Cairo in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the principal hubs of radical anticolonialism not only in Africa, but also across the decolonizing world. The Egyptian capital attained this status following the 1952 Egyptian Revolution that replaced the British-friendly monarchy with radical nationalist military officers. Gamal Abdel Nasser, one of these revolutionary officers, became president in 1956 and expanded the radical ambitions of the Egyptian state by participating in the 1955 Bandung Conference, becoming one of the main proponents of the resulting Afro-Asian movement. Nasser spent considerable energy molding Cairo into a headquarters of Afro-Asianism, building the physical and intellectual infrastructure necessary to challenge colonialism worldwide.Footnote 1
A component of this anticolonial infrastructure was the Kenya Office in Cairo (KOC), founded in 1958 by Kenyan political exiles as an outpost of Kenyan nationalism beyond the control of the colonial state. As one of many outposts of African liberation established in the Egyptian capital, the KOC connected Kenyan nationalism to the regionalist and internationalist political infrastructures of Cold War and Afro-Asian anticolonialism. In a period when licit travel for Kenyan Africans was severely constrained by colonial authorities, the KOC was in many ways the institution that first introduced Kenyan nationalism to the Afro-Asian world and beyond.
Institutions like the KOC and the figures who staffed them reflect the necessary role that external partnerships and patronage played in the development of African nationalist movements and anticolonial worlds-in-formation.Footnote 2 The cities that hosted such institutions have in turn anchored a growing literature on anticolonial solidarities along South-East and South-South axes, supplementing scholarship on the role of imperial capitals in facilitating anticolonial encounters.Footnote 3 What this growing body of work has shown, however, is that these hubs were sites not only of solidarity but also of competition, friction, and fission.Footnote 4 The competitive and fissiparous nature of these external outposts of African nationalism is the core concern of this article, which examines these phenomena in a specifically Kenyan context. I argue that the external positionality of the KOC and its proximity to powerful patrons allowed its relatively obscure staffers to attain a degree of political capital that would otherwise be out of reach within Kenya. This clout was, however, highly contingent on temporal, geopolitical, and structural factors operating both within and without Kenya. As will be shown, as the geographic and ideological horizons of Kenyan nationalism constricted immediately before and after independence, internationalist links could become more of a liability than an advantage in intra-nationalist politicking.Footnote 5
This article adds to a growing body of literature exploring the multidirectional trajectories of African political networks in the era of decolonization. Central to these narratives is a focus on mobility: the ability of African students, activists, and politicians to evade colonial constraints on travel and to engage with political, educational, and cultural institutions abroad.Footnote 6 Works within this corpus that include the KOC tend to focus on its principal role as a facilitator of African mobility, providing connections to networks that allowed African students to obtain necessary financial and bureaucratic support to reach universities abroad. The KOC also serves as an example of the many institutions that cemented Cairo’s status as an important hub of the Afro-Asian movement. This status was promoted not only by Egyptian authorities and African nationalists-in-exile, but also by the surveillance files of colonial and metropolitan intelligence services and memoirs written by African nationalist exiles who passed through or were based in the city in this period.
Extant scholarship on extraterritorial outposts of nationalist politics and exilic activists illuminates the networks that sustained African engagement with regional and international anticolonial networks and institutions in this period. However, it can be easy within this body of work to lose sight of important factors outside the frameworks of mobility, solidarity, and intellectual exchange. First, what the scholarship tends to overlook is the role and positionality of the people who staffed these outposts. That is, the individuals who staffed institutions like the KOC were as important as the students whose mobility they facilitated in the structuring of political relationships between the national and international. The actions of these figures—both the public-facing proto-diplomacy and the more quotidian bureaucratic tasks in the KOC itself—were just as consequential as the movement of students through their offices.
Second, it can be easy to miss the distinctly national ends that supranational projects like the KOC served. Recent scholarship on African student mobility in the Cold War rightly highlights the agency and desires of African students over that of host governments in both the capitalist West and the communist East. However, what can get lost is the fact that African leaders often sponsored African students to gain leverage over political rivals within the nationalist milieu in their home countries.Footnote 7 This is especially true in the case of Kenya, where scholarships were arguably the most important means of distributing patronage by rival nationalists Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga, both of whom were attempting to gain primacy within the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU).Footnote 8 That Mboya and Odinga favored different superpower blocs does not negate the fact that much of their politicking abroad was meant to pay dividends in domestic political arenas. As we will see below, the use of international institutions for national political gain influenced how the history of the KOC has been narrated in Kenya.
This article expands the framework through which institutions like the KOC are incorporated into the corpus of Kenyan, internationalist, and Cold War scholarship. It illustrates how the KOC was not just an important facilitator of African mobility in the era of decolonization, but also a generative and contested site that served as a nexus of overlapping and competing national, regional, and international political projects. Indeed, the KOC shared an address with the offices of several other African nationalist organizations in exile, indicating that it was not unique, but rather part of a constellation of extraterritorial sites in which “domestic and international politics were inextricably linked, with exiles and migrants serving as the figures that connected the two realms.”Footnote 9
I emphasize, however, that the mobility and status of these figures were inherently unstable and shaped as much by conflicts within and between nationalist and internationalist spaces as by a shared struggle against colonialism. These internal conflicts could generate alternative visions of what these movements could look like, what they could believe in, where they could operate, and what kinds of alliances they could try to build. While these visions operate at the ideological, intellectual, and diplomatic levels, the conflicts that generate such alternative visions can be the result of personal grudges, perceived slights, or exclusions from the echelons of official authority. Institutions like the KOC—outside the nation but working on its behalf—and the people who staffed them—marginal figures who nevertheless had access to powerful infrastructures of patronage and publicity—thus offer a unique lens into the formation of inchoate nationalist, Afro-Asian, and Pan-African worlds-in-formation.
It is necessary to articulate what, exactly, is meant by “marginal” as it relates to the primary actors in this narrative. I argue that these figures—though protagonists in the history of the KOC—in many ways live at the margins of Kenyan nationalist historiography. This positionality—important in a micro-historical focus on the KOC in a specific timeframe but obscured in the grander histories of Kenyan nationalism—makes these figures difficult to classify. Part of the difficulty derives from the fluid nature of their position; at times best understood as nationalists, students, and political activists and at others as diplomats, bureaucrats, and internationalists. The fluidity of this position—between faceless bureaucrats performing quotidian administrative functions and public-facing figures participating in media and political events—was itself the result of their geographic position.Footnote 10 By being physically outside the control of British colonial authorities and proximate to powerful Afro-Asian patrons, a faceless bureaucrat could become a globe-trotting diplomat. At the same time, reliance on patronage to effect these shifts left exilic activists vulnerable to manipulation by Kenyan and non-Kenyan patrons who often had political motives of their own. That the main figures in this history of the KOC would end up as minor functionaries and peripheral parliamentarians in postcolonial Kenya indicates that the political capital accrued by their proximity to external networks was highly contingent. Indeed, as Kenyan nationalism closed the horizons of its solidarities with other geographic and ideological visions, and as territorial nationalism and Pan-Africanism eclipsed Afro-Asianism as the primary political imperatives of African (inter)nationalists, these connections could become more of a liability than an advantage. It is in this sense that these figures can be described as marginal, a point that will be explored as the article unfolds.
These figures are also difficult to classify in terms of their political ideals and affiliations. The KOC’s staffers displayed a high degree of political promiscuity, declaring and changing allegiances to different political leaders within the Kenyan nationalist milieu with startling speed. Similarly, their pronouncements and affiliations indicate a fluctuating identification with political visions at different scales. While always professing strong allegiance to the ideals of Kenyan national independence, this nationalism was inflected variously through Afro-Asian, Pan-African, communist, and other supranational visions depending on time and venue. As will be shown, this ideological fluidity corresponded directly to their physical proximity to the infrastructures and networks of anticolonial politics based in Cairo, positioning these figures as “mobile intermediaries” for their various patrons and political visions.Footnote 11 British officials and some Kenyan contemporaries, in contrast, saw these figures as mere “political adventurers” whose fluid political affiliations were a sign of dilettantism and opportunism.Footnote 12 From another angle, KOC staffers are perhaps best seen as political entrepreneurs, a category that has gained currency among historians of Africa in recent years.Footnote 13 Cairo’s Afro-Asian milieu can be seen as a political marketplace where access to resources often involved identifying and exploiting opportunities among competing patrons and political visions. This is not to say that KOC staffers were merely self-interested or invested in financial self-enrichment. Indeed, the specific content and scale of political visions caused significant friction within the KOC and between staffers and patrons. However, seeing staffers as political entrepreneurs provides an analytical framework to evaluate their actions and shifting positionality both during and after the functional life of the KOC while making them legible within the context of contemporary Africanist historiography.
Methodologically, this article relies on a combination of documents from the British intelligence archive supplemented with memoirs of African nationalists and contemporary media reporting on the KOC and its staffers. As decolonization inched closer, British intelligence officials dedicated much effort to identifying and cultivating “moderate” Kenyan politicians who would be amenable to maintaining British interests in a postcolonial future. Cold War factors influenced this dynamic, with attempts to keep Kenya free from communist influence a key priority of British officials in this period. British records thus provide insight into the movements, actions, and political affiliations of Kenyan political activists within and without Kenya. Yet these sources have their limitations. Much of the detail populating these records comes from African informants, who may have had their own reasons for manipulating information.Footnote 14 Given British priorities, the details recorded pertain largely to travel and ideological leanings; we hear less about the quotidian operations of places like the KOC or the thoughts of surveilled individuals themselves. Finally, British sources are replete with the racial biases characteristic of the colonial project writ large, which in turn influence how British officials interpreted the actions and statements of surveilled Kenyan activists. Much can be gleaned from these sources, but they are by necessity flawed and incomplete snapshots.
Similarly, the use of African memoirs highlights both the opportunities and constraints of the biographical method for narrating the histories of both individuals and institutions. Extant work on the KOC and similar institutions has been enriched using memoirs of key figures involved in the Office’s founding and operation. Autobiographical sources have opened analysis of the personal and political connections upon which anticolonial and Afro-Asian solidarities were built, as well as the global and regional reverberations of African nationalist politics. However, as I detail below, the narrative of the KOC provided in many of these memoirs is factually inaccurate, and likely the result of conscious manipulation of history to further the authors’ political interests. To reconstruct the institutional biography of the KOC and its main staffers, this article combines and compares the reminiscences of nationalist leaders with the surveillance and intelligence reports of the British and Kenyan colonial governments.Footnote 15 In doing so, it incorporates Judith Brown’s argument that “The careers of prominent individuals are…a valuable source for the historian—not in the biographer’s sense of ‘what did my subject achieve in his lifetime?’ but more deeply, as a window into the networks and systems in which those individuals worked.”Footnote 16 However, I amend Brown’s approach by focusing on the lives of figures who were prominent in the KOC’s founding and functioning but who became marginal to the grand histories of Kenyan nationalism and anticolonial internationalism.
To accomplish this, the article focuses on a series of interrelated aspects of the KOC and its staffers. First, it interrogates the narrative of the Office’s founding in late 1958. This is less straightforward a task than it may appear at first glance, as details of the KOC’s founding are contested, with two different narratives representing opposing sides of Kenyan intra-nationalist rivalry. This competition comes to a head in the second section, which focuses on a factional schism within the Office in 1959. The schism imbricates the KOC not only in histories of Kenyan nationalism, but also in the competitive politics of Pan-Arabism. The concluding section gives a brief overview of the postcolonial careers of important KOC staffers covered in the preceding sections. That these figures faded into relative obscurity indicates that the weight of national and international political capital shifted dramatically as the horizons of Kenyan nationalism contracted and the value of international connections diminished in tandem.
Contesting Founding Narratives of the KOC
Cairo was an important setting for African nationalists to establish an extraterritorial base of operations. Starting in 1956, postrevolutionary Egypt began sponsoring African nationalist organizations from across the continent, a component of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s attempts to cement his position as a leader of the decolonizing world. Nasser was particularly interested in establishing Egypt as an important player in African decolonization, devoting considerable resources to cultivating relationships with nationalist organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote 17 This status was reinforced in 1958 when the Permanent Secretariat of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) was established in Cairo, leading to the permanent presence of exiles, politicians, guerrillas, and students from across the decolonizing world. Hosting the AAPSO Secretariat gave Cairo an edge over other anticolonial hubs competing for both patronage and clients among African activists in this period. As the de facto representatives of Kenyan nationalism in the city, KOC staff had unprecedented access to the publicity and patronage embedded in this internationalist infrastructure and were able to introduce Kenyan nationalism to the world on their own terms as a result.
The founding of the KOC is, however, contested, with two different narratives reflecting the intense competition that characterized Kenyan nationalist politics in the postwar era. While this competitive politics would in later years be articulated in the vocabulary of ethnic and Cold War rivalry, in the late 1950s it was largely concerned with access to resources and patronage. The first founding narrative is based in the British and colonial intelligence archive. In these documents, the Office began its institutional life in mid-1958 as “The representative Body of Kenya Political Organisations Abroad.”Footnote 18 The original founders were George Sedda, John Kamwithi Munyi, and Hassan Wainaina Kamau. These three were Kenyans who had left the colony illegally at various times in the 1950s: Wainaina in 1953 to escape Mau Mau-related charges; Sedda and Kamwithi in 1956 or 1957 after being denied passports to study theology at the University of Perugia.Footnote 19
It is unclear how Wainaina, Sedda, and Kamwithi were able to illegally emigrate from Kenya, but in the case of the latter, their departure was likely facilitated by nationalist lawyer C.M.G. Argwings-Kodhek. Sedda had institutional ties to Argwings-Kodhek’s Nairobi District African Congress (NDAC), founded in 1956. Argwings-Kodhek appears to have been important in facilitating the departure of several Kenyans making their way north, both to work in the KOC and to attend universities in the communist bloc. He also had an acrimonious relationship with Tom Mboya, who headed a similar scholarship program directing Kenyan students to Western universities, and who led the rival Nairobi People’s Convention Party (NPCP).Footnote 20 British sources frequently mention animosity between Argwings-Kodhek and Mboya, with the former accused of using the KOC as a tool to attack the latter on the international stage. Kenyan historiography tends to highlight the rivalry between Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta, on one side, and Oginga Odinga, on the other, as representing the fault lines between West and East, respectively, in the Cold War era. However, in this narrative of the early life of the KOC it was Argwings-Kodhek who was Mboya’s main antagonist, with Odinga conspicuously absent. This dynamic may reflect Argwings-Kodhek’s attempt to cultivate support within internationalist circles to bolster his standing within domestic political competition in this period. Argwings-Kodhek fades from the colonial surveillance records on the KOC after this early presence, perhaps indicating that this tactic was unsuccessful.
In this version of the founding narrative, the inaugural Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference in Cairo in 1957 laid the foundations for the rise in political stature of Sedda, Wainaina, and Kamwithi as they were the only Kenyans present. More prominent Kenyan nationalists Francis Khamisi and Dennis Akumu had intended to attend the conference but were denied passports by a colonial administration wary of internationalist networks being leveraged toward the cause of Kenyan independence. Tom Mboya voluntarily canceled his plans to attend after learning that the Conference was going to be “dominated by communists.”Footnote 21 That Akumu and Mboya had different feelings about the Conference reflects rifts within the NPCP, of which they were both members and in which the KOC may have played a role. As mentioned above, Argwings-Kodhek and his NDAC party had connections to George Sedda, and possibly his colleagues.
However, it appears that the three founders may also have had ties to the NPCP, as then-General Secretary Akumu sent a memorandum to read at the Conference on the party’s behalf. Sedda, Kamwithi, and Wainaina would later establish correspondence with Joseph Mathenge, who succeeded Akumu as General Secretary of the NPCP in 1958. Akumu, Mathenge, and Mboya had developed an increasingly acrimonious relationship over the party’s direction, so the former two reaching out to the KOC may have been a means of gaining outside support to strengthen their positions in Kenya. Regardless of official ties, Akumu clearly recognized the potential of Sedda, Kamwithi, and Wainaina serving as mouthpieces for the NPCP on an international stage. While party loyalties were difficult to identify with certainty and there was considerable political promiscuity among staffers, it is clear that the KOC served as an extraterritorial site of intra-nationalist competition occurring within Kenya.
Asserting ties to both the NDAC and the NPCP was also likely a means of claiming legitimacy to represent Kenya on the part of the three attendees. Such claims seem to have been unnecessary, however, as despite having only questionable links to established Kenyan nationalist organizations, Sedda and company were warmly received by the Conference’s organizers and designated official representatives of the Kenyan people. British reports highlighted the absurdity of this anointment, stating that these three “can best be termed political adventurers having no standing whatsoever at home” and that “none of them can be considered an active politician.”Footnote 22 Even after the KOC became operational, British sources questioned the staff’s credentials with one report reiterating that “Despite its extravagant title the body [held] no mandate from any political party in Kenya, and even its contacts with individual politicians at home were then of the most tenuous nature.”Footnote 23 Some expatriate nationalists also held the KOC in low regard: in August 1959, Othigo Othieno, a member of the Committee of African Organizations in London, reported that KOC staffers had written asking for political advice and institutional partnership. Othieno informed Odinga of his refusal to engage with the Office “on the grounds that its members were mostly uneducated and unreliable and, in any event, not representatives of Kenya Africans.”Footnote 24 That Othieno was a confidant and supporter of Odinga lends credence to the veracity of this version of the founding narrative, in which Odinga was peripheral to the KOC’s founding.
This correspondence reflects the mutually influential nature of political networking inside and outside the space of the nation. It is also important as it undermines the second narrative of the formation of the KOC provided by the memoir of Oginga Odinga and recent media reporting. In his 1967 memoir Not Yet Uhuru, Odinga states that the KOC was founded in 1959 by “three young students”: Wera Ambitho, Odhiambo Okello, and Abdulla Karungo.Footnote 25 In Odinga’s telling, these three planned on opening the Office in Khartoum, but this plan fell through after a 1958 coup installed a government less amenable to hosting exilic activists. Following the coup, the story goes, Okello, Ambitho, and Karungo founded the KOC in Cairo with the blessing and assistance of President Nasser. A similar account is given in a 2018 obituary of Odhiambo Okello written by his half-brother Richard Okello, who adds that the three had enrolled in the University of Khartoum to study law but abandoned this course of study to pursue the higher calling of establishing the KOC.Footnote 26 A nearly identical account is given by Odinga’s son Raila Odinga in a 2006 biography.Footnote 27
Oginga Odinga’s account is the only one of these revisionist founding narratives that mentions Kamwithi, Sedda, and Wainaina by name, stating that they were residing in Cairo at the time but referring to them merely as “three of our students,” with no mention of their involvement in the KOC’s founding. The backgrounds of the three revisionist founders that Odinga narrates, however, do reflect a knowledge of the travels of Sedda, Kamwithi, and Wainaina: Odinga’s memoir claims that Karungo was a Kikuyu freedom fighter who fled to escape arrest, while Okello and Ambitho had received scholarships to study in Italy but were denied passports. This is the exact trajectory that colonial officials above ascribed to Sedda, Kamwithi, and Wainaina. Thus, Odinga’s memoir conflates the itineraries of both sets of putative founders, perhaps to inject a degree of accuracy to what is likely a revisionist account. In this sense, Odinga’s memoir is an example of a “usable past,” a historical retelling in which narrators “directly seek to shape contemporary understandings of the past for political purposes.”Footnote 28 Odinga’s account shows how the so-called “Big Men” of Kenyan nationalism could act as gatekeepers controlling not only political and economic resources but also the historical narratives upon which they build their political legacies.
It is important to highlight the narratives of African history presented by African actors themselves, and memoirs like Odinga’s are valuable sources for constructing these histories. However, given the politics of historical remembrance and the intense competition between Kenyan nationalist figures both during and after the active life of the KOC, historians must be wary of accepting such narratives at face value. Given this competitive context and the fact that the British intelligence archive was not public, it seems likely that, of the two accounts of the KOC’s founding, the one preserved in British intelligence files is the more accurate. Why, then, would Odinga and Okello fabricate this revisionist account? I argue that the rationale behind Odinga’s version lies in the rivalry he later developed with Tom Mboya and Jomo Kenyatta. It is potentially significant that Odinga’s claim was first made in his memoir, which was published after his public break with Kenyatta’s government and formation of the radical left Kenya People’s Union (KPU) to challenge Kenyatta’s KANU. Odinga’s retroactive claiming of the KOC could thus be read as a means of buttressing his radical anticolonial bona fides, providing a contrast with which to reinforce the image of Mboya and Kenyatta as agents of neocolonialism.
Given the “usable” nature of Odinga’s account, the rest of this article proceeds on the assumption that the founding narrative of the KOC provided by colonial intelligence sources is the more accurate of the two. This is not to say that colonial archives are free of bias, fabrication, and manipulation. However, British officials had less incentive to manipulate the specific information in these files as they were not open to public scrutiny. Whereas memoirs like Odinga’s are more amenable to conscious manipulation for political gain, the ambiguity in British sources instead represents the inadequacy and furtiveness of their intelligence infrastructure combined with racial bias. If memoirs like Odinga’s are more usable for the purposes of nationalist history-making, those of British intelligence are perhaps more usable for reconstructing those figures who fall victim to more conscious historiographical manipulation.
In some ways, the identity of the founders was irrelevant to the broader argument that despite the lack of political stature and tenuous connections to nationalists in Kenya, Sedda, Kamwithi, and Wainaina were imbued with political capital through their proximity to Afro-Asian patrons in Cairo and their anointment as the representatives of Kenya by the Egyptian government. In Kenya both sets of founders would likely be seen as no more than a few among many student-activists and aspirational nationalist leaders, whereas the physical proximity to Cairo and its patronage networks imbued them with an amount of political prestige unavailable to figures of greater stature who were restricted to the geographic confines of Kenya. Sedda and his colleagues made good use of this political capital: touring communist bloc countries and attending the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra in 1958 as members of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Committee delegation.Footnote 29 This itinerary—traversing networks of Afro-Asianism, Pan-Africanism, and communism—attests to the multiple overlapping networks of politics and patronage accessible through Cairo.
If Sedda, Kamwithi, and Wainaina were political adventurers, they nevertheless had the ear of the international apparatus of Afro-Asianism and the communist bloc. The particularity of the group’s position was recognized by political figures of objectively higher stature in Kenya, like Akumu, who argued that their proximity to Afro-Asian infrastructures could be used to amplify publicity for Kenyan nationalism. Mboya, in contrast, appeared to have an ambivalent relationship with the KOC. While he recognized that the KOC’s unique position could have provided him a platform on the world stage, the potential value was dwarfed by Mboya’s fears that criticism leveled from the Office could damage his reputation. Significantly, Mboya’s concern was for his international reputation, rather than among nationalist circles within Kenya itself.Footnote 30 This distinction reflects a relationship between the national and the international in this period in which the latter was more consequential for building patronage networks and claiming resources, and reinforces the argument that it was the proximity of the KOC to these networks that endowed seemingly inconsequential figures with the power to give more established leaders pause.
1959: Nationalist Schism Amid Competitive Regionalisms
The conflicting narratives surrounding the KOC’s founding thus reflect intense competition within Kenyan nationalist circles. However, a factional schism in 1959 reveals that the KOC was also embedded in competitive regional politics during this period. The schism occurred in September 1959, resulting in two opposing groups among a staff that had grown to include at least a dozen men.Footnote 31 On one side was a faction led by James Ochwatta, and included Sedda, Kamwithi, Rajab Saleh Salim, and Michael Wamatu. This group reportedly aligned itself with Argwings-Kodhek’s NDAC and was strongly anti-Mboya. The second group was led by Wera Ambitho and included Odhiambo Okello and David Kikubo. The political allegiances of this second faction are difficult to identify, with some surveillance records indicating they supported Mboya and his NPCP. However, this allegiance conflicts with the later identification of Ambitho and Okello as partisans of Odinga and the generally anti-Western politics that animated Cairo-based African nationalist organizations. Ambitho would later travel to communist bloc countries alongside Odinga, further indicating his personal and political affinities with the left-wing of Kenyan nationalism.Footnote 32 It is possible that at the time of the schism, this faction was indeed pro-Mboya and changed allegiance to Odinga later, which fits into the general pattern of professional opportunism and political promiscuity that characterized many of the individuals at the intersection of nationalist and internationalist politics. The confusion may also reflect the fact that British observers were scrambling to track these activists and often had to make sense of allegiances after the fact.
The schism was preceded by a series of minor, often petty, confrontations within the KOC. Due to the nature of the archival sources, there is little information on the day-to-day operation of the KOC and the thinking of individual staffers. However, the details that are available through the perspective of British surveillance indicate that quarrels among staffers were common. For example, a dispute arose when Ochwatta contacted politicians in Kenya without prior permission from Sedda, who interpreted this move as both a personal slight and challenge to his authority.Footnote 33 Similarly, in April 1959, Sedda wrote to political leaders in Kenya, using KOC letterhead, denouncing the actions of some staffers and indicating Ambitho had been expelled for undisclosed infractions. Both incidents indicate that it was not only politics that drove wedges between staffers, but also the granular clash of personalities and rampant egomania which may have developed because of the KOC’s gatekeeping position vis-à-vis access to Egyptian and Afro-Asian patrons and resources. Indeed, a common thread in files on the KOC is the recognition, by British and Kenyan observers, of the emotional instability and exaggerated self-importance of many staffers.Footnote 34
By October, the schism had led to significant changes in the KOC, with nine staffers departing Cairo. Five of these departees “established themselves in educational institutions behind the Iron Curtain and appear to have severed all connections with Cairo.”Footnote 35 These were Sedda, David Kikubo, and Hassan Wainaina Kamau, who attended Karl Marx University in Leipzig, with Mika Aloo Gumbi and John Kimiti Kamau enrolling at the University of Belgrade.Footnote 36 The departure of the other four—Ochwatta, Kamwithi, Wamatu, and Saleh Salim—was more dramatic: they were declared personae non grata in Egypt, leading them to flee to Khartoum where they subsequently announced the formation of a splinter group called the African Anti-Colonial Movement of Kenya (AACMK).
Of significance are the causes that British intelligence attributed to the flight of the AACMK cohort. Specifically, they speculate that the schism was due to Ochwatta and his colleagues’ opposition to increasing control over the KOC by the Egyptian government. Reports on the KOC immediately prior to the schism indicate that Mohammed el-Fayek, head of the African Affairs Department of the Egyptian Intelligence Service, had taken more direct control over the operations of the KOC, with intelligence officers now stationed at the Office during its hours of operation.Footnote 37 British intelligence speculated that the increasing investment in, and control of, the KOC by the Egyptian government was due to a widening rift between Nasser and his erstwhile communist bloc allies coupled with the former’s desire to consolidate control over the Cairo-based African nationalist and Afro-Asian infrastructures. Indeed, Dennis Akumu, in his capacity as a Kenyan representative to the 1960 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Tunis, stated that the Egyptian government disapproved of contact between KOC staffers and “representatives of the Indian, Indonesian and Chinese governments,” indicating a desire to undermine Kenyan nationalist connections with alternative bases of Afro-Asian and anticolonial patronage.Footnote 38
This interpretation contrasts with the rosier view of Egyptian collaboration with the KOC offered by Odinga who, in his memoir, simply notes that el-Fayek provided invaluable assistance in establishing the KOC’s publicity infrastructure.Footnote 39 Other African activists who worked in political offices in Cairo take pains to portray their Egyptian hosts as hands-off and willing to let the offices operate autonomously.Footnote 40 The conflicting accounts of the Egyptian state’s role in the functioning of these offices-in-exile indicate that personal accounts of working in these institutions should be revisited and put in conversation with accounts from the archival record of colonial intelligence and the Egyptian government. It also illustrates how memoir and autobiography are historical sources as open to conscious manipulation and unconscious bias as are files from the colonial archive.
Increased control by the Egyptian government marks a break with earlier iterations of relations between African liberation organizations and Egyptian hosts. As Reem Abou-el-Fadl notes in her work on Cairo’s Afro-Asian milieu, an African Association had been founded in the city in 1955. That the KOC and other African offices were evolutions of the African Association is demonstrated by the fact that they shared the same address at 5 Ahmed Hishmat Street in Cairo’s Zamalek district. The African Association had Egyptian staff, but these were self-consciously not government employees and claimed to be aloof from national politics. The transition from a continental to a national framework for the offices operating out of 5 Ahmed Hishmat could similarly reflect a reorientation of political visions from Pan-African and Afro-Asian positions to one emphasizing the salience of the nation-state. This is supported by Abou-el-Fadl’s observation that many of the offices of liberation organizations were converted into embassies after independence, underlining Egypt’s emphasis on the “principles of national sovereignty and mutual non-interference.”Footnote 41 Abou-el-Fadl also notes that there was at times competition between the African Association and the AAPSO over access to African activists in the city, further illustrating tension within and between national and supranational political visions.
The 1959 schism in the KOC can thus be read as an extension of this competition between nationalist and internationalist visions operating in Cairo. More directly relevant to the schism was the increased oversight of the Egyptian authorities in the later iterations of the Offices, as opposed to the seemingly autonomous existence of the earlier African Association. Indeed, the AACMK was vocally opposed to Egyptian control, arguing the increase in support was too high a price to pay for subsuming the interest of Kenyan freedom to Nasser’s African ambitions. The use of “African” in Ochwatta’s breakaway movement could thus have been a subtle but pointed criticism of their erstwhile colleagues at the KOC, implying that they were more beholden to Egyptian than Kenyan interests. The AACMK was especially vocal in their criticism of Nasser after their expulsion from the country, accusing the Egyptian government of using African activists “merely as an instrument of Arab nationalism and as something to be exploited to serve NASSER’s ambitious aims irrespective of the wishes of the Africans concerned.”Footnote 42
This criticism was not confined to the AACMK; as Eric Burton observes, several African nationalists had come to believe that “Nasser’s Pan-Africanism…was never more than a sideshow to his grand investments in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Arab projects.”Footnote 43 This position reveals the growing disconnection between the political priorities of territorial nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Afro-Asianism, pointing to a dynamic marked as much by competitive regionalisms as by solidarity. The schism within the KOC thus shows not only differences on issues of pragmatism versus ideological purity within Kenyan nationalist circles, but also within the overlapping and increasingly competitive brands of supranational anticolonial politics more broadly. It is in this sense that the KOC can be read as an example of the tensions between globalizing and deglobalizing impulses of anticolonial politics and how a focus on the actions of individual staffers “[does] not obscure structural factors but rather reveal patterns about why these factors mattered.”Footnote 44
The 1959 schism in the KOC exposes a disconnect between the priorities of Kenyan nationalism and Egyptian foreign policy. Similarly, it is possible that Nasser’s increasingly turbulent relationship with the Soviet Union and growing competition with Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah for leadership of the Pan-African movement motivated his increased control over the African nationalist infrastructure in Cairo, including the KOC.Footnote 45 However, it was not just the rivalry between Nasser and Nkrumah that was relevant here, nor was it the AACMK’s resistance to increased Egyptian control. Competition within the realm of Pan-Arabism also played a role in this dynamic, further imbricating the KOC in another regional political rivalry. British intelligence speculated that the expulsion of the AACMK was catalyzed by a trip that Kamwithi made to Iraq in August 1959. Residing outside the constraints of colonial immigration authorities and with access to the infrastructures of Afro-Asian and communist networks, members of the KOC were incredibly well traveled. Thus, Kamwithi’s excursion might not itself seem out of the ordinary. However, it was the stated intention of this trip that could have catalyzed Egyptian expulsion of Kamwithi and his faction: in a letter to comrades in Kenya, Kamwithi stated his intention to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim to discuss establishing a Kenya Office in Baghdad.Footnote 46
It is unclear in what capacity Kamwithi made this trip: whether he still considered himself a member of the KOC or was working on behalf of the AACMK prior to its formal establishment. The significance of Kamwithi’s intention to discuss a Kenya Office in Baghdad is that Nasser and Qassim were rivals for leadership of Pan-Arabism as a geographic and ideological project. Nasser, for his part, wanted to incorporate Iraq into the formal, nominally federal structure of the United Arab Republic formed from the merger of Egypt and Syria in 1958. Qassim, by contrast, sought a more informal unity in which Arab nationalist states reached common positions on defense and foreign affairs, but in which national sovereignty and internal autonomy were maintained.Footnote 47 Within this competitive framework, Kamwithi’s trip would have signaled to Nasser an intention to draw Kenyan, and potentially other African, nationalists toward his opponent. Not only could this undermine Egypt’s position in Afro-Asian and Pan-Arab circles but could have also potentially undermined Nasser’s desire to consolidate Egyptian influence in Africa by creating an alternative source of propaganda and patronage. Indeed, Qassim’s emphasis on national sovereignty may have been more attractive to African nationalists who were increasingly prioritizing developing the nation-state at the expense of wider supranational projects.Footnote 48
The content of conversations between Kamwithi and Qassim, if they occurred, are unknown. However, given the tensions within the KOC and the increase in Egyptian intervention in its affairs, it is not unreasonable to speculate that Kamwithi’s trip to visit Nasser’s rival could have triggered the expulsion of his faction from Cairo. Indeed, the AACMK’s post-Cairo travels indicate that they may have actively sought to exploit other Pan-Arab rivalries. For example, they made overtures to the ruling Neo-Destour Party of Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, another Nasser antagonist and Pan-Arab rival.Footnote 49
Despite their expulsion from Cairo, the AACMK maintained that they were the true representatives of Kenyan nationalism abroad and set about forging relationships with anticolonial organizations, nationalist parties, and foreign governments in much the same way as they had in Cairo. A key venue for this sort of political entrepreneurship was the plethora of international conferences held across Africa from the late 1950s, several of which were also attended by KOC staff members who sometimes formed part of official delegations. “Official” must be qualified, however, as it appears that AACMK members attended some of these conferences alongside more established Kenyan political figures, and at other times were actively disavowed by Kenyan delegations. For example, members of both factions attended the second Conference of Independent African States held in Addis Ababa in 1960, with Ambitho representing the KOC and Kamwithi and Wamatu representing the AACMK. However, James Gichuru, who led the official Kenyan delegation, repudiated Ambitho’s attendance, making it clear that the latter “had no status vis-à-vis the Kenya delegates.”Footnote 50 Mboya had made similar objections two years earlier at the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra when Sedda and Kamwithi had attempted to gain recognition as official representatives of Kenya.Footnote 51
The stature of both KOC and AACMK representatives at international conferences was mixed and influenced by political reverberations emanating from within Kenya as well as in internationalist circles. Speaking to the protean nature of political allegiances and the mutually influential connection between place and political fortunes, it seems that activists from both sides of the 1959 schism rapidly lost whatever political clout they held the farther removed they were from patrons and, especially, in venues where the political emphasis was on Pan-Africanism and territorial nationalism instead of Afro-Asianism. Indeed, because of Sedda and Kamwithi’s sidelining by the official Kenyan delegation at the AAPC in Accra, their “standing with their Egyptian sponsors was considerably reduced.”Footnote 52 This dynamic reveals the precarity of the politics of recognition that accompanied the “mobile intermediaries” of the KOC and AACMK in their travels through the worlds-in-formation of anticolonial (inter)nationalism.
It is likely that the increasing precarity of both KOC staffers and their AACMK counterparts was also due to the legalization of territory-wide political parties in Kenya in 1960 and a general loosening of the restrictions imposed on Africans during the Mau Mau Emergency. This development reiterates how changes to national politics reverberated into international spaces. Indeed, British observers noted in November 1960 that the KOC had begun to “style itself ‘The Foreign Bureau of KANU’ which was the term used by Wera AMBITHO when travelling behind the Iron Curtain with OGINGA.”Footnote 53 Ambitho would later correct a news report describing him as the “Kenya agent” in Cairo, insisting it was more accurate to refer to him as the “secretary of the Kanu Office in the UAR capital.”Footnote 54 Also in 1960, the AACMK launched an appeal for an electoral and education fund, requesting contributions be sent to Odinga in his capacity as Vice-President of KANU, and secondly to the AACMK in its capacity as KANU’s “Vanguard Unit” abroad. British observers interpreted this as “an obvious attempt at self-alignment with KANU,” most likely to bolster their “official” bona fides in much the same way as KOC staffers.Footnote 55 It similarly reflects attempts by both factions to align themselves with the “radical” wing of KANU represented by Odinga. This indicates that the balance of power in the relationship between the national and international was beginning to shift from the latter to the former in the wake of easing restrictions on African political organizing in Kenya and the formalization of KANU as the preeminent nationalist organization in the country. Significantly, KANU sources within Kenya disavowed both attempts at affiliation.
Conclusion
The KOC closed in 1964, shortly after Kenyan independence.Footnote 56 Media coverage of the Office and its heads, Ambitho and Okello, indicates that in the years preceding the closure the KOC’s operations had become something of a political liability for all involved. The Daily Nation for example ran a series of articles criticizing Ambitho and Okello for mistreating and exploiting Kenyan students “stranded” in Cairo, including pocketing stipend money destined for students by the Egyptian government.Footnote 57 The response to these reports indicates that the KOC continued to be a set piece in the theater of political rivalries in Kenya. Cabinet minister and Kenyatta ally Daniel arap Moi penned a reply clarifying that the Kenyan government did not blame the Egyptian government for the plight of Kenyan students but rather castigated the “individual politicians who sent students overseas and then left them to the governments concerned to deal with.”Footnote 58 Moi’s accusation was rebutted in the same publication by Oluande K’Oduol, Oginga Odinga’s personal secretary, who stated that Kenyan students sent abroad under Odinga’s auspices were well-treated and only in Cairo as part of their route to universities abroad.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, the KOC continued to attract opprobrium from Kenyan government and media sources in the years prior to its closure.
It is perhaps the relative infamy accrued by these and similar stories that caused Ambitho and Okello, as well as former KOC comrades and AACMK rivals, to fade into relative obscurity upon their returns to Kenya. However, the brief appearances these figures make in Kenyan media suggest that their decline in stature may have also been due to the gravity of Kenyan politics shifting away from internationalist links and more toward domestic arenas. Wera Ambitho by 1967 had returned to Kenya and become a mid-level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, rising to the position of Provincial Information Officer for Western Province by 1971. Given the sidelining of Odinga supporters from official government positions after 1965, Ambitho likely disavowed his former patron at some point in the years between the KOC’s closure and his bureaucratic career.Footnote 60 Ambitho’s Cairo ties seemed to be less damaging, with media references in the late 1960s and 1970s consistently mentioning his work at the KOC. Indeed, Kenyatta may have recognized the utility of a Cairo connection as Ambitho was sent to greet Major el-Fayek during the latter’s stopover in Nairobi during a 1969 tour of East Africa.
Odhiambo Okello’s post-KOC career is similar in some respects. By August 1964 he was listed as a KANU branch official in Mombasa. He then briefly worked at the Organization of African Unity Headquarters in Addis Ababa before being assigned to the Kenyan Embassy in the United States in 1965. It again is unclear whether these positions were rewards for a possible break with Odinga or a means of removing an Odinga supporter from the domestic political scene. Okello’s ties to Odinga were emphasized in several obituaries issued on his death in 2018, but it is unclear whether these ties were similarly publicized during Okello’s career. Complicating this narrative further is the fact that Okello was an active informant for Czech intelligence from 1960.Footnote 61 The multiple overlapping roles and political promiscuity of KOC staffers thus seemed to follow them into their post-Office careers.
The trajectories of two AACMK veterans are similarly instructive of the shifts in political geography that influenced postcolonial careers. John Kamwithi Munyi, for example, seems to have followed a conciliatory path like Wera Ambitho. In a 1965 issue of the Daily Nation, Kamwithi vociferously defended Odinga when the latter was under attack for public statements supportive of communism. Yet less than a year later, Kamwithi, who had since been elected as a senator on the KANU line, publicly supported a bill to expel KANU legislators who defected to Odinga’s KPU.Footnote 62 That Kamwithi sided with the government over Odinga suggests that he had cast his lot with Kenyatta and the KANU mainstream. Kamwithi would later publicly endorse Kenya’s non-aligned foreign policy, indicating he had eschewed previous affinities for the communist bloc and the radical wing of Afro-Asianism.Footnote 63 Ambitho and Kamwithi’s post-KOC careers thus indicate that domestic allegiances became more important than international connections in the context of independence and realignment within KANU.
James Ochwatta was unable to translate his international experience into a formal political role in postcolonial Kenya, though not for lack of trying. In 1965 he declared his intent to run for the parliamentary seat of the recently assassinated Pio Gama Pinto; in his application to the KANU leadership he supports his candidacy by describing himself as a “known Kenya politician who…represented Kenya in the international field.”Footnote 64 KANU declined to select Ochwatta as their candidate, yet he remained active in labor and religious organizations and was a habitual contributor of letters to the editor of various Kenyan periodicals. He similarly seems to have moderated his connections to Odinga, as reflected in a 1968 article where Ochwatta appeals to Odinga to abandon the KPU and make amends with Kenyatta in the spirit of African unity.Footnote 65 Though more conciliatory toward Odinga than some of his colleagues, the statement indicates that Ochwatta was casting his lot with Kenyatta, perhaps in the hope of obtaining a formal government appointment. Significantly, Ochwatta makes no mention of his Cairo ties in any of his published statements after 1965.
The Kenya Office in Cairo and its post-schism rival thus occupied unique positions in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which the founding members had no domestic political clout but became consequential due to their role as gatekeepers providing access to Afro-Asian and communist bloc networks. However, this position was tenuous, fraught, and contingent on political developments unfolding at national, regional, and international levels. As East African territories inched closer to negotiated independence, domestic political parties with established leaders came to be recognized as the sole official vessels of nationalist politics. In Kenya, the terrain of political competition immediately before and after independence was increasingly domesticated. In such a context, internationalist links waned in importance or became instrumentalized in ways that made it difficult for political entrepreneurs like former KOC staffers and their schismatic rivals in the AACMK to compete.
What this article has shown is that the relationships between patrons and clients in places like the KOC are as important as the formal relationships between political parties and governments. Indeed, for a brief window from 1957 to 1963, the role of exilic activists could eclipse that of more established nationalist leaders whose movements were more restricted. These relationships are not ideologically or territorially bounded: they are shifting combinations of the quotidian and extraordinary, the personal and political, the national and transnational. They are the result of solidarity and cooperation but also of conflict and competition. But conflict and competition could be as generative as cooperation, and this point can get lost in both the neat teleological narratives of territorial nationalism and uncritical accounts of internationalist anticolonial solidarity left by politically invested participants.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the editors at The Journal of African History and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This article would not have been possible without the insightful feedback from James Brennan, Eric Burton, Dan Branch, Emma Hunter, Ismay Milford, Peter Wright, Alex White, Eva Rogaar, and Doug Jones, for which they all have my sincere gratitude. The History Department of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign provided funding for this research.
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