Word: mboya
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Then a mighty roar went up, and there came Tom Mboya on the shoulders of his excited supporters. Around his shoulders was a black skin cape. The sleepy eyes danced with pleasure, and a grin split the gleaming, satin-smooth black face...
...Patrice Lumumba, onetime postal clerk and jailbird in the Congo, debates Congolese independence on even terms with the skilled ministers of Belgium in Brussels' Palais des Congrès. Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika enraptures sophisticated U.S. audiences on a coast-to-coast lecture tour. Kenya's Tom Mboya, 29, who used to be courted only by English left-wingers, now holds forth suavely as honor guest in the private dining rooms of London's largest banks and casually keeps a colonial governor waiting while he takes a shower...
Twenty years ago, handsome Tom Mboya was just another barefoot child in the untamed highlands of East Africa, where his people had only recently discovered the uses of the wheel. He was born to illiterate parents on the dried cow-dung floor of a grass-roofed hut on the sisal (hemp) estate of Sir William Northrup McMillan, who, a local yarn has it, won his 34,000 acres of Kenya highlands with a throw of the dice in Nairobi's Norfolk Hotel...
...Mboya has come a long way from his origins, but he remembers them and their rigid social order: at the bottom were the African workers, earning $3 a month in the sisal fields; then came the Indian shopkeeper, who sold them kerchiefs, trinkets and tobacco; on top were the few whites around...
...yourself against the white man," warned Tom Mboya's father, a sober, hard-working Jaluo tribesman who was the African headman at the farm's sisal-processing plant. "He is too powerful, and you cannot change him." But Tom Mboya recalls how riled he was at the sight of the stern estate manager, whom the Africans in fear called Bwana Kiboko-the boss who carries the hippo-skin whip...