The Kenya Kwanza government has accused the Ford Foundation of funding the ongoing anti-government protests. It is not the first time a foreign government is levelling such accusations against the American charity organisation whose main goal is to advance human welfare. In 2015, India placed it on security watch list for allegedly sponsoring activists who were agitating for the trial of prime minister Narendra Modi over human rights abuses.
Even though the grant-making philanthropy has been engaged in the fight against inequalities for decades, some scholars contend that during the Cold War, it knowingly or unknowingly served as a CIA front organisation to thwart the Soviet Union’s cultural influence and to prevent young promising leaders from being sucked into communism.
According to Frances Saunders, the CIA used such foundations to “fund a seemingly limitless range of covert action programmes affecting youth groups, labour unions, universities, publishing houses and other private institutions”.
Although the foundation opened its Nairobi office in 1963, it had been involved in the country much earlier than that when it would send young research specialists to conduct systematic anthropological, sociological, economic, political and historical studies of Africans as members of a developing world order during the colonial period. One of them was Robert West, a 29-year-old American researcher and professor from Yale University who was sent to Kenya by Ford to conduct research into native cooperatives between 1954 to 1955.
It was at the height of Mau Mau rebellion and many young leaders had emerged on the political scene to replace the old guards who had been arrested. As soon as West arrived in Kenya the first leader he befriended was Tom Mboya a young fiery trade unionist who was at the helm of the trade union movement in Kenya, the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL). With the proscription of all political parties in October 1952, the KFL emerged as the only channel Africans could use to highlight their plight and to express their political views.
This meant that it was highly targeted by Cold War protagonists, especially the Soviet Union which saw trade unions as a potential force for social transformation in entrenching communism. The West was equally determined to prevent this from happening and consequently heavily funded activities of young trade unionists such as Mboya to guard them from being lured into communism. It is therefore not surprising that West became much closer to Mboya not only to get his views but also to influence him into a moderate leader.
In 1959, after West moved to Congo to conduct further statistical survey for Ford on the causes of the economic crisis in the country, Mboya who was on his way to Kenya from West Africa paid him a short visit in Leopoldville now Kinshasa. By then Mboya was having some issues with Nkrumah over the questions of a Pan-African trade union movement. While Nkrumah wanted all African trade unions to cut links with the western based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and be affiliated to the Accra based All African Trade Union Federation (AATUF), Mboya was of the opinion that African trade unions should be free to choose whether to be affiliated to the AATUF or the Brussels based ICFTU.
In his book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, former CIA agent Philip Agee claimed that the ICFTU was a LaAbor centre set up and controlled by the CIA to oppose the Soviet backed World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU)”, which was secretly backing the Nkrumah proposed AATUF. Therefore, when Mboya made a brief stop in Leopoldville western diplomats who were keen to understand his position tasked West with extracting information from him. West would later leak his conversation with Mboya to the British Consulate General in Leopoldville according to a confidential document dated November 23, 1959, and signed by the British Consulate-General in the Belgian Congo.
“Tom Mboya passed through Leopoldville, where he spent a few hours only, on his way back from Lagos on November 15/16; he was met and looked after by a young American professor Robert West, who is here to do a statistical survey of the causes of the recent economic crisis in the Congo for Ford Foundation,” wrote the British Consular-General in a letter to the Foreign Office. The letter went on: “According to West, Mboya came back from Lagos particularly hostile to Dr Nkrumah, whom he regarded as an ambitious megalomaniac.”
After independence Ford and other American organisations became more concerned with institutional development as a way of strengthening higher education in third world countries, but with the hidden motive of locking the Soviet Union out of the education sector. Ford spent $210,000 for training in English language teaching and another $300,000 to support the Africanisation of the current university of Nairobi. USAid supported the Kenya Polytechnic while Peace With Freedom Inc. New York helped to set up the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, East African Publishing House and Tom Mboya’s East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs.
With CIA backed coups taking place in Africa, many leaders in the pretext of protecting their country’s sovereignty became increasingly sensitive to external assistance from American organisations. Leaders like Tom Mboya who had been receiving aid from such organisations were marked as threats. In 1965, Kenyatta personally summoned the then American ambassador to Kenya Mr William Attwood and warned him that American organisations should stop funding Mboya.
Mboya’s American connections, became so much resented that when American Vice-President Herbert H Humphrey decided to include Irving Brown the Executive Director of the American Labour Centre in his delegation to Kenya in January 1968, Glenn Ferguson, the then US Ambassador to Kenya cabled Washington advising that Brown be dropped because of his closeness to Mboya. However, after consulting the American labour organisation AFL-CIO, Humphrey ignored Ferguson’s advice, and travelled to Kenya with Brown.
Mboya’s East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs (EAISC) sponsored by (PWF)in particular became a major target for the Gatundu group who thought it was being used by the Americans to channel money to him. Controversy over the institute had first erupted in July 1967 in parliament when George Oduya, MP for Busia North, claiming to quote from a British newspaper, alleged that Mboya had received money from a CIA agent named Robert Gabor a Hungarian American who was also one of the sponsors of the EAISCA. This was strongly denied by Mboya, who said the article had been misquoted.
On January 31, 1968, Mboya approached Vice president and Minister for Home Affairs Daniel Arap Moi and requested him to ease the passage of four EAISCA sponsors who were to arrive the following day. Among the sponsors were Gabor and another American citizen called Richard Garver. Others were a German citizen called Heintz Putzrath and a Hungarian called Erno Kiraly. By informing Moi about their arrival Mboya had sought to eliminate any suspicion about their presence especially after Gabor was mentioned in parliament. However, when the four landed in Kenya, Moi declared them persona non grata and expelled them from the country without Mboya’s knowledge.
The irony of it all was that apart from being associated with EAISCA they were also working with Kenyatta in the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation which they were funding. In fact, on Kenyatta’s request, Prof Bethwell Ogot the Secretary General of EAISCA had arranged for a meeting between Kenyatta and the four which was to take place on February 7, 1968 at State House Nairobi. Furthermore, they had previously visited Kenya freely and without any restriction. Garver was even a semi-permanent resident of Kenya where he worked as an advisor to the institute.
According to a declassified file marked confidential, two days after the deportation, the cultural attaché at the German Embassy visited Moi to plead for the four sponsors to be allowed back in the country.
Moi remained rigid but dismissed the whole episode as a joke. On the whole, the episode revealed how Mboya’s American connections which played a great role in propelling him to prominence had become anathema to the very government he was serving.
