The Obamas Page 13
Shortly before the line was completed in late 1901, the British Foreign Office had appointed a new governor. Sir Charles Norton Edgecumbe Eliot was an experienced career diplomat and a brilliant linguist who had previously served in Russia, Morocco, Turkey, and the United States. Eliot realized immediately that the Uganda Railway was a white elephant, but he also insisted that the protectorate had to be self-financing and that the railway would have to pay its full running costs. An arrogant, conceited man, Eliot held the indigenous Africans in contempt, calling them “greedy and covetous” and claiming the African “is far nearer the animal world than is that of the European or Asiatic.”27
In his search for ways to develop British East Africa and make it financially viable, Eliot effectively ignored the Africans in his plans, except as a source of tax. Instead of developing the local population, he proposed to resolve the fiscal problems of the railway by sending white settlers to colonize the rich land in the Kenyan highlands, where they would produce cash crops for export. (Other diplomats and politicians had different ideas about what to do with British East Africa, none of which involved the participation of the indigenous Africans. Lord Lugard, then high commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, suggested that British East Africa be given over to the Indians, and Harry Johnston, the new special commissioner in Uganda, even referred to Kenya as the “America of the Hindu.” The colonial secretary in London at the time, Joseph Chamberlain, even offered the protectorate to the European Jews as a permanent home.28 However, none of these competing ideas actually addressed the problem of paying for the railway, so Eliot’s plan prevailed almost by default.)
Eliot also introduced what was called a “hut tax”—a duty on every dwelling, payable in hard currency. If a man had several wives and several sons, then a tax was due on each of their houses. This was an iniquitous levy on a society that did not have a cash economy. In addition to raising money for the Uganda Railway, the tax also effectively forced the Africans to work for the British in order to earn the money to pay the colonial administration. The Africans bitterly resented the tax, which the Luo historian Bethwell Ogot claims set off the “beginning [of] rural-urban migration and the breakdown of the closely-knit family structure and values.”29
Critics in London asserted that Europeans had no moral or legal right to settle or colonize the Africans’ land, to which Eliot responded in his characteristically blunt manner:
There seems to be something exaggerated in all this talk about “their own country” and “their immemorable rights.” No doubt on platforms and in reports we declare we have no intention of depriving the natives of their lands, but this has never prevented us from taking whatever land we want for Government purposes, or from settling Europeans on land not actually occupied by natives.… We should face the undoubted issue, namely: that white mates black in a very few moves.… The sooner [the native] disappears and is unknown, except in books of anthropology, the better.30
By May 1901—less than four months after taking up his tenure in Nairobi—Eliot submitted his first annual report to the Foreign Office back in London, in which he greatly exaggerated the agricultural potential of British East Africa. Nevertheless, his report had the desired effect, and the colonization of the richest agricultural land in East Africa soon began. In 1903 the first large grants were made around Lake Naivasha in the central Rift Valley, regardless of the rights of the indigenous tribes in the area.
The colonial administration declared the land to the north of Nairobi and the central highlands around Mount Kenya to be Crown land, and by 1904 white farmers from Europe and South Africa began to arrive, lured by the promise of good farming land being sold off for a pittance. The original occupants of the land, predominantly the Kikuyu, Maasai, and Kalenjin, were moved off their tribal territories, and the incoming foreign white settlers qualified for a ninety-nine-year lease on their new farms. Eliot, eager to speed up the process, pursued even greater independence from London over the allocation of land. He claimed that “the enormous land appetites of the colonists, particularly South Africa, should be considered, and this, without wasting time on African interests.”31 Ever unapologetic, Eliot also wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne:
There can be no doubt that the Masai and many other tribes must go under. It is a prospect which I view with equanimity and clear conscience. [Masaidom] is a beastly, bloody system founded on raiding and immorality.32
Eventually this uncompromising attitude brought Eliot into direct conflict with the Foreign Office back in London, and he was forced to offer his resignation in 1904.
Despite Eliot’s departure, the settlement of what became known as the “White Highlands” continued. By 1905, 700 Afrikaner farmers had arrived from South Africa, together with more than 250 British and other settlers. Between 1904 and 1912 the South Africans outnumbered the British, and other Europeans arrived from a number of countries, including Finns and Jews. In contrast to the pattern of colonization in other parts of the British Empire, the availability of cheap local labor meant that these newcomers never intended to perform manual labor themselves. Instead, they were determined to become planters—managers who would oversee the Africans doing the hard labor. As John Ainsworth, one of the early colonists, wrote in 1906, “White people can live here and will live here, not … as colonists performing manual labour, as in Canada and New Zealand, but as planters, etc., overseeing natives doing the work of development.”33
Wealthy British families used their strong political connections to buy up huge areas of land, and by 1912 just five families owned 20 percent of all the land held by whites. The population of white settler-farmers in British East Africa rose from just thirteen in 1901 to nearly ten thousand in 1921. By then 20 million acres (about one-eighth of the country) had been designated as “native reserves,” and more than 7.5 million acres—by far the best-quality farming land—had been taken by the white farmers. The Maasai reserve, for example, was only one-tenth of the area the tribe had occupied prior to 1883.
In the ten years between 1895 and 1905, British East Africa grew from an isolated backwater to a colonial protectorate bigger in area than metropolitan France. Controlled by an administration that was prepared to use ruthless force where necessary, the Africans now paid taxes to live in their own homes, steamboats sailed on Lake Victoria, telegraph lines crossed the land, and a railway connected the ocean to the interior. Into this world of dramatic change a young Luo male was born; his name was Onyango Obama, second son of Obama and Nyaoke, grandson to Opiyo, and later grandfather of the president of the United States.
Onyango belonged to the very last generation of Luo to be raised in an independent Luoland. He started life in an Iron Age society whose people were catapulted into the twentieth century in less than a generation. Onyango would fight in two world wars, witness a bloody national revolt against the colonial rulers, and eventually see his country gain independence from white rule. But for his first few years, he grew up like any other young Luo male, in a world that was tough, uncompromising, and narrowly defined. Already his family’s cattle had been decimated by a decade of bovine infections, his father and five wives had struggled through the 1889 famine with young children, and now an epidemic of smallpox was rampaging through the region. Many Luo families had been forced to move on, but Onyango’s father, Obama, elected to stay in the family homestead in Kendu Bay.
When Onyango was nine a new influx of white people arrived in Nyanza whose influence on the lifestyle of the Luo would match that of the British administrators: the Christian missionaries. Although Anglican and Catholic missionaries had worked in East Africa for several decades, most of their stations were concentrated in central Uganda. The new missionaries came from a very different branch of Christianity: the Seventh-Day Adventists (SDAs), an evangelical Christian church that observes Saturday as the Sabbath and puts strong emphasis on the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ. The Seventh-Day Adventists were late on the scene in Kenya
and only established their first mission in 1906. Under the leadership of a Canadian missionary, Arthur Asa Grandville Carscallen, the Church focused its attention on the region around the eastern shores of Lake Victoria, where it established seven mission stations.34
Upon arriving in Kisumu in November 1906, Carscallen did not receive the reception he had been expecting. A colonial official told him that they had missionaries of all shapes and sizes, and with all sorts of labels, and the last thing they needed was any more. Undeterred, he began to scout for a suitable place to establish his first mission, and his first trip took him to Kendu Bay:
Brother Enns, Brother Nyambo and myself took a small launch here and crossed over to the southern shores of the Kavirondo Bay where we pitched our tent close to the water’s edge until we could have a look around the country. After a few days’ search we decided to locate on a hill about two miles back from the bay. From this hill we have a fine view in every direction.…
The country here is very thickly settled with a most friendly class of natives. We can stand on our hill and count about two hundred villages, each of the nearest ones sending us a present of at least a fowl. The natives have made friends with us quite quickly, and we now have a good deal of company every day.… Whenever [the chiefs] come they bring us some little present. One brought a fine sheep the other day. Another, who wants two boys educated, brought us a fine young bullock, nearly full grown, to pay for the education of the boys. Other missionaries say it is best to take something that way from the chiefs as it makes people feel that the education is worth something.35
John Ndalo was born eighteen years after Arthur Carscallen established his mission in Kendu Bay, and like many of the residents of the area, he was baptized as a Seventh-Day Adventist. He recalls his father telling him about the arrival of the first missionaries:
When they first came, there was an old man called Mr. Ougo. He was the first person to see them. So they asked Ougo to give them a place where they could settle. So in that place called Gendia, that’s where they put their tent. Mr. Ougo was the owner of all that land, and he gave them a place to stay.
So these missionaries started getting into people’s homes, to tell them about this foreign god. Initially, they were very suspicious of these white men. But you know, the white man knows how to go about making friends, giving them sweets and so on. But some of the Africans were very proud, so they said, “Forget about the white man”—some of them were taking bhang, so they were very strong-headed.
Then they began by building a small settlement with a school, where they started teaching people the word of God. But there was a language barrier because people couldn’t understand them. So they started teaching the older people of about thirty years of age, teaching them English so they could communicate.
An accomplished linguist, Arthur Carscallen soon mastered the Dholuo language (which in itself was no mean feat), and he went on to create the first written language and dictionary for the Luo people. He even imported a small printing press, which he used to produce a Luo grammar textbook, and spent several years translating parts of the New Testament into Dholuo. (This original press is still used today in the SDA mission in Gendia.) With textbooks, the Luo could receive a formal education. The Seventh-Day Adventists also stress the importance of good diet and health, so one of the mission’s objectives was to establish a free clinic where they treated malaria, cholera, and other diseases. They even made house calls.
A year after arriving in Luoland, Carscallen was joined by his fiancée, Helen. As an accomplished seamstress, she was less concerned about the lack of a written language and more troubled by the lack of any clothing worn by the locals. Determined to change the situation, she began to grow cotton, and made her own fabric to clothe the Africans. However, John Ndalo recalls that his older relatives found the new clothing provided by the missionaries had several disadvantages over their traditional attire, especially when it came to ease of access for certain bodily functions:
They used to wear skins, so when the white man came, they started to give them clothes. They had a very hard time with these clothes, because every time they wanted to go for a “long shot,” they had a big problem taking off their clothes. It was difficult to handle the European clothes, so we were struggling for a long time. We could not get them on, and they tried very hard to get people to wear them by giving us sweets and sugar. But people refused because they didn’t want to wear them, they were cumbersome to us.
The missionaries’ stalwart independence and focus on corporeal as well as spiritual matters brought them into conflict with some of the local traders who were trying to establish a presence in the region. Richard Gethin, the first British trader to settle permanently in Kisii, in south Nyanza, complained that Carscallen and his other missionaries were “more interested in trading in buffalo hides” than in saving souls. He also claimed that their mission houses, far from being havens of spiritual devotion and learning, were used mainly to store skins and other trade goods for export:
Preaching of the Gospel was conspicuous by its absence. Carscallen would see an old Jaluo [Luo] native asleep in the shade of a tree. He would approach him, put his hands on his head and if he still slept, give him a kick on the backside saying, “Son you are saved and you can thank the Lord it is me who has saved you; if it were one of the others you would be condemned to terrible torture when you died.” With this, the convert would be roped into carrying a load on the next safari.36
For the young Onyango Obama, the arrival of the white missionaries provided an exciting diversion from the monotony of village life. Onyango was only eleven when Carscallen established his first mission in Gendia, but according to Onyango’s last wife, Sarah, he was fascinated by these white strangers from the beginning.37 Sarah says that Onyango was always different from the others, even as a young boy. As a child he would wander off by himself for days on end and nobody would know where he had been—nor would he tell them anything when he got back. He was always very serious as a child; he never laughed or joked around, or even played games with the other children. He was, and would always remain, an outsider.
But Onyango had a great strength, and that was his curiosity. He wanted to learn about and understand everything around him. This innate inquisitiveness drew him to the white missionaries like iron to a magnet. At a time when most of the Africans were doing their best to ignore these new visitors, thinking that, like the Arab traders, their presence would be only temporary, Onyango went off alone to find out more about these strange new people who had come to live in Luoland. Nobody in the family can recall how old Onyango was when he left, but he must have been only in his early teens, perhaps fourteen or fifteen—old enough to wander away from home alone, but young enough to return before the outbreak of the 1914 war.
Nobody in his family knew what had happened to him; for all they knew, he could have been taken by a leopard or bitten by a deadly snake. During Onyango’s absence, life in Kendu Bay carried on as it had done for generations: the older girls slept together in the siwindhe and learned from their grandmother, and the boys tended the livestock and joined their father in his simba to talk long into the night about heroic deeds of past warriors. Then, after several months’ absence, Onyango returned to his father’s compound wearing long trousers and a white shirt. In a household where no one wore more than a piece of animal skin to cover their genitals, a young black boy dressed like a white man was deeply shocking. Onyango’s father was convinced that his son had broken a strict tribal taboo and had been circumcised; after all, why would anyone wear trousers except to cover this humiliation? And his shirt? Surely he wore this to cover an illness or sores on his body—after all, venereal disease was not uncommon among the white man, or perhaps he had caught smallpox and was contagious. Sarah claims that Onyango’s father, Obama, turned to his other sons and said, “Don’t go near this brother of yours. He is unclean.” His brothers laughed at Onyango and had nothing more to do with him. Rejected by h
is family, the young man turned his back on village life in Kendu Bay and returned to Kisumu. Onyango would remain estranged from his father for many years.
By 1914 the new taxes and cash crops had made Nyanza the most successful and prosperous of the provinces in British East Africa, and its few roads and other transportation systems were considered to be the best in the region. In the fiscal year 1909–10, the tonnage shipped along the railway to Mombasa was nearly double that of the previous year, and this grew by an additional 45 percent the following year.38
However, in Luoland, people were still bitter over the punitive wars waged against them at the turn of the century, the imposition of the hut tax, and the forced labor on road construction and settlers’ farms; these grievances were compounded by the paternalistic attitude of the missionaries. In response, a unique local religious cult was growing in popularity in central Nyanza. Rooted in the traditional Luo religion, Mumboism helped focus local opposition to the white man. At its worst, the movement could be brutal—its followers vowed to sever the arms of those found wearing European clothes, and threatened to transform whites and their allies into monkeys.39
According to the religion’s followers, the Mumbo spirit serpent used Onyango Dunde of the Seje clan in Alego as a Luo prophet. Onyango claimed to have been swallowed by the serpent which, after a short time, spat him out unhurt.40 The giant snake then gave Onyango a message to pass on to his people:
I am the god Mumbo whose two homes are the Sun and in the Lake. I have chosen you to be my mouth-piece. Go out and tell all Africans … that from henceforth I am their God. Those whom I choose personally and also those who acknowledge me will live forever in plenty.… The Christian religion is rotten and so is its practice of making its believers wear clothes. My followers must let their hair grow never cutting it. Their clothes shall be the skins of goats and cattle and they must never wash.41