Airlift to America
Airlift to America

Author: Tom Shachtman

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2009-09-15

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1429960906

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This is the long-hidden saga of how a handful of Americans and East Africans fought the British colonial government, the U.S. State Department, and segregation to transport to, or support at, U.S. and Canadian universities, between 1959 and 1963, nearly 800 young East African men and women who would go on to change their world and ours. The students supported included Barack Obama Sr., future father of a U.S. president, Wangari Maathai, future Nobel Peace Prize laureate, as well as the nation-builders of post-colonial East Africa -- cabinet ministers, ambassadors, university chancellors, clinic and school founders. The airlift was conceived by the unusual partnership of the charismatic, later-assassinated Kenyan Tom Mboya and William X. Scheinman, a young American entrepreneur, with supporting roles played by Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The airlift even had an impact on the 1960 presidential race, as Vice-President Richard Nixon tried to muscle the State Department into funding the project to prevent Senator Jack Kennedy from using his family foundation to do so and reaping the political benefit. The book is based on the files of the airlift's sponsor, the African American Students Foundation, untouched for almost fifty years.

Decolonization & Independence in Kenya, 1940-93
Decolonization & Independence in Kenya, 1940-93

Author: Bethwell A. Ogot

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780821410516

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This is a sharply observed assessment of the history of the last half century by a distinguished group of historians of Kenya. At the same time the book is a courageous reflection in the dilemmas of African nationhood. Professor B. A. Ogot says: "The main purpose of the book is to show that decolonization does not only mean the transfer of alien power to sovereign nationhood; it must also entail the liberation of the worlds of spirit and culture, as well as economics and politics. "The book also raises a more fundamental question, that is: How much independence is available to any state, national economy or culture in today's world? It asks how far are Africa's miseries linked to the colonial past and to the process of decolonization? "In particular the book raises the basic question of how far Kenya is avoidably neo-colonial? And what does neo-colonial dependence mean? The book answers these questions by discussing the dynamic between the politics of decolonization, the social history of class formation and the economics of dependence. The book ends with a provocative epilogue discussing the transformation of the post-colonial state from a single-party to a multi-party system."

Kenya
Kenya

Author: Maurice Odhiambo Makoloo

Publisher: Minority Rights Group

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13:

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Minorities and indigenous peoples in Kenya feel excluded from the economic and political life of the state. They are poorer than the rest of Kenya's population, their rights are not respected and they are rarely included in development of other participatory planning processes. This report discusses the abuse of ethnicity in Kenyan policies, arguing that ethnicity is a card all too often used by Kenyan politicians to favour certain communities over others in the share of the nation's wealth. Kenya: Minorities, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Diversity exposes these concerns in detail via the analysis of budgetary expenditure in the poor Turkana region, which is dominated by the minority Turkana people, and in the richer Nyeri region, home of Kenya's current President. The author, Maurice Odhiambo Makoloo, calls for immediate action to address the inequalities and marginalization of communities, as a way of ensuring that Kenya remains free of major conflict. It calls for disaggregated data - by ethnicity and gender - and a new Constitution to devolve power away from the centre, so that minority and indigenous peoples stand to benefit from current and new development programmes.The report argues that Kenya's diversity should be its strength and need not be a threat to national unity. Suppressing and denying ethnic diversity is the quickest route to inter-ethnic conflict and claims of succession. The report calls for urgent action.

Ten African Heroes
Ten African Heroes

Author: Thomas Patrick Melady

Publisher: Orbis Books

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1608330168

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This title tells the story of the African leaders who ignited independence in black Africa during the 1960s through the eyes of two Americans who knew them well.

The Last Utopia
The Last Utopia

Author: Samuel Moyn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-05

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0674256522

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Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

A Leap Into the Future
A Leap Into the Future

Author: Peter Anyang' Nyong'o

Publisher: African Books Collective

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9966706267

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A Leap into the Future is a collection of speeches, essays and articles compiled during Prof. Anyang' Nyong'o's tenure in the Kenya government and soon afterwards (2002-2006). In this provocative collection, Prof. Nyong'o examines the challenges of development, analyses how pan-African and global partnerships could facilitate development, and invokes the visionary direction pointed out by prominent personalities in Kenya's political leadership to whom he pays tribute. Through the collection, the author projects his vision for socio-political and economic transformation of the Kenyan society in a bid to formulate an economic strategy capable of leap-frogging the country from the current quagmire of underdevelopment to development. Professor Anyang' Nyong'o is a renowned reformist and political scientist in Africa and is best known for his role in Kenya's "second liberation." He holds a doctorate degree in Political Science from the University of Chicago and has taught in universities in Kenya, Mexico and Ethiopia. Upon the re-introduction of multiparty politics in Kenya in 1991, he was involved in the founding of Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD), which provided the premier opposition machinery in the run-up to the 1992 general elections. He was also involved in the formation of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), which defeated KANU, the party that had ruled Kenya for 24 years. In the subsequent NARC government, he became the Minister of Planning and National Development. Besides teaching, he is widely published in Africa and abroad. Prof. Nyong'o has also been at the frontline in championing the reform agenda in Africa, especially through the establishment of NEPAD. At the time of publication of this book, he was Secretary General of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM).