Eastern Socialist Countries Scholarships To Kenyans, Aeroflot And The Cold War Conflict, 1959-1970

Abstract

research was about the Kenyan students who went to study at the Socialist eastern and central European universiies from1959 to 1970, as Kenya was nearing her independence. The programme continued after independence. The programme was referred to as the Aeroflot scholarships programme and the discrimination some of the graduates faced upon their return to Kenya has been discussed. The main objective of the study was to research on why the the prospective students had to face difficulty by trekking along the way, simply because the then colonial government would not entertain such moves to go for studies in the communist east. The work also looked at the interplay of the cold war in the provision of the scholarships, given that a similar programme.otherwise referred to as Airlift, which took students to the west, in America. This work had two hypotheses one was that, the two scholarship programmes were not only out of humanitarian concern to Kenyans but were also a furtherance of competing political hegemony of western and eastern blocs and that the two scholarship programmes as supported by the eastern bloc and the capitalist west, was clear manifestations of the Cold War conflict in Kenyan. On methodology the work chose qualitative research method.On sampling the work used snow balling method, semi structured interview (free style) was used.This method is best for study like this one, because the questions flow is controlled by the researcher. This method allowed the work to get an in depth response from the respondents. The findings were that the two scholarships were meant to advance the supper powers preferd ideologies and that the colonial government never wanted anything to do with communism to come to kenya