Scholarship Invasion: Cold War Anxieties and Black Transnational Educational Alliances

• In Event: Centering Black Agendas in the Historiography of Black Education: Decoupling Agency From Whiteness

Abstract

“The American Committee on Africa’s contribution to Afro-American understanding is already an important influence in both continents” (American Committee on Africa, n.d., p. 342; Houser, 1976). This was Thomas J. Mboya’s 1959 message, repeated at hundreds of meetings, and on national radio and television interviews. That year, over 200 Kenyan students received admission and scholarships to attend university in the United States through the African Airlift Program (Goffe, 2014; Meriwether, 2008; Okoth, 1984). Conceptualized and led by Mboya, the Committee, the Black Left, and the African American Students Foundation (AASF), the Airlift program was part of transnational alliances, that Loraine Hansberry described as, “the sweep of national independence movements globally […] inextricably linked to the political initiatives of Black Americans engaged in similar, and sometimes overlapping struggles for freedom, full citizenship, and self-determination” (Wilkins, 2006, p. 192). Hansberry, like many other Black American civil rights organizers, affirmed international connections between Black Africans and Black Americans. Africans and African Americans had a shared vocabulary and strategic alliances in the broad decolonization movement from which they both drew and were energized by. Hansberry’s words resonated with aesthetic, social, legal, and political agendas of the anticolonial activists of the time in the U.S., Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Using archival records of correspondences between Black leaders in Kenya and the United States, this paper recasts the history of the how an educational program (the African Airlift program) became one of the first steps towards increased African immigration to the U.S. Often attributed to the government of President John F. Kennedy, the African Airlift program’s Black organizers conceptualized the program as a vehicle to bypass the colonial restrictions on the African continent limiting Black immigration from African colonies long-determined by European mandates and restricted by quotas, which, “in practice served to increase the quotas of Great Britain, France, and Belgium, the nations with the largest colonial empires” (Ngai, 2004, p. 27). Strategically, both the post-colonial Kenyan government and the U.S. government of the 1960s would neutralize the original histories and the goals of the program. Understanding the Black architects of the African Airlift program demonstrates how Black transnational alliances shaped both the Airlift program itself and the nation-states involved, as education served as a conduit for ideologies and solidarities that would legislatively influence both the US and Kenya.

Author

• Brenda N. Sanya, Colgate University