in the 1960s 'It will be a difficult task keeping Africa clear of ideologies. There will be the Cold War growling its thunder around us'. 1 So wrote leading Kenyan politician Tom Mboya in 1963, the year of Kenyan independence from the British Empire. The Cold War certainly had a striking influence on the African continent as countries gained independence from European colonialism and sought to carve out independent foreign policies. In Kenya, the influence of the Cold War has most often been explored in the realm of domestic politics and the factional disputes of the early 1960s between the American-backed Mboya, Minister for Economic Planning and Development, and Vice President Oginga Odinga, who fostered relations with communist countries. This article will focus on the 1960s, when Kenya publicly committed to the common African tropes of non-alignment and African Socialism, but, despite this, under the leadership of President Jomo Kenyatta favoured the West, and had especially close links to Britain. Recent scholarship has stressed the importance of the Cold War in contexts beyond the superpowers or their most obvious allies. 2 Following Westad, historians' attention has turned to the global nature of the Cold War. 3 For African countries, the Cold War could be beneficial in giving the continent a significance for the international community that it might otherwise have lacked. In his study of Africa during the Cold War period, Reynolds has argued that Cold War competition 'offered African leaders and activists opportunities and options that simply had not existed a decade or two before'. 4 On this reading, this was in fact an advantageous time for decolonization to occur, as it gave increased opportunities to negotiate relationships. McKay, writing in 1966, even went so far as to suggest that 'although Africans often tell the West to "keep the Cold War out of Africa", some of them regard it as a blessing in disguise'. 5 The

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