Harambee By Jamie Kirkpatrick

In the summer of 1968, I was two months shy of my 20th birthday and on my way to Nairobi, Kenya. That, in itself, is a story. I was supposed to be on my way to Haiti to be a volunteer at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital there, but Papa Doc’s repressive regime was under attack and it was deemed unsafe to travel to Haiti. A few months earlier, I had applied for—and received—a summer study grant from my university, so at the last minute, I scrambled for another opportunity, and with a little paternal help, I secured an internship shadowing Kenya’s Minister of the Interior. It was an election year in Kenya, and I wanted to observe how a single-party nation practiced democracy.

If you were around at the time, you may recall that 1968 was an “annus horribilis.” Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. So had Bobby Kennedy. There was civil unrest in the streets of every major city in America, and protests against the Vietnam War were common front-page news. President Lyndon Johnson had declared he would not seek reelection, a decision that would result in violent clashes between anti-war demonstrators and the Chicago police during the Democratic National Convention in August.

Far away in Kenya, I missed most of the action that hot summer. However, I did have a front-row seat in the theater of Kenyan politics. On several occasions, I accompanied Lawrence Sagini, Kenya’s Minister of the Interior, on visits to small rural villages where he was greeted with dances, songs, and the joyful ululations of women in traditional dress. At every stop, Minister Sagini would deliver a stump speech in Swahili, and two words always rung out loud and clear: “Uhuru” (meaning Freedom or Independence) and “Harambee” (meaning We All Pull Together). Kenya was a relatively new democracy in 1968 —it had only gained its independence five years earlier—so the concept of pulling together toward a common goal was a powerful and galvanizing concept. It permeated every village we visited, even the most visibly disenfranchised ones. If it’s true that (as Tip O’Neal once said) that “all politics is local,” then what I witnessed in those ochre-colored villages was vintage single-party politics at its best.

But sometimes what one sees on the cover of a book isn’t the whole story. Kenya may have been one of the rising stars in the nascent pantheon of African democracy, but beneath all the hope and promise of new statehood, there were serious tensions. There was a residue of anti-colonialist sentiment, a widening gap between the “haves” and the ‘have-nots,” and perhaps most dangerous of all, tribal divisions that ran counter to the promise of Harambee. Kenya’s ruling elite were almost all Kikuyu, the largest and most prominent ethnic group in the country. The Kikuyu had played a significant role in the Mau-Mau rebellion, a central event in Kenya’s struggle for independence, and, as a result, they had come to dominate Kenyan politics.

Tom Mboya was a significant exception to this rule. He was of the Luo people, a small but dynamic ethic group in Kenya’s cultural quilt. He was an extraordinarily charismatic man who had worked with President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr to create educational opportunities for African students to study in America. (In recognition of his efforts, he was the first Kenyan to appear on the cover of Time Magazine.) In the summer of 1968, Tom Mboya was Kenya’s Minister for Planning and Development, one of the most critical portfolios in a developing country’s government. I remember shaking hands with him at a rally, and I’m not kidding when I tell you that I could literally feel the warmth and power within the man. But, sadly, nothing gold can stay. Less than a year later, Tom Mboya was shot to death in the streets of Nairobi; his murder was either a political assassination or the bloody result of the long-standing rivalry between the Kikuyu and Luo peoples. Like Dr. King and Senator Kennedy, Tom Mboya was another bright candle suddenly and tragically extinguished.

Two days ago, a state senator and her husband were killed in their home in Minnesota; another couple were seriously wounded by the same attacker. Remember that Swahili word  “harambee?” Maybe now, we need to stop tearing each other apart and start pulling together. What do you think?

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His most recent novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon and in local bookstores.