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The Self-Assured. Many perils lie ahead as African colonialism gives way to the ferocity of raw new nationalism across a continent so large that the U.S., India, Pakistan and China together could fit within its boundaries. How it all turns out will depend largely on the new crop of young leaders rising to prominence in the peaceful revolution's wake. They are a mixed lot: clerks, teachers, village firebrands, and bush politicians with considerable native talent but little background or experience for the task of nation-building. Yet they walk onto the world stage with uncommon self-assurance. A Patrice Lumumba, onetime postal clerk and jailbird in the Congo, debates Congolese independence on even terms with the skilled ministers of Belgium in Brussels' Palais des Congrès. Julius Nyerere of Tanganyika enraptures sophisticated U.S. audiences on a coast-to-coast lecture tour. Kenya's Tom Mboya, 29, who used to be courted only by English left-wingers, now holds forth suavely as honor guest in the private dining rooms of London's largest banks and casually keeps a colonial governor waiting while he takes a shower.
Twenty years ago, handsome Tom Mboya was just another barefoot child in the untamed highlands of East Africa, where his people had only recently discovered the uses of the wheel. He was born to illiterate parents on the dried cow-dung floor of a grass-roofed hut on the sisal (hemp) estate of Sir William Northrup McMillan, who, a local yarn has it, won his 34,000 acres of Kenya highlands with a throw of the dice in Nairobi's Norfolk Hotel bar.
Tom Mboya has come a long way from his origins, but he remembers them and their rigid social order: at the bottom were the African workers, earning $3 a month in the sisal fields; then came the Indian shopkeeper, who sold them kerchiefs, trinkets and tobacco; on top were the few whites around.
"Do not set yourself against the white man," warned Tom Mboya's father, a sober, hard-working Jaluo tribesman who was the African headman at the farm's sisal-processing plant. "He is too powerful, and you cannot change him." But Tom Mboya recalls how riled he was at the sight of the stern estate manager, whom the Africans in fear called Bwana Kiboko—the boss who carries the hippo-skin whip.
Scrawling in the Sand. Making the princely local sum of $7 a month as headman, his father could afford the luxury of school for Tom at Kabaa mission, 25 miles away, where Roman Catholic priests were Irish and the fees were $14 a year. There, at nine, Tom scrawled his lessons in the sand under a shade tree, for classrooms were crowded and blackboards nonexistent. At his next school, St. Mary's, near Lake Victoria, the lessons for the first time were in English. He was no prodigious scholar, and no leader, but he liked singing, acting, and especially debating. His teachers noted another characteristic, a deep aversion to violence. No one recalls a single fist fight or angry argument; when the kids ribbed him about his soprano voice and his chubby figure, he laughed it away.