Tom Mboya

Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya was born on 15 August 1930 in colonial Kenya. He began as a sanitary inspector with the Nairobi City Council, where he was elected president of the African Staff Association and moulded it into a trade union, the Kenya Local Government Workers' Union.

Mboya used trade unions as a platform in the fight for independence. In 1953 he was elected general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour, the umbrella body for the colony's unions, which made him the most powerful African trade unionist in Kenya. He helped build the union movement across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and in 1959 called a conference in Lagos to form the first All-Africa labour organisation.

He entered politics in 1957, winning a seat in the Legislative Council, and in 1958 founded the Nairobi People's Congress Party. As secretary general of KANU, he headed the Kenyan delegation in the negotiations with Britain that led to independence, and he was instrumental in designing Kenya's national flag.

Mboya's best-known initiative was the airlift. In 1959 he organised Airlift Africa with the African-American Students Foundation, flying 81 Kenyan students to American universities, and over the following years hundreds of East Africans followed. Beneficiaries included the future Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai and Barack Obama Sr., the father of a future U.S. president.

After independence in 1963 Mboya became Minister of Labour, then Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, and from December 1964 Minister of Economic Planning and Development, the principal architect of Kenya's early economic policy, including Sessional Paper No. 10 on African socialism. On 5 July 1969, aged 38, he was shot dead outside a pharmacy in central Nairobi. A man was convicted and hanged, but suspicions about who was behind the killing have never fully faded.