Word: mboya
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Throughout his life, Tom Mboya worked for an end to tribalism and for the growth of a Kenyan nationalism...
...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...
Negative Rays. A public viewing of Mboya's body, scheduled for that night, was canceled. At four in the morning, the funeral cortege set out, headed for the shores of Lake Victoria, the heartland of the Luos, 300 miles away. Mboya's coffin was draped in the national colors of black, green and red, and covered with tropical flowers. Nothing went right. After only five miles, one car broke down. On the escarpment of the Rift Valley, the car carrying Mboya's pregnant widow, Pamela, was involved in a three-car collision that injured five people...
...political effect of Mboya's murder will apparently be to strengthen the opposition to the government. Mboya himself had been in Kenyatta's Cabinet and a supporter of the government. But most Luos, led by Leftist Oginga Odinga, belong to the opposition Kenya People's Union. Along the entire route of the cortege, crowds shouted the defiant party rallying cry of "Dume! Dame!", which means bull, and refers to the K.P.U. party symbol. How badly the government will be hurt depends, of course, on how swiftly it can capture the assassin and on the discovery of which...