ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to relate a biographical case-study to some 'liberal'and 'radical' ways of thinking about ethnicity. The Kenyan political leader Tom Mboya, who was active in labour and political affairs from 1951 until his death in 1969, was widely regarded as genuinely non-tribalist in his politics. Yet he exercised successful leadership within a political system characterised very strongly, according to a great many observers and participants, by the play of ethnic forces. Mboya himself wrote that 'Kenya has been afflicted a good deal with negative tribalism'. Whatever else may be said about Mboya — and he had many detractors — no one has ever judged him a tribalist. As General Secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour from 1953 to 1963, Mboya was clearly non-tribalist in the sense that he showed no obvious favouritism towards Luo colleagues or Luo trade unionists generally. Mboya won because he was the most effective patron figure in Kenyan African politics.
