The Making of the Kenyan State: Citizenship, Belonging, and Nation Building through the East African Airlift and Aeroflot (1920 – 1980)

In 1959, nationalists leveraged support from Cold War hegemons to launch two education schemes in the British colony of Kenya. The East African Airlift and the Aeroflot programs were established to sponsor the higher education of African students in North America and the communist bloc, respectively. Responding to the lack of educational opportunities for Africans, these inclusive crash programs were designed to “Africanize” the colonial civil service as independence approached. The returning students weaved through a post-colony fraught with tense debates concerning development, modernity, identity, citizenship and belonging. This dissertation utilizes these two understudied schemes as a lens to explore the making of the modern Kenyan state through the students' impact on decolonization and empire. Relying on oral histories and archival sources, I argue that tracking the trajectory of these students complicates dominant historiographical narratives of elitist nationalism, hegemonic practice of empire and a Kenyan society beset by marginalization.