Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours Review

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Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours ReviewOne of the legacies of W W II was acceleration of the disintegration of colonialism in Africa and Asia. Colonialism, of course, did not end overnight, and it took longer to collapse in some countries than in others. The book AIRLIFT TO AMERICA looks, generally, at the end of colonialism in eastern Africa and, specifically, at an interesting and little known "crusade" or initiative whose main purpose was to prepare a country emerging from British rule to independence by providing higher education for its future leaders. The country was Kenya.
The crusade referred to in the previous paragraph was the so-called African "Airlift" to the USA. Beginning in 1959 and continuing for the next several years, and supported by people from both Africa (Tom Mboya) and the US (Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, Bill Scheinman), approximately eight hundred east African students flew to the US to continue their education at a wide variety of colleges and universities all over the country, from community colleges to Ivy League schools.
Most of these students earned undergraduate and/or graduate degrees and returned to their African homes to take up positions in government, education, agriculture, and business, as their country prepared and attained self-rule (granted to Kenya in 1963). Some chose to stay in the US.
The airlift venture inevitably became connected to and involved in both the international cold war (the Soviets were also recruiting African students to come to schools in Moscow) and domestic US politics (the presidential election of 1960). These connections are discussed by the author in some detail. He also supplies profiles of numerous airliftees, i.e. the individual students, and their experiences.
One of these students happened to be named Barrack Hussein Obama, who left his native Kenya (and wife there) to study at the University of Hawaii (Hawaii's climate, he'd apparently heard, might be more to his liking than Maryland's or northern California's) and later earn a master's degree in Economics at Harvard and work toward a doctorate in that subject. As with most of the airliftees, Obama returned to his country where he worked in business and government. But while in Hawaii, he was married for a short period of time to a university student by the name of Ann Dunham, and this union produced a future president of the US.
Although Barrack Obama Sr. and John F. Kennedy are featured in the book's subtitle, there really is not much on either of them here. Readers would probably like to have seen a bit more. I'd also like to have read more specifics on the discrimination the students had to put up with in the US because of the color of their skin. Too, the book seems somewhat hastily put together in that there are a lot of gaps and "jumping arounds". (Perhaps a historian might take up this topic?) Still, in spite of minor imperfections, the book opened up a topic that I knew nothing about, for which I thank Tom Shachtman. And, in the end, how can one not fail to be moved or inspired by a cause as noble as this, in most repects at least, appears to have been.
Recommended.
Tim Koerner December 2009Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours Overview

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