he found his African guests neatly divided. Those from the newly independent and largely black territories of West Africa were for a more moderate program -keyed to their need for foreign capital and advice-than those, like Kenya's Mboya, who back home are still fighting their colonial masters. The militant group objected to Nkrumah's cry for a Gandhi-style "nonviolent revolution" in Africa. They were joined by the Egyptians and the Algerians who want no such peaceful limits set on their future actions...
When the trial began in Nairobi, it seemed inevitable that it would provide Mboya with the kind of martyrdom that is so invaluable in nationalist politics. The first day, Bwana Tom (as his idolatrous followers call him) arrived ostentatiously wearing a Ghana toga of kente cloth. Wherever he went, his followers trailed him crying the Ghana chant: "FreeDOM! Free-DOM!" His new People's Convention Party, modeled after Nkrumah's party, organized an effective boycott of buses, beer and tobacco, staged such wild demonstrations that the police had to call on Mboya himself to stop them...
...Mboya's leftist London lawyer, D. N. Pritt, Q.C.. the defender of Mau Mau Leader Jomo Kenyatta (now in prison), got the conspiracy charge thrown out on a technicality, and set forth to destroy the reputations of the moderate African nominees who appeared as witnesses for the prosecution. At one he thundered: "Do you hate Africans, or merely despise them?" But somehow, the fireworks...
...from being European stooges, some of the Africans emerged from hard cross-examination (as the judge remarked at the end of the trial) as simple, frank and engaging men. Last week the court declared Mboya & Co. guilty of criminal libel, slapped each with a token ?75 fine, not enough to make martyrs of them. Outside the courthouse, where thousands of Bwana Tom's followers had demonstrated only a few days before, one native forlornly waved a placard saying EIGHT MILLION AFRICANS ON TRIAL, for the benefit of the small, halfhearted crowd-and the Nairobi police phlegmatically waited to quell...