3 “In the Spirit of Harambee!” Kenyan Student Unions in the German Democratic Republic and Yugoslavia, 1964–68

Situated above the signatures of the newly-minted executive committee, this phrase concludes the first official record of correspondence of the Kenya Students Union (KSU) in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). At the core of this phrase was a request: to retain, and in some ways expand, the nature of their status as Kenyan students studying abroad while also articulating a more robust and charged vision of the significance of their education to the nationbuilding program at home. Dated October 1, 1964, the letter was addressed to none other than Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta himself. In naming harambee (a Kiswahili term typically translated as “pull[ing] together”) the authors invoked the official rhetoric of the nascent Kenyatta regime, which had the year prior began using the term as “an appeal not only for self-help but for national unity as well.”3 The purpose of the KSU’s letter was to notify the independent Kenyan government, only a year and some months old at this point, of the formation of a new students’ union whose membership was open to all Kenyans studying in the GDR. The KSU was not the first students’ union to service Kenyans studying in East Germany. It is unclear in the historical record exactly when and how the Kenyan students whose lives this chapter explores had arrived in their respective