How assassin’s bullet stopped popular Mboya

What you need to know:

  • On March 7, 1960, at 30 years, he was on the cover of Time magazine — the first Kenyan and African to grace the cover of the world’s most influential magazine. The headline was Kenya’s Tom Mboya.
  • On Monday, July 21, Isaac Nahashon Njenga Njoroge was charged before Nairobi resident magistrate SK Sachdeva (later a judge) with the murder.

It was dubbed the Black Saturday of Kenya. On that day, at around 1 pm, the 39-year-old Minister for Planning and National Development, Thomas Joseph Mboya, walked into Chhanis Phamarcy on Government Road, now Moi Avenue.

He had just chatted with Barack Obama Sr, the father of the US President Barack Obama, at the intersection of Mama Ngina Street and Moi Avenue. The pharmacy was then located in Union Towers, where the present Galitos eatery is.

Obama Sr was later to testify in court that Mboya was in a “very jovial mood on earth” that day.

As Mboya walked out of the pharmacy, three men were waiting at the entrance. The front man, who turned out to be Isaac Nahashon Njenga Njoroge, the assassin, pumped two bullets into his chest. Mboya collapsed and was taken to Nairobi Hospital five kilometres away, where he was pronounced dead.

Kenya, Africa, and the world were stunned. They mourned and eulogised a man who lived ahead of his age. Mboya had become Secretary-General of the Kenya Federation of Workers Union at the age of 23.

On March 7, 1960, at 30 years, he was on the cover of Time magazine — the first Kenyan and African to grace the cover of the world’s most influential magazine. The headline was Kenya’s Tom Mboya.

Hell broke loose in Nairobi streets after the shooting. Wailing and riots. Police started looking for the three assailants, who had disappeared.

Meanwhile, local and international newspaper columnists euologised Mboya as “the hawk-eyed youth who became dutiful servant of his people” and “a visionary with a mission.”

“His brilliance might have outshone, even humiliated, some of his domestic or foreign opponents, who at one time or another, might have been outclassed in the tricky game of political leadership,” the Daily Nation wrote in an editorial.

On Monday, July 21, Isaac Nahashon Njenga Njoroge was charged before Nairobi resident magistrate SK Sachdeva (later a judge) with the murder. The two other men were never found. Njenga was convicted and sentenced to death, but not before he told the court to go and “ask the big man” why he had killed Mboya.

After Mboya’s burial on July 11, 1969, Kenyatta chaired a Cabinet meeting in his Gatundu home on Sunday July 13, 1969, in which decisions were made to crack the whip.

The gap between Kenyatta and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga widened further. Rival political parties were banned.

And Mboya, the man Kenyans wanted to forget, has become an idol capped by his giant statue erected in 2011 on Moi Avenue, near the spot where the assassin’s bullet felled him.