The Obamas Page 15

  The so-called Class B mandates covered all of the former German colonies in Africa. In German East Africa specifically, Ruanda and Urundi (now called Rwanda and Burundi) would be administered with the Belgian Congo, with the rest of Deutsch-Ostafrika falling under British military rule, consisting of the territory that would become known as Tanganyika.

  Despite the grandiose, paternalistic ideals behind the League of Nations, any ordinary African would be hard pressed the see the distinction between a “colony” and a “mandate.” As the historian Brian Digre has explained, mandates were simply “imperialism’s new clothes.”17 It would take another World War, when Africans again fought and died alongside Europeans, before there was any real progress toward self-governance for Africans. Even so, the end of the First World War marked a turning point in the history of East Africa, and a nascent independence movement was beginning to emerge.

  Between 1914 and 1918, Africans fought alongside their white masters, and the experience transformed the image that the black man had of the white. Previously, the European had been feared—he was a superhuman, capable of killing on a whim and curing at a stroke. Now, having spent four long and arduous years living, sleeping, and dying alongside white officers, often advising them in the secrets of jungle warfare, Africans realized there was nothing omnipotent about their colonial masters.

  They had also been introduced to the new technology of the European, as one postwar reporter noted:

  Men who a few years ago had never seen a white man, to whom the mechanism of a tap or a doorhandle is still an inscrutable mystery, have been trained to carry into action on their heads the field wireless or the latest quick-firing gun. Men of tribes which had never advanced so far in civilisation as to use wheeled transport, who a few years ago would have run shrieking from the sight of a train, have been steadied till they learned to pull great motor lorries out of the mud, to plod patiently along hardly stepping to one side while convoy after convoy of oxcarts, mule carts and motor vehicles grazed by them, till they hardly turned their heads at the whirr of passing aircraft.18

  For some young Luo warriors—as with many of the other African tribes—the white man’s war was traumatic. They had long known tribal war and death, but this European conflict was on a scale and magnitude far beyond anything they could have imagined. The rules of the white man’s war were also different from those of the African, and the traditional tribal taboos had been broken, leaving a persistent, lingering anxiety about the consequences. The African askaris had lived in huts and camps that were obviously cursed with the deaths of others, and they had witnessed horrific injuries and diseases inflicted on their comrades, who were then violated in death by being buried in mass graves with strangers.

  Some returning Africans could not face the future and took their own lives—suicide being a rare occurrence in Africa. Others were reluctant to talk about what they had experienced, for fear they would be banished from their community. Military doctors diagnosed the condition among the Africans as a mental illness similar to shell-shock, but circumstances and complaints differed both among individuals and among tribes. The Kikuyu in particular were badly affected, with many young men classified as temporarily insane. The Luo, of course, feared that because the bodies of their fallen comrades could never be buried in Luoland, their spirits would become demons—jachien.

  Onyango Obama was away from Nyanza for the whole of the war. After road duties he joined the British force that was pursuing the Germans south out of German East Africa. He also spent some time in Zanzibar, which was a British protectorate throughout the war years. There he encountered Islam for the first time. As a young boy he had been brought up to worship the Luo god Nyasaye, who was manifest in everyday things, including the sun, the moon, the lake, and some wild animals. At mission school he had been introduced to Christianity; he was baptized and even took the very English name of Johnson for a short time. But for Onyango, like many Africans at the time, the Christian message of love and compassion toward all men was difficult to reconcile with the white man’s apparent willingness to go to war. Onyango saw the Christian doctrine of showing mercy toward one’s fellow man as ambiguous, even a sign of weakness—nothing more than sentimental gibberish. So it is not surprising that Islam should have appealed to Onyango, who appreciated the structure and discipline it brought to his life.

  Members of Onyango’s family think there were other reasons behind his embrace of Islam. John Ndalo thought that at least part of the appeal was the women: “Onyango was an adventurous person and he went to many places, including during the First World War. He met many different people, including Muslims. He even married Muslim wives. So, he had a liking of the Muslim people and he had a liking of the Muslim ladies.”

  Charles Oluoch thought similarly:

  These Muslim ladies, they know how to treat men. Onyango was attracted to these Muslim ladies because they are different from our women. They are more submissive.

  The Christians, when they came, they believed that polygamy was wrong. But Muslims, they gave you the assurance that you can have even five wives.… So I think he found it to be more comfortable in Islam than Christianity.

  As part of his conversion, Onyango took the Arab name Hussein, which he later passed on to his eldest son, who in turn gave it to Onyango’s grandson, President Barack Hussein Obama. However, Onyango’s conversion to Islam was anathema to his family back home, who were adopting Christianity under the teachings of the Seventh-Day Adventists. Onyango seems to have taken satisfaction in being different, and no doubt he relished his independence.

  Onyango stayed in Zanzibar for a couple of years after the war and did not return to Kendu Bay until 1920. By this time, his family had given up any hope of seeing him alive—after all, he had been away for six years without making any contact. When he eventually returned home, he had to persuade them he was real: “See, this is the real Onyango—it is me!” he is claimed to have said.

  Hussein Onyango was still only twenty-five, and under normal circumstances he would have moved back to his father’s homestead and looked for a wife. But he was too proud to return, and besides, his faith now made him even more of an outsider in the eyes of his family. Instead he sought to establish a life for himself in Kendu Bay, away from his family. Fortunately, land was still available, so Onyango set about clearing an area some distance away from his father’s homestead where he could establish his own compound. He did not initially build himself a traditional simba, but chose instead to live in an army-issue tent. People thought that he was crazy, and this only added to his estrangement from his family.

  After demobilization thousands of young Africans returned home to find a society in turmoil. East Africa had not seen such a drain on manpower since the 1870s, when Arab slave traders had taken twenty-five thousand Africans a year. For more than four years the normal, supportive African village life had been in limbo; families were dislocated, aging parents neglected, farms abandoned. Young men returned—some of them ill, traumatized, or disabled—to find that their traditional way of life had gone. Meanwhile, their chiefs were rewarded for their loyalty to the British, first for recruiting young men and then for rounding up any deserters. Not surprisingly, the Africans blamed their colonial masters for their postwar problems.

  In south Nyanza, the war had disrupted a profitable trade with the region bordering German East Africa, and the population was suffering the consequences. In 1918 the rains had failed in western Kenya, bringing a famine in 1919. The Luo called the famine kanga, after the name of the returning soldiers, and an estimated 155,000 people in British East Africa died from starvation that year—three times the number of porters who died in the war. John Ndalo, who was a young child at the time, remembers the locust swarms that exacerbated the food shortages in Nyanza:

  The locusts used to invade this place. They came over the trees and they ate all the leaves and everything, and just left the trees as sticks.… There was no food for cattle and there was n
o food for people.

  We devised a method, because they were eating all our food. We said that we must eat them.… We’d come very early in the morning and collect them, and then we’d have to boil them for food, and they were very nutritious. Even now, we still eat the locusts—it’s called ongogo here. You put salt on them so they are tastier.

  If famine and locust swarms were not enough, the Spanish influenza pandemic was sweeping the world in the aftermath of war. In the two years between 1918 and 1920 many more died of influenza worldwide than in four years of combat. The Scottish medical missionary Dr. Horace Philp estimated that in south Nyanza district alone five thousand people died from flu, and many more from smallpox and plague.19 Yet not a single trained medical doctor or pharmacist was available after the war to help the debilitated population of south Nyanza.

  The families of the war veterans also received little help from the authorities. Parents and wives who had lost their men hoped for compensation, but nothing was forthcoming. The government announced that unless the men had been officially registered (a procedure that was introduced only in 1915 and was not universal until 1923), no payment would be made, because it would be impossible to trace the relatives.

  Still other changes came after the war. In 1915 the government had accepted the white settlers’ demand for greater security of land tenure, extending the leases on their farms in the White Highlands from 99 to 999 years. The next year, the British increased the hut and poll taxes on the Africans to help pay for the war. After the end of hostilities, the British government formally annexed British East Africa, declared it to be a Crown colony, and renamed it Kenya* after the mountain in its center. The government also introduced new, onerous demands on the African population: laborers’ wages were reduced by a third; a certificate of identification—the kipande—was introduced to catch those who ran away from their employers; every male over sixteen was fingerprinted; direct taxation was increased to sixteen shillings a head; and women and girls were compelled to work on white-owned farms. Harry Thuku, a Kikuyu leader who founded the Young Kikuyu Association in 1921 to oppose colonial rule, explained in his autobiography how the women were recruited to work on the new farms:

  A settler who wanted labour for his farm would write to the DC [District Commissioner].… The DC sent a letter to the chief or headman to supply such and such a number, and the chief in turn had his tribal retainers to carry out this business. They would simply go to people’s houses—very often where there were beautiful women and daughters—and point out which were to come and work. Sometimes they had to work a distance from home and the number of girls who got pregnant in this way was very great.20

  The white population too experienced postwar changes, but these were much more favorably received. The introduction of a new soldier settlement scheme was designed to double the European farming population in Kenya. In order to accommodate the anticipated influx of white farmers, the government claimed a further five thousand square miles of the highlands—land taken mainly from the Kikuyu.

  By the early 1920s, Hussein Onyango had established his independence by building a proper homestead in Kendu Bay. His neighbors admired the fine hut he had built himself; he kept it scrupulously clean and filled it with fascinating objects that he had brought back from the war. Onyango only added to his mystique when he produced a small wooden box that could speak like a human. The whole community congregated to witness this miracle. One of the elders, his great-uncle Aguk, suggested they should destroy it, as it was obviously their ancestors who had come back to life—the voices could only belong to the much feared jachien. Onyango’s older brother Ndalo disagreed: instead, he said, they should take the box apart so that they could see the small people talking inside. Onyango patiently explained that the box was called a radio, and it allowed people to talk to one another across long distances. Some of the villagers were not convinced, and they insisted that they would never return to his house until he had cleansed his hut of the spirits with an animal sacrifice.

  On a later occasion, Onyango told the skeptical villagers that he could go to an office in Kisumu and talk to people in Nairobi. James Otieno, who is now a very old man living in K’ogelo, was a young boy at the time; he remembers people blowing horns and beating drums to call everyone together. Some of the men were heard murmuring that Onyango had gone completely mad, while others claimed that he had been turned into a witch. Some even accused him of using the story to lure Africans together so that they could be tricked into being sold to the white man. The bravest of the community left Kendu Bay early one morning and accompanied Onyango to the Kisumu railway station. From there he went to the telegraph office, where just as he had promised, a message came through from his white employers in Nairobi.

  Onyango had finished building his hut in K’obama, but the impoverished countryside of south Nyanza offered little to a restless young man. So he returned to Nairobi, where he began to build a reputation among the white colonialists as a reliable house servant and cook. In this respect Onyango resembled many Africans at this time who were obliged to work for cash to pay their taxes. Besides, rural life was hard in Luoland after the war, and Onyango thought himself better off in Nairobi, learning the white man’s ways. Sarah Obama claims that Onyango’s many employers during this time included Hugh Cholmondeley, the third Baron Delamere, de facto leader of the white community in Kenya and founding member of what became known as the “Happy Valley” set—a clique of wealthy British colonials whose pleasure-seeking habits involved riotous parties, drug taking, and wife swapping.

  Around the time that Hussein Onyango decided to work in Nairobi, his older brother, Ndalo, left Kendu Bay and returned to the ancestral home in K’ogelo, which his great-grandfather Obong’o had left in the 1830s. It was a major change for Ndalo—he had two wives and young children, and all his immediate family were in Kendu Bay. The circumstances surrounding his departure comprise a typical Luo story of squabbling and infighting. His grandson, Charles Oluoch, explained to me what happened:

  There were three sons, but Ndalo and Onyango were similar in character. Oguta—their youngest brother—was somebody very polite. But Ndalo was always aggressive and he was very boastful. He was told [by another Kendu Bay villager] he was jadak [a foreigner]—“You are disturbing us!” He was a very proud man. So he took his two wives and his cattle and he walked from here up to Alego [a distance of 80 miles].

  Moving onto the land his great-grandfather Obong’o had vacated nearly a hundred years previously, Ndalo cleared the land, planted his crops, and built huts for himself and his two wives. He also took to riding a bull around the village, looking very regal; this earned him the nickname “King George,” after the reigning British monarch. Here in K’ogelo at least, nobody could call him jadak.

  Two years later in 1922 Ndalo’s senior wife, Odero, gave birth to their second son, Peter Oluoch, who became father to Charles and his older brother, Wilson. When Peter was three, Ndalo and his two wives died unexpectedly, leaving Peter and his two siblings orphaned. People say that the three adults died very suddenly, within a couple of days of becoming ill, and K’ogelo villagers were convinced that a curse had been placed on the family and their homestead. In reality, the cause of their deaths was almost certainly smallpox. The disfigurement and pustules that form on the body of smallpox victims could only have added to the horror their neighbors felt at such a shocking family catastrophe, reinforcing the belief that witchcraft was the cause. A second tragedy was about to befall the family within days of their deaths, as Charles Oluoch explained: “When they died, my father was three years old, so it was around 1925. When people were wailing [at the funeral], he fell into the fire and he was burnt. And it was my aunt, who was called Drusilla, who was the one who rescued him from that fire. At the time he could not walk fully.” Peter Oluoch was scarred for the rest of his life.

  After the funeral, distant relatives of Ndalo offered to take care of the three young children, as is the Luo custo
m. But Hussein Onyango would have none of it, and despite not being married, he insisted on taking his two nephews and his niece with him back to Kendu Bay:

  Onyango took them and brought them back here [to Kendu Bay], to their grandmothers. When my father [Peter] was at school age, Onyango adopted him. So where he worked, all these whites, they knew him as the son of Onyango.… He also converted him to be a Muslim. Even these Muslims in Kendu Bay, they thought my father was the first son of Onyango.

  Odero [the eldest boy] stayed with his grandmother, but Onyango took my father. There was something he admired about him. You know, Onyango was a very harsh person—he’d call you and he’d like you to run. I think my father knew how to work Onyango.

  Onyango decided that Peter Oluoch should join him in Nairobi, where he would receive a better education than in Kendu Bay. However, the rest of the family were unanimously against the idea. After all, Onyango was considered to be a madman—or at best, very odd. How could he possibly look after a young boy when he didn’t even have a wife? But Hussein Onyango had made up his mind, and together they left to take the ferry from Kendu Bay to Kisumu. Distraught, the women of K’obama followed them down to the jetty, and one—who was more hysterical than most—threw herself into the waters of Winam Gulf as the boat left for Kisumu, in a last-minute attempt to rescue Peter.

  The early 1920s saw the beginnings of a grassroots rebellion against the colonial government, both in Nyanza and in the Kikuyu lands. In 1921 Harry Thuku founded the Young Kikuyu Association to protest against unreasonable taxation and the much reviled kipande system. Kipande, which literally translates to “a piece,” referred to a small steel cylinder containing identity papers that every African laborer had to wear constantly if he hoped to find employment. The following year, Thuku founded the East African Association, which campaigned against the forced labor of women and girls. But both efforts were short lived. Thuku was arrested for his political activities on March 14, 1922, and exiled, without charge, to the remote Northern Frontier province. He remained there for the next nine years.