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Born on the 15th August 1930 to Leonard and Marcella Ndiege in a place called Kilima Mbogo, about an hour drive from Nairobi, Thomas Joseph Mboya was one of the most charismatic and progressive politicians Kenya had in the years leading to independence and also during the post-colonial era. Mboya was educated at various Catholic mission schools and enrolled at Catholic Secondary School, now St. Mary’s School in Yala, Nyanza Province. He later attended the Holy Ghost College, now Mang’u High School in 1946 and qualified well enough to join Cambridge School and do his Certification. Upon his graduation in 1956, he returned to Kenya and joined politics at a time when the Mau Mau uprising was fighting a losing battle with the British government.

There was not much representation of Africans in the Legislative Council (LEGCO), which consisted of fifty members, but there were only eight African leaders. This resulted to Mboya forming the Peoples’ Congress Party (PCP) in 1957.

Due to similar views shared about Pan-Africanism between Mboya and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, a great friendship emerged. Pan-Africanism movement was gearing towards the unification and oneness of all the Africans, both within and out of Africa. In 1958, during the All-African Peoples' Conference in Ghana, convened by Kwame Nkurumah, Mboya was elected as the Conference Chairman at the age of 28. Mboya’s personal life was now beginning to scale the heights and so was his popularity. Known as an African Nationalist, Mboya coordinated an "airlift" in 1959 of 81 Kenyan students to the USA to attend college. With the help of Dr. Martin Luther King, the African American Students Foundation and its sponsors, Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, and Sidney Poitier, Mboya raised sufficient funds to cover the students' travel expenses. One of the students was a certain Barack Hussein Obama Senior, the late father of US President Barack Obama. This rally was in Washington DC, 1959. In 1960 the Kennedy brothers joined this project, after Mboya visited them for that purpose, and Airlift Africa was extended to Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. In Kenya, he became a prominent figure in the country’s politics - organizing protests against mass removals, detention camps, and secret trials.

Mboya campaigned for Kenyatta's release, duly achieved on 21 August 1961, after which Kenyatta took the limelight. Mboya was being groomed by Kenyatta as a potential successor, a possibility which deeply worried many of the Kikuyu elite. There had been an attempt on Mboya’s life in early 1969. By the middle of that year, Mboya found himself increasingly isolated on the domestic political scene. Internationally, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, an intimate friend and perhaps his biggest champion in the United States, was a big blow to Mboya. Mboya was gunned down on July 5, 1969 on Moi Avenue, Nairobi CBD after visiting a pharmacy. Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge was arrested, and convicted for the murder. It is said that as Nahashon was being lead away he said: “Why are you not going after the top men?” Mboya's death precipitated the most severe riots in post-independence Kenya's history and had deepened existing ethnic and political divisions to the point that they threatened to break the country apart. Allegations linking the assassin to prominent KANU party members were dismissed, and in the ensuing political turmoil Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, banned the opposition party, the Kenya People's Union (KPU), and arrested it's leader Oginga Odinga (who was also a leading Luo representative).

His personal and public life had transcended beyond the preoccupations of ethnic chauvinism and parochialism, had possessed the imagination to lead the country in a new direction and was gaining support from far and wide. He was founder of the Nairobi People's Congress Party, a key figure in the formation of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), a party which ruled Kenyan politics from independence to 2002. In 1960 Jomo Kenyatta was still being held in detention. In 1962, Mboya married Pamela Mboya, daughter of Walter Odede, a politician. They bore five children; Maureen Odero, Susan, Luke, Peter and Patrick Mboya. Luke and Peter were twins; they died after a motorbike accident in 2004, while Patrick died at four years of age. Pamela, Mboya’s wife, died in January, 2009 from an ailment.

During Mboya's burial, a mass demonstration against the attendance of President Jomo Kenyatta led to a big skirmish, with two people shot dead. The demonstrators believed that Kenyatta was involved in the death of Mboya, thus eliminating him as a threat to his political career although this is still a disputed matter. Mboya's role in Kenya's politics and transformation is the subject of increasing interest, especially with the coming into scene of American President Barack Obama. Obama has referred to Tom Mboya as his "Godfather". 

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