Remembering Tom Mboya, Kenya's finest trade union leader

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Without a doubt, Mboya was a fine trade union leader

Tom Joseph Mboya was a man on a mission - he used charisma and his charming smile to take weights and burdens off the shoulders of workers oppressed by a colonial administration.

Mboya was always at ease chatting with overworked peasants and labourers just as he effortlessly waltzed through ballrooms.

This is evident in this picture taken in July 1962. Mboya was on a tour of Coast when he took some time to listen to dockworkers at Kipevu berths in Mombasa. At the time, he was the Minister for Labour. 

Three years before this picture was taken, Mboya had been feted by the iconic Martin Luther King Junior for his role in fighting for the rights of the oppressed. King celebrated Mboya during the Africa Freedom Dinner at Atlanta University on May 13, 1959.

King saw the linkages between the American civil rights movement and the African liberation movement when he said. “Our struggle is not an isolated struggle. We are all caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality”.

Labour minister Tom Mboya (R) addressing dock workers during his visit to Kipevu berths in Mombasa in July 1962 [Courtesy]

Three months later, on July 8, 1959, Mboya wrote to King requesting assistance for a Kenyan student who was to enter Tuskegee Institute in the fall. This marked the beginning of an airlift that would enable 81 Kenyans to get university education in the West.

At a relatively young age, Mboya had distinguished himself as a trade unionist and had founded the Kenya Local Government Workers’ Union. Rather than give up to the government’s harassment of trade unionists, Mboya took up the leadership of the Kenya Federation of Labour in 1953. He was instrumental in resolving the dockworkers’ strike of 1955.

At a time when national political parties were banned, Mboya used his wit to start an outfit, which propelled him to the Legislative College previously dominated by Whites.

At one time, he went to prison in Lodwar where he met Jomo Kenyatta who had been denied any access to the press. He recorded Kenyatta as he gave a short speech which he would later play in Egypt on March 26, 1961, during the All Africa People’s Conference much to the embarrassment of the colonial government. This is the man, whose life was cut short in July 1969 by a bullet when he was only 39. Kenyan workers owe Mboya a lot for he sacrificed his time and life for them to work in peace.