by Marjorie Kimani (Author)
So what inspired me to write The Airlift Orphan?
The seed from which this book germinated was the Tom Mboya-John F. Kennedy airlifts which took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dozens of young bright students from Kenya were given a chance to further their education in the United States of America. A Kenyan visionary, politician, and trade unionist, Tom Joseph Mboya, had seen that an independent Kenya would need its own well-educated citizens to steer the new nation as most of the colonial government workers were leaving.
Kendi, the chief persona in the story, is the daughter of a man who left his pregnant lover behind and failed to come back. The travails that Kendi and her mother go through at the hands of a ruthless society form the real gist of this story.
The story is entirely fictional but is primarily based on a historical event that actually took place.
Marjory Kimani