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But those who have seen Kenyatta recently say that in his 60s he is an alcoholic wreck. There are younger challengers to Mboya too, and his Luo origin remains a handicap among the Kikuyu, who resent the fact that the Luos stayed out of the Mau Mau troubles and inherited good jobs in Nairobi.
Westerns & Thrillers. In the hope that he will get practice in governing, Colonial Secretary Macleod is trying to persuade Mboya to take one of the three major Cabinet posts that will be handed over to Africans after next year's elections. But Mboya will probably prefer to snipe from outside, from the security of the second-floor offices in Nairobi, which are the headquarters of his People's Convention Party and of the Kenya Federation of Labor.
Bachelor Mboya lives with a younger brother, 15, in a rented yellow-stucco duplex, and is one of the few Africans in Kenya who has a houseboy and a telephone. He gets up between 5 and 6 and dictates his correspondence and orders for the day into the fancy new Dictaphone he keeps at home. By the time he arrives at the office, smartly dressed, each morning around 9, the dingy hall outside is filling with long lines of visitors, 200 or 300 a day, who want his attention on union matters, advice on jobs or marriages, or seek scholarships to American colleges under the Jackie Robinson-Harry Belafonte fund that he runs (to date it has sent 81 students to the U.S.). He tries to see all comers, and his office is usually swarming with people talking at the same time. He sits at his green metal desk, sleepy-eyed but taking it all in. Sometimes, to get away, he goes off to an afternoon movie (favorites: westerns and thrillers).
At night, after dinner, he often goes to work alone in a hideaway upstairs office, where he can hear the sounds of the best dance band in Africa, arising from the first-floor exclusive Equator Club, which is open to white hunters, rich settler types, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Ruark, and Hollywood visitors—but not to Africans. Except on trips, Mboya has little time these days for the nightclubs and dancing he loves (he once shook the maracas in a dance band), or for the many girl friends, not all of them African, whom Tom has always attracted. His current flame is Pamela Odede, 21, slender, poised, and graceful daughter of Tom's former K.A.U. chief, Walter Odede (who after seven years is still being held without trial). They were secretly engaged long before she left last September for Western College in Oxford, Ohio, where she is a junior on a scholarship arranged by Tom.
Sensational in Swahili. By most who know him, Tom Mboya is respected but not loved, for the hard climb up the ladder has tempered his shy, modest personality with a clinically detached coldness and an occasional ruthlessness that angers enemies and saddens friends. He is courteous and correct, but a hard man to know. He lacks the warm, friendly charm of the African he admires most,
Tanganyika's Nationalist Julius Nyerere (see box). But on Legco's debating floor, few can match his organization of a case or his smooth command of English. And he is second only to Kenyatta as a Swahili orator, whipping African crowds into a frenzy of chants and shouts by the skillful rhythm of his speeches.