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 the history of the Marxist-Leninist movement. Many Africans and members of the African diaspora were attracted to the institution because it offered free education and the opportunity to study in an environment where they were treated with dignity, free from the institutionalised racism present in the U.S. and British Empire. However, Kenyatta complained about the food, accommodation, and poor quality of English instruction. There is no evidence that he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and one of his fellow students later characterised him as "the biggest reactionary I have ever met." During his time in the country,