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As K.A.U. treasurer Tom helped raise funds for Jomo's defense, and still insists that Kenyatta was not guilty of engineering the Mau Mau terror, which before it ended took the lives of 84 whites, of more than 1,500 Kikuyu who fell under the Mau Mau pangas for failing to support the movement, and of 10,500 terrorists, killed by police and soldiers. Mboya himself had a close call when police raiders stormed into his office during a roundup and opened fire, wounding a colleague sitting next to him. The government's ruthless countermeasures (including the arrest of 35,000 people in one day) disturbed Tom as much as did the revolt itself.
Moving Up. With so many Africans being arrested, Mboya rose to increasing prominence. "All of a sudden I was just in it," he recalls. "People looked to persons like myself, for after all, we had no elected members in the government to speak up for the Africans." Tom's Luo tribal origins saved him from landing in jail—the police were scouring Nairobi for the Kikuyu, and their Embu and Meru allies. Technically still on the city payroll, he spent most of his time expanding his local union to a Kenya-wide municipal workers' organization and had a sharp eye on the big Kenya Federation of Labor, with which he affiliated his expanding group. When K.A.U. was finally banned in mid-1953, the federation became the ideal nationwide group for organizing African political ambitions. He elbowed his way to the top job, general secretary. He was 23.
Lesson in India. Tempers have cooled somewhat but many Kenya whites still agree with a crusty pioneer, Colonel Ewart Scott ("Grogs") Grogan, 85, who thinks the government should have strung Mau Mau bandits from every lamppost in Nairobi. Some, like Kenya's able, liberal ex-Minister of Finance Ernest A.
Vasey, believe that Mau Mauism is an ugly symptom of deeper illness. Industrious the white settlers may be, and hopelessly primitive the majority of Africans, but how long can the Africans be kept out of power in a land where they outnumber the Europeans 92 to one?
Under the new constitution for Kenya that British Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton introduced in 1954, one lone African was appointed to the Cabinet—but left out of important decisions and conferences. Young Tom Mboya rejected the new constitution, as did most Africans. Besides, he found himself being lionized by foreign labor leaders, who offered him encouragement, advice and, best of all, money. In 1954, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions paid Mboya's expenses to a labor seminar in Calcutta. There, he was shocked by a poverty even worse than Kenya's but much impressed by India's development projects. "What I saw made me completely aware that independence must be looked upon as a means to an end but not an end itself."