Jomo Kwame Sundaram Named after two African anti-colonial leaders, Jomo was born in Penang, Malaysia, soon after the first Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta was incarcerated by the British in late 1952 and years after the first Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah served as Secretary of the Pan-African Congress. He spent his early years studying at Westlands Primary School (1959–63), the Penang Free School (1964–66) and the Royal Military College (1967–70), when he was selected as Malaysia's delegate to the World Youth Forum in 1970. After graduating cum laude from Yale with a major in economics, Jomo went to the Kennedy School of Government at
Jomo Kenyatta East Africa, Kenyatta relocated to Nairobi where he worked in a store selling farming and engineering equipment. In the evenings, he took classes in a Church Mission School. Several months later he returned to Thika before obtaining employment building houses for the Thogota Mission. He also lived for a time in Dagoretti, where he became a retainer for a local sub-chief, Kioi; in 1919 he assisted Kioi in putting the latter's case in a land dispute before a Nairobi court. Kenyatta wanted a wife, although his first attempt failed when it was revealed that his proposed bride was related to