A New Frontier—in Africa?

Abstract

Tfirst met Mr. Kennedy, said Tom Mboya speaking of the recently slain U.S. president, “in 1959” at “Asilomar on the West Coast near San Francisco, we found a lot of interest in each other almost immediately.” This friendliness was vindicated when Kennedy’s foundation provided ample funding for an airlift of young men and women from Kenya to the United States in order to study in colleges and universities. Mboya then visited the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and amid the graceful affluence of Cape Cod the two sophisticated politicians hammered out a deal whereby a hefty $100,000 would be donated for this edifying purpose. Kennedy wished this donation to “remain very private” (he had yet to be elected president). With JFK’s ascension, concluded Mboya, “it was the beginning of a completely new era in our foreign relations with America,”¹ what a Kennedy booster could well term a “New Frontier in Africa.”