Tom Mboya's Student Airlift and the Path That Brought Obama Sr. to America

Tom Mboya was 28 years old and already Kenya’s best-known labor leader when he toured the United States for six weeks starting in April 1959, asking Americans to fund university educations for East African students most local colonial institutions had no room for. The trip produced the African American Students Foundation, backed by Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier among others, and on September 11, 1959, its first chartered flight carried 81 students, 13 of them women, from Nairobi to New York. The program became known as the airlift, and by the time it wound down in the mid-1960s it had sent several hundred East African students, including future Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, to universities across the US and Canada.

Barack Obama Sr. was not on that first flight, despite frequently being described that way in later retellings. According to reporting compiled by Kenyan and American researchers, including Tom Shachtman’s 2009 book on the program, Obama applied on his own to more than 30 American colleges and was accepted only by the University of Hawaii. He made the trip separately from the chartered flights, arriving in 1959 the same year as the airlift’s launch, with tuition help from the same African American Students Foundation fund that Mboya had helped set up, and with Mboya’s direct assistance in securing it. The distinction matters for the historical record even if the underlying connection holds: Mboya’s fundraising network, not the literal flight manifest, is what put an Obama in an American classroom. It was at the University of Hawaii that Obama Sr. met fellow student Ann Dunham, and their son, born in Honolulu in 1961, became the 44th president of the United States.

Mboya himself never lived to see that outcome. He rose from a Nairobi sanitation worker’s union post in the early 1950s to lead the Kenya Federation of Labour, helped found the Kenya African National Union in 1960, and served as a government minister after independence in 1963, widely regarded at the time as a likely successor to President Jomo Kenyatta. On July 5, 1969, he was shot and killed in broad daylight on Nairobi’s Government Road. Nahashon Njoroge was convicted of the killing, but questions about who ordered it, and why, have shadowed Kenyan politics for decades since.

The airlift’s legacy outlived both men who built it. Historians studying African decolonization have described the program as a notable chapter of the Cold War-era competition for influence on the continent, one in which private American fundraising, rather than government policy, moved first. Kennedy’s own family foundation stepped in to help fund the program’s expansion only in 1960, after Mboya appealed directly to then-Senator John F. Kennedy for support, a fact that later gave the effort its popular name, the Kennedy Airlift, even though Mboya and the African American Students Foundation had set the program in motion a year before Kennedy’s involvement began.