(3 of 10)
He barely passed in history, but he did absorb a few ideas: the American revolutionary slogan, "No Taxation Without Representation," echoed in his mind, and he wrote an enthusiastic paper on Napoleon—"Here was a man who defied the whole world." Later, at the Holy Ghost College (high school) at Mangu, he learned about Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington. But the missionaries discouraged his political questions and, irritated, he abandoned his plans to enter a seminary, forming a bitterness toward the church that he retains to this day, though he still considers himself Catholic ("My disagreements are not with the faith, but the church has been very weak in its position on the colonial question; it has tended to defend the status quo").
The Voice of Kenyatta. Tom's high school days ended when his father could no longer afford to help with the fees. But this shock was to give him his political start. He took a free, three-year public-health course in Nairobi to qualify as a sanitation inspector with the city government, and began slipping off to hear the fiery political speeches of Jomo ("Burning Spear") Kenyatta, the famed Kikuyu leader. As a city official, Tom Mboya noted bitterly, his job paid $30 a month for work that brought white inspectors $140, and the whites drove official cars and wore street suits, while Tom was expected to go about his duties on a bicycle and dressed in uniform.
Nor was he pleased when one day a white woman walked into the health-office laboratory to have a bottle of milk examined. "Is nobody here?" she asked of Tom, who was alone in the lab. "Madam, something is wrong with your eyes," replied Mboya. Stomping out, the woman huffed: "I must have my work done by Europeans. This boy is very rude."
From then on, say his former official superiors, Mboya had little time for his job. Instead of going out on inspections, he held court in his office, taking up and then taking over the Africans' municipal union. Jomo Kenyatta's scowling photo hung in the most conspicuous place on Tom Mboya's office wall.
Hard Work & Play. Dark storm clouds were gathering over Kenya's lovely land of smoke-blue mountains, deep forests and lush green pastures. For the white landowners, some of them from England's titled families, carving farms out of virgin bush had been hard but rewarding work, producing some modest fortunes. They lived well, and when the sun went down, they played hard. Upcountry, there was cricket, polo, and pink gins on the terrace for the retired military and naval officers, whose modest pensions stretched farther in Kenya than they did in the changing social order back home in England. In the free and easy atmosphere, few of the 30,000 whites (in a land of 6,000,000 Africans) made much note of the brooding hatred of the million-strong Kikuyu people, Kenya's largest tribe, who fiercely resented the white intrusion.