There was a time when the Luo politician arrived on the national scene ready to prove an intellectual point. Two of them were murdered for it. The rest hankered.
In Tom Mboya and Robert Ouko, the Luo community had perhaps the most naturally gifted — as ‘the brightest of the bright’ Luo kids are identified in primary and secondary school.
The problem is that Mboya and Ouko were gifted in a world that didn’t need their gifts.
The clarity of their thoughts. The vastness of their ideas. Their sophistry. Their sincere honesty.
Michael Blundell in a Love Affair With the Sun — Memoirs of 70 Years in Kenya, points to these facts.
Mboya confided in Blundell in the last days of his life that he was opting out of Kenya, for whatever the world held for him in the United Nations. At his age, Blundell reminded him, he was too ambitious for a society that never prepared adequately for the sheer force of his mind on government policy.
For Ouko, his undoing was — ironically — the most mundane. Those he served with, many who had half his wit and quarter his intelligence, felt he was “too unambitious” for a man of his mental acuity.
According to Blundell, John Robert Ouko did not have the unbridled ambition of Tom Mboya. Everyone saw him as a potential future president. Everyone, but himself. And this is why he so discomforted the power hungry hounds around Daniel Arap Moi. He was an outlier. A square peg in a round hole.
So while Tom Mboya was murdered for being too ambitious, Robert Ouko was acidified for having no ambition.
This country…
