Ford Foundation funds, CIA link and why Kenya complaint is not the first
The Kenya Kwanza government has accused the Ford Foundation of funding the ongoing anti-government protests. It is not the first time a foreign government is levelling such accusations against the American charity organisation whose main goal is to advance human welfare. In 2015, India placed it on security watch list for allegedly sponsoring activists who were agitating for the trial of prime minister Narendra Modi over human rights abuses.
Even though the grant-making philanthropy has been engaged in the fight against inequalities for decades, some scholars contend that during the Cold War, it knowingly or unknowingly served as a CIA front organisation to thwart the Soviet Union’s cultural influence and to prevent young promising leaders from being sucked into communism.
According to Frances Saunders, the CIA used such foundations to “fund a seemingly limitless range of covert action programmes affecting youth groups, labour unions, universities, publishing houses and other private institutions”.
Although the foundation opened its Nairobi office in 1963, it had been involved in the country much earlier than that when it would send young research specialists to conduct systematic anthropological, sociological, economic, political and historical studies of Africans as members of a developing world order during the colonial period. One of them was Robert West, a 29-year-old American researcher and professor from Yale University who was sent to Kenya by Ford to conduct research into native cooperatives between 1954 to 1955.
Mau Mau rebellion
It was at the height of Mau Mau rebellion and many young leaders had emerged on the political scene to replace the old guards who had been arrested. As soon as West arrived in Kenya the first leader he befriended was Tom Mboya a young fiery trade unionist who was at the helm of the trade union movement in Kenya, the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL). With the proscription of all political parties in October 1952, the KFL emerged as the only channel Africans could use to highlight their plight and to express their political views.
This meant that it was highly targeted by Cold War protagonists, especially the Soviet Union which saw trade unions as a potential force for social transformation in entrenching communism. The West was equally determined to prevent this from happening and consequently heavily funded activities of young trade unionists such as Mboya to guard them from being lured into communism. It is therefore not surprising that West became much closer to Mboya not only to get his views but also to influence him into a moderate leader.
In 1959, after West moved to Congo to conduct further statistical survey for Ford on the causes of the economic crisis in the country, Mboya who was on his way to Kenya from West Africa paid him a short visit in Leopoldville now Kinshasa. By then Mboya was having some issues with Nkrumah over the questions of a Pan-African trade union movement. While Nkrumah wanted all African trade unions to cut links with the western based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and be affiliated to the Accra based All African Trade Union Federation (AATUF), Mboya was of the opinion that African trade unions should be free to choose whether to be affiliated to the AATUF or the Brussels based ICFTU.
In his book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, former CIA agent Philip Agee claimed that the ICFTU was a LaAbor centre set up and controlled by the CIA to oppose the Soviet backed World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU)”, which was secretly backing the Nkrumah proposed AATUF. Therefore, when Mboya made a brief stop in Leopoldville western diplomats who were keen to understand his position tasked West with extracting information from him. West would later leak his conversation with Mboya to the British Consulate General in Leopoldville according to a confidential document dated November 23, 1959, and signed by the British Consulate-General in the Belgian Congo.
Economic crisis
“Tom Mboya passed through Leopoldville, where he spent a few hours only, on his way back from Lagos on November 15/16; he was met and looked after by a young American professor Robert West, who is here to do a statistical survey of the causes of the recent economic crisis in the Congo for Ford Foundation,” wrote the British Consular-General in a letter to the Foreign Office. The letter went on: “According to West, Mboya came back from Lagos particularly hostile to Dr Nkrumah, whom he regarded as an ambitious megalomaniac.”
After independence Ford and other American organisations became more concerned with institutional development as a way of strengthening higher education in third world countries, but with the hidden motive of locking the Soviet Union out of the education sector. Ford spent $210,000 for training in English language teaching and another $300,000 to support the Africanisation of the current university of…
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