The scheme, funded by celebrities including ‘the actor Sidney Poitier’, offered scholarships to 80 Kenyans in 1959. The newly released files reveal that both the British & American governments were uneasy about this. A letter from the British Embassy in Washington to the Colonial Office in London claims that Kenyan students had a bad reputation in America, tending to fall into the kind of company which turned them into people who were both anti-American & anti-White; they were also academically unimpressive, ‘drawn from the lower grades of school certificate holders’. And there were allegations that the involvement of Tom Mboya meant that only members of the Luo tribe would be selected.
But, our diplomats concluded, there was little they could do except ‘try to contact the students when they returned to Kenya.’ The Times report, by Jack Malvern & Billy Kember, from which I take these details, does not say what the diplomats hoped to achieve through this contact.
Last week’s coverage did however prompt a letter to the editor of The Times from George Healy, which added the further detail that, following a meeting between Tom Mboya & JFK in July 1960, the Kennedy Family Foundation agreed to provide the bulk of funding for the scholarships.
So there, through the contingency of history, President Kennedy gave us President Obama. And, in a kind of reverse of that process, President Kennedy also gave us the Peace Corps, one of whose aims could be said to be to counter, through personal example, the influence of the radicalised, anti-Americanism of the returning educated natives.
There must be interesting stories to be told, influences to be traced, in what happened to those 79 co-beneficiaries of Barack Obama Senior.
And to all the other Colonial Students who received their higher education in the West.
And how their subsequent careers compare with those who went as students to Russia or East Germany instead.
Not to mention the inheritance of their children, including those of mixed race.
Sidney Poitier later went on to play the teacher in To Sir With Love, the story of ER Braithwaite, who had been a Colonial Student at Oxford
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