Political Traffic: Kenyan Students in Eastern and Central Europe,1958–69

Shortly after midday on 5 July 1969 in central Nairobi, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge assassinated Tom Mboya, Kenya’s minister for economic planning and development. Mboya’s death was an event of global significance. The founder of a scholarship programme that took hundreds of Kenyan students to the USA, Mboya moved in international networks of Panafricanism, development and trade unions. By contrast, Njenga’s own background seemed to be mere detail to observers at the time. Of greatest importance was his role as the front man for a deeper plot involving Mboya’s rivals for the presidency, which in turn led to Njenga’s swift execution. Those behind the shooting continued their factional battles until the elderly President Jomo Kenyatta finally died in 1978.

Despite the relative disinterest in his background at the time, Njenga was just as engaged with the global politics of the age as Mboya. He had participated in a very different scholarship programme to the one established by Mboya. He was one of 88 Kenyan students sent to Bulgaria by Mboya’s great rival and then minister for home affairs, Oginga Odinga, just a month before Kenyan independence in December 1963. Njenga spent four years in Bulgaria, where he underwent military training. ¹ Odinga’s scholarship agreement with Bulgaria was part of a wider programme of such scholarships, spread across Eastern and Central Europe, that exceeded even Mboya’s in scale.

Njenga did not kill Mboya because of that training or his ties to Odinga. Instead, Njenga’s role in the murder likely emerged from his disaffected existence on his return to Kenya in 1967. Many of the 1500 Kenyan students who studied in Eastern and Central Europe in this period returned home to be greeted with suspicion as the course of domestic politics and the influence of the Cold War turned against them. Rather than taking up the key roles they expected to occupy in the new state, the returning graduates were forced to take work wherever they could find it. Although he enjoyed relative prosperity through his work as a second-hand car salesman, Njenga was unfulfilled and he spent much of his time drinking. His vulnerability was ruthlessly exploited by Mboya’s rivals. ²

This article explores the intersection of the Cold War and decolonization in Kenya by examining the experiences of students like Njenga who travelled to Eastern and Central Europe for their university education. For the ever-growing numbers of young Kenyans – the country was part of ‘the most sudden and rapid population growth the world is ever likely to see’ ³ – the simultaneous demise of British imperialism and the emergence of the Cold War meant there were unprecedented opportunities for such journeys. The superpowers and their satellites offered such scholarships as part of their efforts to find allies among the leaders and populations of the soon-to-be independent African states. Nationalist leaders in Kenya were, in turn, keen to encourage such offers. Without sufficient existing provision of higher education in Kenya and Eastern Africa, overseas scholarships were vital, in the words of Oginga Odinga, if the country were to ‘have people who will work to build up Kenya when we attain independence’. ⁴ Kenyans enthusiastically seized the new opportunities. Just 110 Kenyan Africans were studying outside Eastern Africa in 1955. ⁵ Many were in independent India, to the chagrin of colonial officials who feared the effects of their exposure to nationalist politics. ⁶ A decade later, at least 2500 students were overseas and spread across the globe. As in other African states, higher education became a site of intense political debate. ⁷

The stories of the 800 or so Kenyan students who studied in the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s have become well known since the emergence of Barack Obama. ⁸ Less familiar are the experiences of Njenga and the approximately 1500 other Kenyan students who travelled to various Eastern and Central European countries at the same time. ⁹ There is, however, a growing body of literature that narrates the experience of the wider body of African students in Eastern Europe. ¹⁰ This article extends the subject of this work to one of the former British colonies of East Africa and to the most eager African participants in student mobility. By January 1962, with more than 280 students spread across the region, the British authorities stated that the number of Kenyans studying in communist countries

much exceeds the number of students from either Ghana or Nigeria who were studying in bloc institutions on the eve of Ghanaian and Nigerian independence, and certainly surpasses the number of bloc students from any other East or Central African territory. ¹¹

Kenyan students were by 1970 more deeply integrated into networks of global student exchange programmes than those from any other sub-Saharan African country. ¹²

This article has more substantial contributions to the existing historiography beyond its inclusion of Kenya. In much of the recent work on African students, the emphasis is on the contradictions between the rhetorical commitments of communist states to support for African liberation and the students’ experiences of racism. Such an argument provides further evidence of Frederick Cooper’s arguments about the hidden constraints to African liberation in the post-colonial world. ¹³ Collectively this literature therefore forms an important part of the new historiography on the global Cold War. However, in such studies the students themselves can simply appear and disappear. Little consideration is given to the circumstances by which they found their way to Europe or the consequences of their studies for their lives and broader society back home after graduation. Indeed, the political context of their home countries is given so little attention that some studies simply consider the students as Africans or foreigners. Although such categorizations may make analytical sense when one’s primary focus is on the reception given to, for example, non-Soviet students by Soviet society, it does little to advance our broader understanding of the historical significance of student mobility to both host countries and the countries of origin.

This article considers the relationships of Kenyan students with their hosts, particularly in the USSR and Bulgaria. It too finds that the everyday racism they experienced revealed the limits of the commitments of the host countries to the liberty and equality of the new decolonized nation-states. Kenyan students were not shy to make this point. They proved no more willing to accept the political authority of the Bulgarian, East German or Soviet state than they had been the Kenyan state. However, this article’s wider arguments have more in common with Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor’s work on Zimbabwean military trainees in the USSR. Alexander and McGregor convincingly argue for the need to pay more careful attention to the domestic political context and the agency of African participants in mobility around the Cold War world if we are to better understand the historical significance of this subject. ¹⁴

This article shows how the students and their mobility represented one way by which nationalist leaders could ‘unmake’ the colonial state. ¹⁵ Overseas education provided Kenyans with the opportunities to evade the paradox of modernity used by European rulers to justify the subjugation of their colonies. As long as access to higher education had been strictly controlled and limited, colonial rulers who used modernity to set the boundaries of citizenship in colonies could do so without fear of the significant inclusion of Africans in the category of citizen. ¹⁶ Empowered by their education, Kenyan students and graduates disputed the settlers’ monopoly on citizenship, modernity and political power. But the potential of the students to unmake a state did not end with the demise of colonial rule.

In Kenya, the mobile students who had been so important to efforts to dismantling colonial rule proved even more troublesome to the country’s new rulers’ conceptions of independence and sovereignty. The students’ mobility provoked other restrictions to be placed on their possible transformative effects on Kenyan political life, hence indirectly exerting a considerable influence on the process of state-building in the new nation-state.

Kenyans were keen participants in what in 1958 Count de Liedekerke, the Belgian attaché in Nairobi, called ‘political traffic’. ¹⁷ By this, he meant the dramatic and rapid expansion in global mobility by individuals from across Africa connected to the anti-colonial movement. This traffic was possible because of the weakening grip of European colonial rule on its African subjects. Although frequently subverted, control over their mobility had been a hallmark of modern European imperialism: ‘empire was a self-consciously spatializing project'. ¹⁸ In Kenya, this took the form of reserved districts for European settlements, the use of passes to control labour migration and a variety of other methods to limit the mobility that the territory’s population had long practiced. The imperial spatializing project reached an apogee during the final decade of colonial rule. Forced displacement, curfew, detention, imprisonment and other measures were imposed by the British between 1952 and 1960 as part of a state of emergency intended to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency. The mobility of many Kenyans and their engagement with global political debates were therefore curtailed; ‘we have ceased to be movable creatures’, wrote Kariuki Njiiri, a former student in the USA, in 1959 after his return home. ¹⁹

In truth, colonial restrictions on African mobility in Kenya had already begun to be relaxed by the time Njiiri wrote those words. Prohibitions on organized African political activity were partially lifted in 1957 and the state of emergency was abandoned in 1960. The new freedoms to move and communicate with external parties were enthusiastically taken up by a wide range of political actors. Spatial control of Kenya weakened even earlier. The ability of the colonial regime to police its own borders was weakened as soon as its neighbouring states, such as Sudan in 1956, became independent. British officials in Nairobi recognized in 1958 that ‘it was fairly easy to leave it [Kenya] without being stopped at the border’. ²⁰

African civil servants, cooperative leaders, army officers, spies and trade unionists all travelled the world to gain the expertise needed for independent rule. For those that could not leave Kenya, the world came to them. On their shortwave radios Kenyans could listen to nationalist Swahili broadcasts from Moscow, Accra and Cairo. ²¹ Pamphlets and newsletters from Egypt and the USSR were carried across Kenya’s borders with increasing regularity. The colonial authorities intercepted nearly 2500 separate such publications in 1962, the vast majority originating from the USSR. The volume of this form of political traffic had increased fivefold over just four years. ²² To Kenyan exiles in Egypt this dramatic spike in the globalization of Kenyan politics meant that the soon-to-be nation-state was recalibrating its position in hierarchies of global power, particularly in relation to Britain. The officials of the Kenya Office in Cairo, students themselves, pronounced that ‘history has passed its sentence on colonialism, imperialism and settlerism …’: ‘We the African people of Kenya – nay Africa – are now the executors of the sentence passed by history now!’ ²³

Kenyans living under colonial rule were fully aware of the need to study abroad. Colonialism, Odinga wrote, left a legacy of ‘retarded educational facilities’. ²⁴ Efforts by the British to redress such concerns were too little, too late. Although Kenyans joined their counterparts from across Eastern Africa at Makerere from 1935, there were still just 325 Kenyan students at the region’s elite university in 1959. ²⁵ In Kenya itself, the Royal Technical College in Nairobi was founded in 1956 and only began offering degrees as the University College in 1961. No wonder thousands of young Kenyans shared with Monica Mbotela, the daughter of the historian James Juma Mbotela, ‘that great dream of her life – education Overseas’. ²⁶

The likes of Mbotela had earlier examples to follow. Throughout the colonial period, a small number of Kenyan African students were successful in applications for places and scholarships at universities in South Africa, India, the UK and the USA. Various luminaries of the nationalist movement studied abroad between the 1920s and 1950s, including Kenyatta, Mboya, Mbiyu Koinange, Eliud Mathu, Julius Kiano, Njoroge Mungai and Mwai Kibaki. Kenyatta spent a short and unhappy time in Russia in 1933 during a long exile in Europe. ²⁷ But they were among the lucky few that received such an education in spite of colonial policies. There was no great expansion of opportunities in the UK even once decolonization began; just 42 Kenyans were students there in 1959. ²⁸ Nor necessarily was there any great desire among Kenyans to travel to Britain for their studies. Although a degree from Oxford, Cambridge or London carried great weight for graduates in decolonizing Kenya, some of the students that travelled there found their experience blighted by racism. ²⁹ Moreover, Britain’s reputation as a technological pioneer, industrial giant and centre for innovation had diminished long before its political power began to retreat. ³⁰ Musa Amalemba, a visiting politician, was struck by the ‘extent of disaffection’ he encountered among the students he met during a visit to the UK in 1959. ³¹ George Onyuna and Henry Ouma Olwa were among the students in Britain at the time. They left in secret shortly afterwards in order to take up places at Leipzig University. ³²

As more Kenyans looked to follow in the footsteps of Onyuna and Olwa, they became embroiled in the fierce domestic and global politics of decolonization. The Mau Mau rebellion was the best-known expression of the ferocious nature of late-colonial politics in Kenya. In the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa, unemployment, low wages, inflation and a regressive approach to labour relations sparked the growth of a powerful trade union movement. In the countryside, efforts by the colonial government to change land tenure and agricultural practices caused protests and resentment. Population growth, urbanization, increased religiosity, generational struggles and growing inequality combined to exacerbate a pronounced sense of crisis and fuel anti-colonial protest. And as thoughts turned to a future after colonial rule, no great consensus about the size and shape of a successor state emerged. Ethnic federalists proclaimed the need for devolution in direct competition with centralizers advocating for stronger national government. Somali irredentists and Coastal separatists hoped that they would not even be part of Kenya. Other Kenyans harboured ambitions of joining an independent East African Federation compromising Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika.

Until 1960, these various strands of debate were only able to find expression in individual political leaders, of which Oginga Odinga and Tom Mboya were among the most notable, or a complex network of highly localized informal political organizations. Colony-wide political parties were banned and labour unions and other vehicles for African involvement in public political action were heavily restricted. Without recourse to such strong institutions, African politics was intensely personalized. This remained true even after the first countrywide political parties, the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) and the Kenya African National Union (KANU), were formed in 1960. KANU’s leaders were nearly as divided among themselves as they were unified in their opposition to both British rule and the competition from KADU. The contest for influence over KANU between Mboya, Odinga and Kenyatta regularly threatened to derail the nationalist movement before independence.

KANU stayed together long enough to take power at independence in December 1963; Odinga and his supporters were forced out in 1965 and formed the Kenya People’s Union. KANU’s ability to win popular support across Kenya despite its factionalism was testament to the broad appeal of its campaign. First, the likes of Mboya and Odinga championed a cosmopolitan worldliness in Kenya’s expanding towns and cities that better captured the imagination of voters than the fearful, ethnocentrism of KADU. KANU’s political success was, Mboya thought, a triumph of an agenda for ‘local[,] International and Pan-African affairs’ over ‘tribalism’ and ‘mudslinging’. ³³ Mboya and Odinga similarly tapped into a popular demand for modernization and, particularly, education. ³⁴

For many Kenyans, better education sat alongside the desire for land redistribution as a primary goal of independence. As Kariuki Kamau, a self-styled KANU elder in the Rift Valley wrote in May 1963, ‘It would really mean a great joy if the coming new Government of Kenya would try to overcome our troubles of missing land and Education …’ ³⁵ KANU’s leaders recognized the need to meet such demands. They were also conscious of the dearth of graduates, which presented a real threat to the party’s ambitious development goals. ‘The needs are staggering’, Mboya wrote shortly after independence.

Like other African counties, Kenya will strive to build up its educational facilities as rapidly as possible. But this will take time, and the need for using overseas facilities in addition will be pressingly acute for a number of years. ³⁶

As is now well documented by historians and others, Mboya worked closely with his allies in the USA to try to address the development needs of Kenya and to advance his own political career. ³⁷ Mboya’s scholarship programme, known as the ‘air-lift’, served both parties well in this regard. By 1965, 774 Kenyans were studying in US universities and Mboya enjoyed global fame. ³⁸ Odinga’s engagement with global politics was, however, as deep as Mboya’s. He enjoyed a close relationship with with Apa Pant, India’s commissioner in East and Central Africa, and toured India in 1953. His itinerary around the country took him to factories, universities, government offices, and the towns and cities of the new nation. It was, he wrote on his return, an ‘important education’ and ‘something I shall never forget’. ³⁹ But Indian inspiration and encouragement did not translate into the scale of financial support Odinga needed to compete with Mboya. So in the late 1950s, Odinga approached his rival’s US funders. Mboya jealously protected his position, persuading his American friends that Odinga was a communist sympathizer. ⁴⁰ Odinga found a more receptive audience among the communist governments of Eastern and Central Europe.

As Mukiria Muturi, a Kenyan student leader in Poland between 1962 and 1968 wrote, various political figures in Eastern and Central Europe thought ‘Kenya was a “high potential” to communists before and immediately after independence. This was not accidental. Kenya’s struggle for independence was bitter and bitter circumstances are favourable for and vulnerable to communism.’ ⁴¹ Odinga was happy to be the recipient of the support that followed. After constitutional talks in London in February 1960, Odinga travelled to East Germany, his first trip to any Eastern European country. During his stay in Berlin he reached an agreement with the East German government for the funding of scholarships. With his reputation bolstered, Odinga met with Chinese and Soviet diplomats in Cairo during a stopover on his return to Kenya. Further scholarship agreements were struck. ⁴²

Odinga was unapologetic about his foreign ties, describing them as bonds of friendship based on ‘mutual understanding’ that meant ‘my friend in Russia, China or America may accept gifts from me and likewise I can accept gifts and other assistance from him’. ⁴³ By August 1963, Odinga was thought by the British to have received ‘several hundred thousand pounds’ from Communist governments. But the British also recognized that he was no communist: ‘Odinga and his group neither understand nor have any particular sympathy for Marxist-Leninist ideology’, one official wrote. ⁴⁴ Philemon Otieno, a student in Budapest, accurately characterized Odinga in 1967: ‘Well, a trader is a trader. He can only go where his things can find [an] easy market.’ ⁴⁵

As Odinga set about establishing the scholarship programmes, the need for the establishment of outposts along the route from Nairobi to Europe was essential. There were no direct flights connecting Kenya to any communist state and travel to such countries was banned for Kenyan Africans. The first and most important of these outposts was established in Cairo. Already strong after the 1952 revolution, Egyptian support for Kenyan nationalism strengthened after the Suez crisis. The Kenya Office, a base for Kenyan political exiles in Cairo, was founded in 1958. Its founders, Odhiambo Okello and Wera Ambitho, had been awarded scholarships at Italian universities but were refused permission to travel by the colonial government. With Abdulla Karungo Kinyariro, a former Mau Mau fighter, they instead made the long journey overland from Kenya to Cairo, where they began their studies and set up the office to look after those that followed their path. ⁴⁶ Within just a few months of its opening, the Kenya Office had helped eight students travel to communist countries as Okello, in particular, built up links with universities in Leningrad and Leipzig. ⁴⁷

The second staging post for Kenyan students on their way to Eastern Europe was, briefly, the imperial metropole. Odinga’s supporters among the Kenyan student body in Britain, most notably Barudi Nabwera and Stanley Ngombu Njururi, gained control of the Kenya Students’ Association (KSA) in London for a year from mid-1960. ⁴⁸ The KSA had close ties to the Committee of African Organisations (CAO), which was in turn linked to the British Communist Party and hence provided KSA with its connections to the universities in Eastern Europe to which Kenyan students were to be sent. ⁴⁹ The Odinga faction lost control of the KSA in London, but to no great consequence for the scholarship programme. After Tanganyikan independence in December 1961, Dar es Salaam became another important entrepôt. Vicky Gillan Wachira, a leader of the radical Kenya Trade Union Congress and supporter of Odinga, arranged more than 30 scholarships from the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Poland during visits to the city. ⁵⁰

By 1961, the network connecting Kenya to Eastern and Central Europe through Cairo and London or Dar es Salaam was vital to the success of Odinga’s scholarship programme. It allowed Kenyans to escape British efforts to stop ‘students where possible from going behind the curtain'. ⁵¹ The colonial authorities’ efforts meant that passport applications by students wishing to travel to Eastern and Central Europe were refused until November 1962. ⁵² Students suspected of providing false explanations for needing travel documents had their passports seized. Three such students were, for example, stopped at Nairobi’s airport as they were about to board a flight to Zurich on 12 December 1960. ⁵³

Despite these barriers, by late 1962 there were at least 280 Kenyan students spread across Eastern and Central Europe, with 82 in the USSR alone. ⁵⁴ They made remarkable journeys in their efforts to escape British restrictions. Departures had to be abrupt; Edward Kamau simply ‘disappeared’ in September 1963. He resurfaced nine months later, having travelled to Poland in the meantime. ⁵⁵ In order to preserve the secrecy of the operation, often not even the students were told before leaving their homes in Kenya where their final destination was. ⁵⁶ Stephen Macharia’s experience was typical. He was promised a scholarship at an unspecified European university, given a letter of introduction signed by Odinga, and instructed to travel overland to Cairo via Kampala and Khartoum. Once in Cairo, the Kenya Office issued Macharia with a plane ticket and Czechoslovakian visa. He flew to Prague and then on to Holesow in Southern Moravia on 18 September 1961. The whole journey took three weeks. ⁵⁷ Somali and Tanganyikan independence in 1960 and 1961 respectively further widened the range of possible departure points. ⁵⁸ Others took a ship from Ethiopia to Yugoslavia. ⁵⁹ Some students even first travelled by ship to India before an onward journey by plane to Eastern Europe.

A year before independence, Odinga successfully persuaded the colonial government to abandon its opposition to offers of scholarships from Eastern and Central Europe. ⁶⁰ His victory appeared to mark a new era of student mobility that matched KANU’s declared stance of non-alignment. Within months of independence, the new government accepted scholarships offered from Romania and Yugoslavia and authorized a student exchange programme between the University College in Nairobi (later University of Nairobi) and the USSR’s Students’ Union. ⁶¹ 200 students left Kenya for the USSR in 1964 on scheduled flights and with the knowledge of government ministers. ⁶² However, the mobility of Kenya’s students remained highly politicized.

Once the management of scholarships could be conducted in the open, the selection processes used to award scholarships provoked much controversy among the rival factions in KANU. Supporters of Mboya and Odinga accused one another of using scholarships to reward allies and to construct patronage networks. George Sedda, Odinga’s close ally, told British intelligence sources that Odinga intended to use the scholarships to ‘build around himself a group of well-trained professional politicians whom he could use after Kenya became independent’. ⁶³ His efforts to do so were thwarted to some degree by committees within KANU and, later, the cabinet, which exerted central control of the offer of all scholarships by both Mboya and Odinga. ⁶⁴

Ministers and civil servants took decisions on such funding largely on the basis of the academic quality of the applicant. But prior political connections to KANU’s leaders certainly did not harm the chances of certain applicants being successful. Mukiria Muturi won funding to study in Warsaw from 1962. Raised in the heartland of the Mau Mau rebellion in Karatina, Nyeri, he had been involved in nationalist politics since his schooldays. Expelled from school and placed under police surveillance, his local MP, Joseph Mathenge, found him a place to complete his schooling in Mombasa. On leaving school, Muturi joined KANU and became an active member of the party’s Youth Wing. This connection, coupled with his strong academic record, led to him securing his Polish scholarship through the Kenya Office in Cairo. ⁶⁵

For the most part, applicants to the scholarship programmes were not much concerned about the political orientation of their future homes. James Karani from Thika was ‘highly interested in education and would be very much like [sic] to further it at least in America, Europe, Canada, Ethiopia, West Germany, Cairo and Moscow etc.’ ⁶⁶ The primary motivation for travel was to gain a degree, not to make a statement of political sympathies. Joseph Kinyanjui at Sofia State University wrote, ‘I am only here for my studies.’ ⁶⁷ Students therefore travelled to wherever funding seemed available, which made the generous stipends offered in Eastern and Central Europe particularly attractive. In 1961, Alfred Ngata abandoned his studies in engineering at the City of London College, where he worked part-time in order to make ends meet, to take up a scholarship at Łodz University. ⁶⁸ Patrick Morage and Rahab Wambui had both declined American scholarships because they had insufficient funds to meet living costs in the USA before winning scholarships in 1962 to study at Sofia State University. ⁶⁹

Many of the students were transformed by their experiences overseas, particularly the few women involved. In Kenya, the colonial state’s modernization project in the 1950s had encouraged their domesticity. ⁷⁰ Winifred Mshingo was, therefore, delighted by the opportunities presented to her as a science student at Moscow State University. During a meeting with a delegation of visiting Kenyan politicians led by Odinga in August 1962, Mshingo ‘condemned the western education of women based on domestic sciences and crafts which she said could not be of any use in Kenya at the present time.’ ⁷¹

For other students, events back home continued to dominate political debate. Of particular importance was the personal struggle for influence between Mboya and Odinga, but also between the wider and differing approaches to development and foreign policy adopted by the two leaders. In Moscow in 1966, for example, the sons of Odinga and his ally Achieng’ Oneko led ‘campaigning against students from South Nyanza [Mboya’s ancestral home] because we have refused to support their policies.’ ⁷² In his role as the general secretary of the Federation of Kenya Students in Europe in 1968, Muturi, the former Youth Wing member we met above, proved to be both an active participant and well placed observer of the political divisions among his compatriots in Eastern and Central Europe. Although Odinga’s supporters were largely successful in dominating Kenyan student organizations, Muturi found that many ordinary members of these organizations ‘were disgusted’ by the machinations of their more radical compatriots. Others still remained silent, rather than ‘risking the confidence of their colleagues and their communist masters’. ‘There was’, Muturi noted, ‘much more to be learnt by remaining “loyal”’. ⁷³

Many Kenyan students were no doubt unwilling to risk their places at university and scholarships by becoming involved in political debates of the sort that preoccupied Mukuri. After all, Kenyan students were generally satisfied with their new lives in Eastern and Central Europe. They found their hosts to be welcoming and their stipends generous. ⁷⁴ Although gleefully reported by both the Western press and diplomats, most attempts at indoctrination by their hosts were low-key. ⁷⁵ There were, however, some recurring complaints from the students. Some were unavoidable problems to do with money, family, homesickness and love. ⁷⁶ Compulsory instruction in languages Kenyans thought would be useless to them when they returned home after graduation was a persistent source of discontent among the students. ⁷⁷ Those studying for professional qualifications were also frequently concerned about the recognition their degrees, such as in law, would receive on their return home. As two law students at Sofia State University, John Njiru and Joseph Osero, put it, ‘We cannot afford 5 long years here at the end of which [we] would bring home ideas corruptible to our young nation.’ ⁷⁸ Such relatively petty concerns were escalated when more substantial problems arose, such as in Sofia in February 1963.

Sixty Kenyan students travelled to Bulgaria in the autumn of 1962 to take up scholarships arranged by Kenyatta prior to his rejection of non-alignment as the basis for Kenya’s foreign policy. ⁷⁹ Many of the students were dismayed to discover that Sofia was their final destination. As some members of the group later told British diplomats, ‘they had simply been offered [a] chance of studying “in Europe”’. The students were further perturbed when they spent the first five months of their time in the country learning Bulgarian. ⁸⁰ Others were distressed when forced to undergo compulsory military training. ⁸¹ The Kenyan students were therefore already discontented when a much bigger crisis emerged.

Over several days in early February, a significant dispute built up between African students seeking formal representation, and the university authorities and government. Around 200 students took to the streets on 12 February to protest against the authorities’ stubborn refusal to allow them to select their own representative. The protestors, including 14 Kenyans, were attacked by the police and non-uniformed members of the security forces. Forty students were arrested, but swiftly released. Following the intervention of the Ghanaian ambassador, the Bulgarian government agreed to let all students who wished to leave the country to do so. ⁸² Forty-nine of the Kenyans decided to do so. ⁸³ Most went to West Germany, where the Kenyan government in the final weeks of colonial rule arranged scholarships for some. A handful of Kenyans were admitted to American colleges. ⁸⁴ Njenga, Mboya’s assassin, was one of the students sent later in 1963 to replace this first cohort in Bulgaria.

A similar episode occurred in Azerbaijan over eight days in early April 1965, when 29 Kenyan students mounted a protest at the main railway station of Baku, Azerbaijan. The city was home to more than 80 Kenyan students, one of the largest such concentrations in the USSR. at the time. They expected to stay in Baku for six years, but after just six months the protestors wanted to go home. The Kenyans were denied service in restaurants and ‘if we tried to dance with a Russian girl in a club we were beaten off’. According to one of the students, Nicholas Nyangira, ‘the Russian people in Baku showed open hatred of the Africans and waylaid some of them with sticks and clubs’. The students were also disgruntled with the year-long, compulsory preparatory classes in Russian language and Soviet history and culture. According to Nyangira, these classes resembled ‘more of [an] indoctrination camp than a university. Most of our studies were taken up with brainwashing and learning the Communist doctrine’. ⁸⁵

The tipping point in Baku came in April 1965 with the accidental death of a Ghanaian student, not the first such incident in the USSR. Near-identical circumstances provoked a major protest in Moscow in 1963. ⁸⁶ The Kenyan students in Baku in 1965 believed the university authorities were responsible for the death of their Ghanaian colleague. The 29 protestors packed their belongings, made their way to the railway station and waited until the authorities would let them leave. They ignored pleas from the Kenyan ambassador to the USSR and the Soviet authorities. After more than a week, they were allowed to depart. ⁸⁷ As with their compatriots who left Sofia two years earlier, the publicity surrounding the Kenyan students who fled from Baku led to the award of scholarships to other universities in the West. Nyangira later completed his PhD at Syracuse before becoming one of Kenya’s leading political scientists.

As events in Sofia and Baku illustrate, Kenyan students were as restless, agitated and distrustful of authority abroad as they had been in decolonizing Kenya. As the Soviet ambassador to Kenya noted of those involved in the Baku incident, ‘this group of the Kenya students have misbehaved since the very first day of their arrival in Baku …’ ⁸⁸ The pluralism of political views among the Kenyan students frustrated other hosts. The East German authorities cancelled a planned congress of Kenyan students from across Europe to be held in East Berlin in July 1968. The congress’ organizers – including Mukiria Muturi (see above) and Odinga’s son and future political leader, Raila – were summoned to Berlin to be admonished. The East German authorities were angered at the fact that supporters of the ‘reactionary and neo-colonialist KANU’ were invited and ‘the inclusion of a pro-Chinese theme to the congress main papers, “cultural revolution in Kenya”’. As Muturi wrote, Kenyan students across the communist states of Europe ‘seemed to have baffled if not completely confused many’ of the figures in authority that they encountered. ⁸⁹

The creative, disruptive political energy exhibited by the students overseas had been an important part of the anti-colonial movement that toppled British rule in Kenya in December 1963. It gave the likes of Mboya and Odinga confidence that Kenyans could remake relations with the wider world in this period. Writing in early 1963, Mboya thought Kenya was ‘on the threshold of a wide-open future which we will determine in full ourselves’. ⁹⁰ But the Kenyan students in Baku, Sofia and other cities around the world discovered that the apparently limitless range of opportunities described by Mboya was more constrained than they initially appreciated. Most obviously, their mobility exposed Kenyans abroad to new forms of racism besides that of their former colonial rulers. However, the students would have been more surprised to discover on their return home that their new rulers felt just as threatened by their mobility as the colonial regime had been. The students’ capacity for dissent irritated their Soviet and Bulgarian hosts, but scared their own national government.

The students educated in Eastern and Central Europe could hardly have had a more different experience of their return home from that of their compatriots educated in the USA. On their return, the American graduates dominated public life in the post-colonial era with the graduates of British universities and those of Makerere. As MPs, cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, newspaper editors, business leaders and cultural figures, they benefitted most from the fruits of independence. The students in Eastern and Central Europe expected to emulate them.

Writing in February 1966 from his dormitory in Sofia, R.W.D. Kiggathi foresaw a future for himself ‘in which I will be helping to build the Nation’. ⁹¹ A few individuals educated in Eastern and Central Europe did so: Mukiria Muturi, for instance, later became chief economist in the office of the vice-president. But such examples were isolated. Instead, this group of graduates were almost entirely absent from elite national politics, the civil service, the media and the boardrooms of large domestic and multinational companies. By 1972, the reality was revealed by the regularly updated biographies of leading personalities maintained by the British High Commission. Among the more than 150 lawyers, MPs, ministers, military officers, businessmen and other figures who dominated public life under Kenyatta, just one – Matthew Ogutu, who studied journalism in Czechoslovakia and became a MP in 1969 – had been educated in Eastern or Central Europe. ⁹²

The failure of the likes of Kiggathi to reap the rewards of their education was partly a reflection of the legacies of colonial attitudes towards the education given to African students in Eastern and Central Europe; one British official believed it was ‘of no academic standard’. ⁹³ But such concerns about the quality of the education received in Europe were, at least in part, misplaced. As the University of Nairobi’s registrar, Solomon Karanja, acknowledged to British diplomats, degrees in the sciences ‘were certainly the equal of any in the West’. The quality of arts degrees awarded in Eastern and Central Europe, however, ‘were little higher than “A” levels in Britain’. ⁹⁴ Far more significant to any effort to understand the exclusion from public life of the graduates from Europe was the course of Kenyan politics that occurred while they were overseas.

The political significance of the students in Eastern and Central Europe was transformed between 1963 and 1965, largely because of their association with military training. The spectre of the Congo loomed large in KANU’s planning for independence. A particular fear of the political effects of British influence upon the military was widely shared by many Kenyans. Indeed, as late as December 1964, in its coverage of Kenyan military cadets in Bulgaria, the main Swahili-language daily newspaper Taifa Leo remarked that such training was necessary to ‘guard our country on their return against the sort of military aggression which there has been in the Congo’. ⁹⁵

Such rhetoric was part of mainstream African nationalist politics in the early 1960s, and for good reason. Kenyatta shared these concerns while British officials remained implacably opposed to his leadership of an independent Kenya. He therefore sanctioned Odinga to use his connections in Eastern and Central Europe to establish training programmes for military cadets. ⁹⁶ Approximately 400 students were sent abroad for this training. ⁹⁷ As Odinga later explained, he and Kenyatta had agreed to the policy ‘because, before Independence, Britain would not agree to grant facilities for the training of African officers’. ⁹⁸ Those in the academies understood well the reasons for their training. As one Kenyan airman training in Egypt put it, the British military officers who remained in post after independence retained ‘some colonial mentality, and they are those who believed that an African cannot become a pilot, and that is why they did not train Africans as pilots.’ ⁹⁹

Although clandestine until independence, little effort was made after independence to hide the fact that Kenyan students were receiving military training abroad. Not only was this reported in press, as we saw above, but also discussed in government. In January 1965, Oluande K’Oduol, a key ally of Odinga, wrote to all KANU MPs and the Ministry of Defence to remind them of the 88 named Kenyans, including Njenga, sent by Odinga to Bulgaria in late 1963 ‘so as to plan their absorption into the Kenya Army on return’. ¹⁰⁰

Such plans did not materialize. British policy in Kenya had a volte face and the last colonial governor, Malcolm MacDonald, embraced Kenyatta as the only feasible leader of the new nation. Faced with a mutiny shortly after independence and the irredentist threat by Somalis living along the north eastern border, Kenyatta embraced British military support. From being feared in 1960, continued British military involvement in Kenya’s politics was essential to the survival of Kenyatta’s government by 1964. ¹⁰¹ Over the same period, Kenyatta’s relationship with Odinga cooled as his minister for home affairs and then vice president became one of the government’s fiercest critics. Odinga’s foreign support became ever more significant to the substance of everyday politics. By 1965, Mboya wrote, ‘The biggest issue at the moment seems to be developing into the ideological and cold war differences …’ ¹⁰² The divisions between Mboya, Odinga and Kenyatta had the capacity to turn violent: Pio Gama Pinto, one of Odinga’s closest allies was assassinated in February 1965 and within weeks somewhat outlandish rumours of a coup led by Odinga were widely reported. Odinga left the government and ruling party in 1966. The position of the students sent abroad to receive military training thus shifted accordingly. Once a bulwark against neo-imperial intervention of the sort seen to such terrible effect in Congo, the students became considered by the government to be a threat to the relationship with Britain and hence disowned.

As members of this group began to return home from late 1964 onwards, their movements were reported as part of a broader effort to chronicle Odinga’s alleged subversive activities. Kenyan, British and US intelligence sources carefully monitored their arrivals and warned Kenyatta that Odinga intended to deploy these students in a coup against the government. ¹⁰³ From November 1965, the students receiving military training in Eastern and Central Europe received letters from the Kenyan government advising them to transfer on to regular degree courses in their host country or to make alternative plans to study elsewhere. ¹⁰⁴ Finally, the Kenyan government ordered the Bulgarian authorities to immediately cease any military training for Kenyan students in May 1966. ¹⁰⁵

The graduates with military training were unsurprisingly immediately barred from recruitment to the Kenyan armed forces or police. But the government’s effort to marginalize the graduates from Eastern and Central Europe went further to encompass all, regardless of whether or not they had received military training. As one British diplomat noted after conversations with Davidson Ngini, the deputy director of personnel for the Kenyan civil service, ‘the government’s prejudice against these students has created a general climate of disapprobation for Bloc qualifications among officials and employers who are chary of getting their fingers burnt.’ ¹⁰⁶ Engineers, medics, chemists and other graduates fell victim to the fear of the political consequences that their recruitment to influential roles in the public eye would provoke from the government.

For the graduates, this exclusion from public life was a cause of significant grievance and their complaints to various government ministries were commonplace. ¹⁰⁷ While Odinga’s faction remained part of the KANU government, they had some champions in power. In June 1965, cabinet ministers

expressed concern over the way returning students from Socialist countries are received by employers including Government and felt that their employment facilities should be similar to those of students returning from other parts of the world, provided the returning students have comparable standards of Education. ¹⁰⁸

But Odinga and his supporters were out of KANU and government in 1966. He instead established the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). But the new party’s supporters faced repression, its leaders harassed and detained, and the party was eventually banned in 1969. In Moscow, about 50 Kenyan students marked the KPU’s demise with a protest at the Kenyan embassy. The building was damaged and the ambassador attacked. ¹⁰⁹ It was the last act of Kenya’s radical students abroad. From 1966 onwards, the award of scholarships lay solely in the hands of the government and Odinga was unable to exert any influence on the process. By the end of 1969, Kenya’s Cold War was in effect over. Kenyatta’s pro-British faction was victorious in its battles with its rivals; Odinga was defeated and Mboya dead. Students continued to travel overseas after 1969 in significant numbers, but to no great political effect.

Many of the graduates who had already returned to Kenya would have sympathized with the anger of the protestors outside the embassy in Moscow. The students’ experience of exclusion on their return combined with their intellectual development while studying overseas to create a new strand of leftist dissidence and opposition within Kenyan politics. The 200 or so students with military training who had returned by mid-1966 were swiftly recruited into the ranks of Odinga’s supporters. ¹¹⁰ All seven of the Kenyan lecturers recruited by the Lumumba Institute and intended by Odinga to train KANU activists had attended the Moscow Institute of Social Science. ¹¹¹ One of the periodic waves of arrests of KPU activists netted Israel Otieno in early 1969. Otieno was a close aide to Odinga and had studied in North Korea. The next day, five further close supporters of Odinga were arrested at Kakamega for carrying banned literature, which in this case included writings by Mao. All had been students in China. ¹¹² This tradition of dissidence survived the demise of the KPU. Kipkurui arap Langat, one of the plotters in another ill-fated conspiracy uncovered in 1971, had studied in both Czechoslovakia and Moscow, and was recruited into the conspiracy due to his close ties to the Soviet embassy in Nairobi. ¹¹³ It was not until the democratization of the 1990s that the individuals educated in Eastern and Central Europe could play major roles in public life, most notably Odinga’s son, Raila. In their absence, the graduates from the USA worked with those from the UK, Kenya and Makerere to create the modern Kenyan state.

Student mobility was a key part of Kenya’s experience of decolonization and the Cold War. It was through such mechanisms, together with broadcasting and print media, that the global politics of the day permeated into the everyday politics and informed state-formation in at least this one part of the decolonizing world. The students brought the politics of the Cold War back to the towns and villages of Kenya. No less importantly, their mobility helped shape the institutions of the new nation-state.

Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson have demonstrated how globalization in the Cold War world disrupted relationships between colonial rulers and subjects in profound ways. ¹¹⁴ Enterprising intermediaries such as Mboya and Odinga were able to take advantage of the competing forms of international politics to create unprecedented opportunities for mobility by Kenyan students in order to further the nationalist cause. Participation in the political traffic of the age took Kenyans beyond the limits of colonial control. Their mobility provided them with the agency to shape events in Kenya in ways that disrupted British authority in the final years of the colonial era. Their experiences overseas empowered them and showed British power to be anachronistic. Nor were they any more obedient to the newly ascendant forms of authority they encountered around the world. Their restlessness, dissent and scepticism of authority forged in the anti-colonial politics of the 1950s returned home with them.

Their mobility therefore presented significant challenges to both host countries and the post-colonial state at home. For one thing, their mobility demonstrated the limits of freedom in the Cold War world. Following Mboya and Odinga, Kenyan students thought that they would be the authors of their own history in the future. But in Sofia, Baku and Moscow – or similar cities in the USA for that matter – their experiences of racism and petty forms of authoritarianism demonstrated how little had changed with the onset of decolonization. Their mobility was even more challenging back home.

As Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran write, ‘mobility makes states’. They continue to argue ‘that states have been strongly shaped by their efforts to “channel” human mobility: preventing some forms of movement while simultaneously promoting others.’ ¹¹⁵ A bigger argument could be made for the validity of this point for post-colonial Kenya that also included forced displacement in north eastern Kenya as a counterinsurgency strategy in the 1960s, the resettlement of thousands of African farmers on land sold by European settlers, the migration of a large proportion of the country’s South Asian population, and the relentless flow of citizens to the towns and cities. The post-colonial state in Kenya was forged through the mobility of its citizens. But no form of mobility was as politically charged as that of the 1500 or so students who travelled to Eastern and Central Europe at this time. They expected to be the nation-builders, the economic planners and technocrats at the heart of the process of state-formation. But they found themselves excluded from the vital early stages of this process, marginalized in favour of their contemporaries who studied in Kenya itself, neighbouring Uganda, the UK and, particularly, the USA. It was this group that built a state on the interlocked foundations of private land tenure, foreign investment, a pro-Western foreign policy, and limited state intervention in society and the economy. It was exactly these foundations that seemed to Kenya’s rulers to be at risk once the students from Eastern and Central Europe returned home. Their subsequent marginalization occurred because the leaders of the new state recognized the potential of their mobility to ‘unmake’ as well as make a state. ¹¹⁶