With the flames of Pan-Africanism sweeping the globe and the embryonic seeds of the civil rights movement beginning to take root at home, U.S. leaders were keeping a close eye on the creep of independence across Africa. As tensions between the United States and Soviet Union rose steadily, the British colonies emerging from domination were seen as being up for grabs politically. Determined that those new nations not fall under Communist rule, the government was poised to intervene in any way that might bolster its posture in the simmering Cold War. In his increasingly fiery oratory before labor leaders and rapt college students, Mboya repeatedly drove home the link between education and political self-determination for the African nations. “A main theme in Mboya's speeches was the lambasting of the European powers' attempts at continuing their domination in Africa through denying Africans access to higher education, which, he contended, prevented the training of the sort of educated leaders who could take new African nations through independence and to stability,” Tom Shachtman wrote in
Airlift to America
.
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Mboya had a vision that he had been nursing for years. What he wanted to do was create an educational airlift of Africa's best and brightest students, an airplane that would transport these students to the doors of American colleges and universities. All he needed was the help of his American friends. Riding the swell of his popularity, Mboya reconnected in New York with businessman William X. Scheinman, president of Arnav Aircraft Associates, and George Houser, the executive director ACOA, whom he had met on his first trip. Scheinman and Mboya had exchanged countless letters about specific students in particular and a possible scholarship program in general over the years. Now they were ready to take action, and the specific shape of an airlift began to emerge.
Together, they formed the African American Students Foundation (AASF) and assembled an impressive board of prominent African Americans, including Theodore W. Kheel, a nationally known labor lawyer and president of the National Urban League, and Jackie Robinson, the former baseball star. By the end of Mboya's five-week visit, the group had received pledges of more than fifty scholarships and had collected
$35,000, according to the AASF.
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Though Scheinman became consumed with business interests in later years, he remained fascinated with Africa for the rest of his life. After his death in 1999, he was buried on Rusinga Island next to Tom Mboya's grave.
Mboya headed back to Kenya to start making arrangements for an aircraft. So began the first phase of one of the greatest achievements of his career. The airlift, which would turn out to be a series of flights, not only greatly enhanced Mboya's stature back home but it also produced a generation that would help shape the independent nation of Kenya. They were not large in number. At the time of independence, there were fewer than five hundred Kenyans with university degrees from overseas, one of the most poignant legacies of the colonial era.
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But the scope of their achievement made up for their diminutive ranks. Over the next quarter of a century the graduates would make up half of Kenya's parliaments and cabinet ministries and would dominate the highest ranks of business. Today, they continue to comprise a select, albeit graying group with a unique collective memory of their country's historic formation.
Ever since the name Barack Obama first filtered into the American political lexicon in 2004, it has been said that his father was one of the students on the famous first airlift. President Obama declared it while campaigning in 2007, and it has been repeated many times since he became president. But Obama Sr. was not a member of the student airlift. Obama, in fact, was turned down for the much-coveted seat. And the man who rejected him was an enthusiastic young American named Robert F. Stephens.
From 1957 to 1959 Stephens was the cultural affairs officer at the U.S. Information Service (USIS) in Nairobi. An amiable Michigan native, Stephens counted among his many responsibilities the task of interviewing students to determine if they met the criteria for the airlift. Despite being a
mzungu
with a significant degree of power, Stephens was well liked by the African nationalists. Not only was he conversant in Swahili, he was an avid supporter of the drive for African education and did much to facilitate the students' success.
Stephens and others in the U.S. Consulate in Nairobi had long objected to the U.S. requirement that a Kenyan student have two years of additional schooling after high school in order to be eligible for a U.S. scholarship.
He reasoned that Americans needed only a high school degree to get into college, so why should the bar be higher for Africans? He was the one who helped convince Washington officials to drop the requirement so that Kenyans needed only a Cambridge School Certificate, the equivalent of a high school diploma, in order to apply.
A thirty-four-year-old father of three at the time he interviewed Obama, Stephens became an unofficial mentor for many Kenyan students eager for a chance to travel to America. Young men and women stood for hours outside his second-floor office on Government Road waiting to hear his advice. While interviewing them to determine their eligibility, Stephens often had to raise his voice to be heard above the buses and bodies churning outside his open window.
Stephens maintained a library of more than six hundred American college catalogues. StudentsâObama among themâwere constantly dropping in to thumb through their well-worn pages, never mind that they had never heard of either the schools or the cities in which they were located. Stephens also held some informal orientation sessions on American ways for prospective students. A chief subject was gender relations and sexual mores, which differed vastly from African habits. In the category of hygiene, clean socks were high on the agenda. “I told them they must always remember to change their socks and to wash them out,” recalled Stephens, now retired in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
When Mboya arrived back in Nairobi, the exhausting process of selecting the eighty-one students who would fill the first charter plane began. Mboya, Kiano, Njiiri, and Stephens formed the selection committee. Often the four men would pour over the student lists long into the night in the living room of the Stephens's Muthaiga home, trying to make the difficult choice of who would get to go. The chance of boarding the Britannia aircraft that had been chartered for the trip had become a dream that infected young people from the shores of Lake Victoria to the rough-hewn docks of Mombasa. “Going to America was
the
thing to do,” said Philip Ochieng, one of Kenya's most prominent journalists and a drinking pal of Obama's in later years. “If you didn't have an education, you'd never rise higher than a senior clerk.”
Obama was determined to be one of the chosen ones. He talked about it constantly, sometimes comparing notes with other applicants. Thinking
his friendship with Mboya was his ace in the hole, Obama headed into his interview with Stephens bristling with certainty.
Stephens recalls his meeting with Barack Obama well, not because he was so impressed with him but because he was not. Dapper in suit and tie, Obama appeared in Stephens's office one morning with his paperwork in hand. Stephens was put off by the younger man's manner from the start. Obama seemed cocksure, far more confident than his résumé merited. Concerned about Obama's abrupt separation from the Maseno School, Stephens asked him what had happened. “He really prevaricated about his school record,” recalled Stephens. “He reassured me that he had gotten all the proper certification that he needed, that there was no problem.”
But as Stephens examined Obama's file, he found that there was indeed a problem. Obama had somehow managed to get a Cambridge School Certificate, the British examination certificate required in order to pursue higher education, but he had earned only a third-division pass, the lowest score possible. Why he did so poorly is difficult to understand given Obama's obvious intellectual gifts. Perhaps he took his performance for granted and failed to apply himself as he had often done as a younger student. In any case, acceptance in an American institution of higher learning required a Cambridge certificate with a first-division pass. In some cases a seconddivision pass was acceptable, but almost never a third division.
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Stephens told Obama he was sorry, but he could not recommend him for consideration for the airlift. “He was a very good talker and he tried to talk me out of it, but there was nothing I could do,” explained Stephens. “He just did not have the grade. I explained that to him and he got up and left. When I heard later that he'd made it to America another way, I was pretty surprised.”
For Obama, the news was devastating. Despite his difficulties at Maseno, he had never for a moment thought he would get turned down for the airlift. Adding to his humiliation was the fact that many of his friends were already rejoicing over their acceptances. Ochieng, an Alliance School graduate who had met Obama in Mboya's office when they checked on the status of their applications, was headed to Roosevelt University in Chicago. Jackson Isigie, who had spent years saving the 7,000 shillings he needed for his first year abroad, had been accepted at Wisconsin State College in Steven's Point, Wisconsin. And Pamela Odede,
the daughter of a Nairobi politician and the woman who would eventually marry Tom Mboya, was going to Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio. The list was growing steadily. Obama complained bitterly to Kezia and a handful of others that he was being unfairly denied this golden opportunity. “Barack was crushed that he was not to be on the airlift,” recalled Olara A. Otunnu, president of the Uganda People's Congress party and formerly Uganda's Minister for Foreign Affairs as well as a close family friend of Obama's. “He wanted this very much and he was not used to being turned down. It was embarrassing to him.”
Some who had not made the cut refused to accept the news. They wanted to go so badly that they would hover hopefully at the airport right up until the plane took off. As Gordon Hagberg, director of the USIS office and later the director of the Nairobi office of the Institute of International Education, wrote of the students who were turned down for some of the later airlifts: “They were unsuccessful candidates who nevertheless persisted in standing around hoping for a last minute change of fortune. Their tearful vigils were sometimes punctuated by more dramatic pleas, such as that of one boy who got down on his knees and begged to be allowed to go.”
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Obama was not about to get down on his knees, but he tried everything else he could think of to reverse Stephens's decision. Even Obama's connection with Mboya, however, could not overcome his poor test score. Obama would have to find another way to get to the United States or likely be destined for a lackluster job in a back office for the rest of his life.
Once again, Mooney stepped in. She knew he was smart enough. Where many others had been put off by Obama's sometimes overbearing demeanor, Mooney resolutely kept her faith. But she also realized that he was going to need to change his attitude if he was going to overcome his lack of high school education. As a young man Obama's intelligence had allowed him to cut some academic corners, and because of this, he rarely had to immerse himself fully in his work. But with the prospect of an American degree before him, Obama agreed to buckle down and commit himself in earnest.
Mooney showed him what to do. She knew well from her own experience the difference a little encouragement and support could make. As a young woman, her two older brothers had paid for her to attend the
Maryland State Normal School for teaching in Towson, Maryland. Later, she lived with her brothers while all three attended George Washington University and supported one another. And so when she decided to help Obama in early 1959, she turned to her brother Mark, a mechanical engineer living in Pomona, California, and asked if he would send some books that Obama could use to prepare. “An African here is preparing to take an entrance exam for admission in an American college,” she typed on her blue airmail stationary. “He has been out of school for some years, so he needs to do some reviewing. He can get books here but they are not slanted to American schools.”
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Mooney asked for the gamut. She wanted books in “European History (any period), general science, biology and chemistry, English literature, English grammar or rhetoric.” She suggested that her brother get “outline” course books, the kind that students use to cram for exams. Paperbacks would be best, as they could be sent more quickly. Mooney also wondered if he could track down a book that she had taken to India for teaching purposes, “a condensed course in Math prepared for the Army” that was stored somewhere in her belongings. If it was not too heavy, perhaps he could send that along as well. If not, Obama could manage with the math books on hand.
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Time was of the essence. Surface mail, she added would take too long. “There is a special rate for books by air,” she wrote. “I am willing to spend as much as $25 for the books including the postage.”
As the proposed airlift to America was increasingly the talk of Nairobi, Mooney too felt the frustration of the countless numbers who were not even in the running. She concluded her letter to her brother: “Really the eagerness of Africans for education is heartbreaking. There are so few opportunities for them here. Out of 5,000 who qualified for high school there were places for 800. There is no way for the others to study. Many are going to the USA, but it is rather expensive to go for high school.”
The books arrived in February. Mooney wrote her sister-in-law a thank-you note and assured her that she would “give the books to the young man in a few days and I know he will be thrilled.”
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