Like most other African states, the nature of British rule meant late-colonial and early post-colonial Kenya was an extraverted state, inseparably tied in a peripheral manner to global networks of power and capital. As its political leaders set about challenging British rule in the 1950s, they had little choice but to engage with external actors seeking to influence the outcome of the process of decolonisation. But the likes of Tom Mboya did so in nuanced and sometimes contradictory ways. Mboya was certainly a worldmaker, who saw links to international allies as key to the overthrow of British colonialism and the reconstruction of the global economy and international organisations as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence. In this effort he found considerable support from the United States. But this effort set him in competition with Kenya’s other worldmakers, such as Oginga Odinga, who had very different networks and more radical visions of what a post-colonial world might look like and Kenya’s place within it. In his efforts to assert control over Kenya’s links to the wider world and to exclude his political rivals, Mboya became an adept gatekeeper.