Out of Africa

Into the halls of U.S. higher education last week marched an exotic vanguard: 81 African students, including 78 Kenyans --the largest group ever to arrive from the British colony that most Americans know vaguely as the land of the Mau Mau. What the Kenyans knew about the U.S. was more specific: scholarships totaling some $100,000 were sending them to 52 colleges and universities, from Howard to Hawaii. The event was not one to make British colonial officials cheer.

The instigator was Kenya's canny Politician Tom Mboya, 28, currently embroiled in a hot fight to expand his native party (see FOREIGN NEWS). When Mboya swept through the U.S. on a speaking tour last spring, he roused support for a stirring project: giving able young Kenyans a crack at higher education. The Royal Technical College of East Africa in Nairobi grants only subuniversity diplomas. Kenyans with a yen for more than a technical degree must go to Uganda's Makerere College, an affiliate of the University of London, or somehow find their way overseas.

To Mboya's aid came prominent U.S. Negroes--notably ex-Dodger Jackie Robinson, Balladeer Harry Belafonte, Actor Sidney Poitier. In flowed the scholarships. The Americans chipped in plane fare; Africans chipped in pocket money. Carefully screened by Mboya, the 81 students enplaned for New York.

Robinson, Belafonte and Poitier let fly with a charge that Kenya's higher educational opportunities "are nonexistent under the repressive colonial system." "The facts are very different," snapped the British embassy's Colonial Attache Douglas Williams in a letter to the New York

Times. His version: 451 native Kenyans are pursuing higher education this year on government scholarships--79 at the Royal Technical College. 325 at Makerere College, 45 in Britain, two in Canada. Countered Tom Mboya: the statistics, in a land with an African population of 6,000,000, "are an indictment of British attitudes toward African education."

The argument on British colonial policy continued, but in Manhattan the 81 students were busy answering reporters' questions about other matters. In clipped British accents, Masai Tribesman Geoffrey M. Ole Maloy reported that his hunting trophies include four cobras, two antelopes and a rhinoceros. But his tribal status, Maloy explained politely, is still not high. He has never taken part in the Eunoto ceremony (killing a lion in order to become an elder). "My father does not wish that I participate. Although he killed a lion in his youth, he has become somewhat involved in Western civilization."

Other students patiently spelled the names of their tribes: Kikuyu. Luo, Embu, Meru. Kamba, Kalenjin. Aba-luhya. And why had Samuel Mutisya and Frank Nabutete chosen, of all places, a Negro college (Philander Smith) in Little Rock, Ark.? "I want the experience," mused Student Nabutete. "It might be useful when I go back home."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.