The “Airlift” Generation, Economic Aspiration, and Secondary School Education in Kenya, 1940-1960

Abstract This article argues that the “airlift” language often used to describe the eight hundred Kenyan students who attended US and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963 is misleading. It assumes that the students were being plucked out of substandard education, yet these youth had received some of the most rigorous education in the world—even though it was colonial education intended to inculcate in them British cultures and mores. The students took this education seriously because they knew it would help improve their economic status as well as that of their families. These elite students were not necessarily concerned with the politics of decolonization or the nation-state, as most studies of colonial elites at the end of empire have tended to claim. They were interested in uplifting their economic status. This uplifting was in and of itself a political act—even though it was not politically motivated.