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  Although Onyango had a reputation as a strict disciplinarian with a fiery temper, he was also generous with his family. The Luo have a saying, pand nyaluo dhoge ariyo—an old knife has two edges—and this certainly applied to Onyango; he could be violent and cruel, but also generous and supportive. As a young man, John Ndalo knew Onyango well:

  I have known Onyango since I was very young. He was a very interesting man. He did not want any friends—everybody had to be under him, not above him. He had a very strict set of rules about where you would sit. He would even whip you—friends and visitors—if you did not do what he said. He had a lot of influence. He was well known all around the area—he was known even fifty miles away!

  I have lived here [in Kendu Bay] all my life, but I worked in Nairobi for the whites in big hotels, and also at the airport. Hussein Onyango taught us how to work … he moved me to Nairobi in 1941 and found me a job. He did not want us to be lazy. He always said, “If you do a good job for the white man, then he will always pay you well.” Many whites loved him because he was a good worker.

  By the end of the 1930s Hussein Onyango was a committed Anglophile: he dressed like a white man, he behaved like a white man, and he even had dentures fitted to replace the six teeth that had been removed during his initiation into Luo adulthood. From his time in Nairobi, he had developed a deep respect for the British, although it was more a reverence for the power, organization, and discipline that they brought to Africa than any real emotional attachment. Charles Oluoch adamantly denied that Hussein Onyango, deep down inside, might have wanted to be British:

  No! He was proud to be a black man. But he admired the British because of their openness, and that is why he did their things. Onyango never liked somebody who lies. He liked people who were truthful to him, and that is why he was very close to my father, because my father would always tell him the truth. If he asks you, “Where have you been?” you tell him exactly where you were. The British liked people who were truthful, and if you were truthful, then they would promote you and give you things. So Onyango admired them.

  But Onyango’s unpredictable nature eventually led to an acrimonious split with Charles Oluoch’s father, Peter. Onyango had adopted Peter when he was young and wanted him to have the best education he could find. So he enrolled Peter in a top school in Kisii, where Onyango was working at the time. Peter was twelve or fourteen, so this must have been in the mid-1930s. One day Peter was sent out on an errand, but he dropped the coins Onyango had given him. When he got home, rather than lie and tell Onyango that the money had been stolen, Peter admitted that he had lost the coins somewhere. Onyango was furious and beat Peter until his back bled. Peter was shocked at the injustice—after all, he had owned up to a small mistake, so why was he being beaten? Disillusioned, Peter ran away back to Kendu Bay. Onyango followed him to bring him back, but by the time he arrived at the family compound, Peter had already left for Kisumu and would have nothing more to do with Onyango.

  September 1, 1939, marked the beginning of another global conflict. More than 100 million military personnel were mobilized around the world, and in East Africa, the British conscripted 323,483 African troops into the King’s African Rifles. This time, instead of fighting in East Africa, the KAR saw action against Italian forces in Ethiopia and against the Japanese in Burma.24 Even though he was now in his mid-forties, Hussein Onyango joined the KAR for a second time in 1940. According to Sarah, he saw service in both theaters:

  The white man he was working for was called Major Batson.… They went to Addis Ababa, they went to India and Burma and everywhere. He was old, but he was a man who could cook very well and they liked him. He was a cook, but when the enemies came, he had to put on all the uniform and he was ready for combat.

  When Onyango was on active service in Burma, he claimed to have met and married another wife. Onyango might have had a rather casual attitude about what exactly constituted a marriage, but he returned from overseas with a framed photograph of the woman, which Sarah Obama still keeps in her hut in K’ogelo.

  This second European conflict was another turning point for the Africans. When they went to war for the British, they were told that they were fighting for liberty and freedom from repression. After hostilities ended, they came home with high expectations. They looked forward to being granted freedom in their own country, and to the end of British rule. But Hussein Onyango, Peter Oluoch, and hundreds of thousands of other Kenyan soldiers returned to a country that offered little hope and even less opportunity. They had saved their army wages, but their attempts to start small businesses were thwarted by the imposition of petty colonial rules and regulations. The ex-soldiers became disillusioned, and that made them dangerous.

  For the British, the war marked the end of empire and the beginning of the end of colonial rule in Kenya. But disengagement would take another eighteen years, and once again Onyango Obama would be drawn into a conflict of interests between the white men he admired and his own people.

  Onyango returned from the war early, in 1941, and that year he married Sarah. Shortly after, Onyango moved his family back across the Winam Gulf to his family’s ancestral home in K’ogelo. Onyango’s great-grandfather Obong’o had left K’ogelo around 1830 and moved south to Kendu Bay because of overpopulation and constant fighting between the subclans; Onyango’s older brother, Ndalo, returned to K’ogelo after the Great War, only to die along with his wives from smallpox, leaving three young children orphaned (including Peter Oluoch). But in the early 1940s, Onyango had no close relatives living in K’ogelo, so it was no small matter for him to leave Kendu Bay and return to his ancestral village with his two wives and young children. Once again, the reason for this family upheaval was Onyango being his usual hotheaded self.

  By 1943 Hussein Onyango was nearly fifty years old, a wealthy middle-aged man, well respected within the community by all accounts, with two wives, three young children, and his extended family living around him. The problem started, apparently, with a football trophy. At the time, Onyango was working for the local British district commissioner, a man called William. (Nobody can remember his last name.) William knew that the local boys were passionate about playing soccer, so he gave Onyango a trophy—really more of a bell than a cup—and suggested that Onyango should organize the local soccer teams to play in a tournament, presenting the winning side with the trophy.

  John Ndalo explained how things suddenly went so terribly wrong: “Onyango was very proud of the trophy and he wanted to call it the ‘Onyango Cup.’ The local chief, Paul Mboya, did not like this and he insisted on renaming it the ‘Karachuonyo Cup,’ after the name of the local district. Onyango was furious—he could not be told what to do by another African. He thought he was better than other Africans.”

  Onyango and Mboya had crossed swords several times before, including over the recruitment of forced labor in the 1930s, and also over the abduction of Akumu—it was Mboya who had had him arrested over that episode. Now Onyango was challenging the chief’s position again, and insults were exchanged between Mboya, who was trying to impose his authority on the situation, and the fiercely proud and argumentative Hussein Onyango. They must have been like two old bulls fighting in a field—and neither one of them was prepared to back down:

  Mboya became very angry and he accused Onyango of being jadak—a settler [because his family had moved to the area three generations previously]. Onyango was furious! “I know my roots,” he said, and he immediately went back home and told his family that they were leaving. Samuel Dola was one of Onyango’s best friends—he was the previous chief before Mboya—and when Dola heard what had happened, he ran to Onyango’s house and beseeched him to stay. But Onyango had made up his mind and he would not change it, so he packed up and left. He gave away all his possessions and left the village and went back to K’ogelo.

  It was exactly the same insult that Onyango’s brother Ndalo had heard more than twenty years previously—and Onyango’s response was the same. Not sur
prisingly, neither of Onyango’s wives wanted to leave Kendu Bay, especially not because of a ridiculous argument about the name of a football trophy. Sarah claims she was young and adaptable and was prepared to move—one family friend indelicately explained there was “hot love” there—and Onyango had little trouble persuading her to go. However, Akumu strongly opposed the idea of moving, and this only made her frequent arguments with Onyango worse. Her family intervened and eventually prevailed upon her to go for the sake of her children: they needed their mother, and Onyango was going to take them to K’ogelo whether Akumu went or not. Onyango’s move to K’ogelo created a division in the Obama family that still exists today, intensified by the fact that the family in K’ogelo are all Muslim, like Onyango, while the Obamas who stayed behind in Kendu Bay remain Seventh-Day Adventists. And that is why Onyango lived out the last of his days in K’ogelo, and why both he and Barack senior are buried there today, instead of in Kendu Bay.

  Nobody is quite sure exactly when Onyango moved to K’ogelo with Akumu and Sarah, but Paul Mboya stepped down in 1946, so the argument over the trophy must have happened before then. Sarah gave birth to her first child, Omar, in K’ogelo in June 1944, so the family probably moved in late 1943, a couple of years after the birth of Hawa Auma. The first thing that Onyango did when he arrived in K’ogelo was to claim his brother’s old compound, which had sat empty for over twenty years. Even though Ndalo and his two wives had died there in 1925, the local people still thought the homestead was bewitched and they would have nothing to do with it. Their superstitions did not deter Onyango; perhaps he even relished the chance to prove everybody wrong and show that he was stronger than the curse of any local witch doctor.

  With his difficult temperament, Onyango soon made his mark in this tightly knit community. Word spread quickly that the family were living in Ndalo’s blighted compound with no adverse effects. This was seen as a bad omen and a threat to the well-being of the village, and the local people summoned their local witch doctor—the uyoma—to finish him off. The locals seem to have genuinely believed that their uyoma had caused the deaths of Ndalo and his two wives and was not a man to be crossed. The uyoma, for his part, probably boasted of his part in the death of these three adults, making the most of his “success” for years. The stage was set for a confrontation between the most powerful witch doctor in the community and a headstrong disbeliever.

  The uyoma arrived with his supernatural paraphernalia and cast his spells over the family compound while Onyango looked on, unimpressed. When the uyoma had finished, Onyango walked up to him, took away his magical tools, beat him up, and threw him out of his compound. The neighbors, appalled at Onyango’s audacity, waited patiently for the most horrible curse to befall the family. But nothing happened, and Onyango’s reputation went from strength to strength.

  Nor was this the only confrontation Onyango had with a uyoma. On another occasion a local witch doctor was sent from outside the area to kill one of the neighbors in K’ogelo following a dispute over a girl. Onyango’s reputation was now rock solid in the community, and he was asked to intervene. Picking up his whip and his panga—a broad-bladed machete—he waited on the roadside for the uyoma to arrive.

  Sarah Obama recalls that Onyango confronted the uyoma: “If you are as powerful as you claim, you must strike me now with lightning. If not, you should run, for unless you leave this village now, I will have to beat you.”25 No lightning strike was forthcoming, so Onyango did as he threatened and beat up the uyoma, then took away his case of medicines. The uyoma had never been confronted like this before, and he was taken by surprise. He turned to the elders and threatened to bring a curse down on the whole village unless his medicine case was returned. But Onyango stood his ground, repeating: “If this man has strong magic, let him curse me now and strike me dead.”

  Once again, nothing happened and the neighbor kept his girl. But this time Onyango made a very clever move: he befriended the uyoma and took him back to his hut, where Sarah fed him boiled chicken. Before sending him on his way, he insisted that the uyoma explain to him how all his potions worked. Onyango, already an experienced herbalist, wanted to learn new techniques from another expert. He had befriended the British, learned how they worked, and used the knowledge to his own advantage; now he did the same with his own people, learning new things about the properties and powers of plants.

  One other story about Onyango says much about his temperament. Barack Obama junior heard the family anecdote from his stepaunt Zeituni on his first visit to Kenya in 1987.26 According to Zeituni (who was a young girl at the time), a neighbor started to walk across Onyango’s land with his goat on a leash; it was a shortcut that he frequently took. Onyango stopped the man and said: “When you’re alone, you are always free to pass through my land. But today you can’t pass, because your goat will eat my plants.” The man insisted that because his goat was on a leash, he could control it and not allow it to eat any vegetation. The two men argued, and Onyango called Zeituni to bring “Alego”—his pet name for one of his pangas. “I will make a bargain with you. You can pass with your goat. But if even one leaf is harmed—if even one half of one leaf of my plants is harmed—then I will cut down your goat also.”

  The man decided to take a chance and he walked across Onyango’s land, closely followed by the old man and his young daughter. Zeituni recalls that they had taken barely twenty steps before the inevitable happened and the goat started to nibble a plant. With one swift stroke, Onyango decapitated the goat: “If I say I will do something, I must do it,” said Onyango, “otherwise how will people know that my word is true?” The neighbor was furious, and he took his complaint to the village elders to arbitrate. Although they were sympathetic to the owner of the goat, they had to agree that Onyango was in the right, because the neighbor had been warned about the consequences of allowing his goat to eat the vegetation.

  The story said a lot about the simple, black-and-white way in which Onyango saw things. I related the tale to John Ndalo and asked him if he thought it was true. He looked at me slightly bewildered at first before shrugging and saying, “That sort of thing happened all the time with Onyango!”

  *The white Kenyans pronounce the name KEE-nyer, whereas the black Kenyans prefer KEHN-yuh.

  7

  A STATE OF EMERGENCY

  KUDHO CHUOYO NG’AMA ONYONE

  A thorn only pricks the one who steps on it

  The township of Oyugis lies to the south of Kendu Bay and straddles the primary trucking route from Kisumu to Kisii. To the first-time visitor, this typical ramshackle Kenyan town is total chaos. Dangerously overloaded minibuses—the ubiquitous matatus—screech to a halt every few minutes to squeeze even more passengers inside; pedestrians risk life and limb every time they cross the road, first dodging a fuel tanker from one direction, then a pair of speeding matatus jostling for position from the other. You can buy almost anything on the main street: beautiful ripe fruit, a secondhand T-shirt, a bottle of warm beer, or a woman for the afternoon. Oyugis has a reputation for having one of the highest HIV/AIDS mortality rates in East Africa. It is also well known as the home of some of the best coffin makers in western Kenya.

  Down the side streets leading off the main road, life is a little safer, as the potholed dirt roads force even the most reckless drivers to slow down. Here you find the smaller businesses—dressmakers, food stalls, and corner shops selling telephone credit. On most days an old woman sits here selling charcoal by the side of the road; on a good day, she makes $2 profit. Her name is Hawa Auma Hussein Onyango, wife of the late David Magak, and she is the closest living blood relative to the president of the United States:

  I am the daughter of Hussein Onyango Obama and the sister of Barack Obama senior and the aunt of the president. His first child was Sarah Nyaoke, the second was Barack, and the third is me. I was born in 1942 in the Kendu Bay area. We migrated to K’ogelo when I was still young. I was still being fed on the breast.

  I first met Aum
a at the Obama inauguration party in Kendu Bay, when she introduced herself in a torrent of incomprehensible Dholuo. She told me in no uncertain terms that it was my duty to write about the forgotten Obamas of Kendu Bay. She has one of the biggest toothless smiles in the world, and she instantly became one of my favorite Kenyan “aunts.” The day after the inauguration party, I went to see her in her small hut, a half-hour walk from the center of Oyugis. She told me that she was too young to remember living in Kendu Bay, but she remembers life in the family compound in K’ogelo, with her father, his two wives, and her two older siblings:

  When my father left the army [in 1941], he came back and became a professional cook. He used to work for the whites in Nairobi until he came back to K’ogelo to retire. My father was a friend toward the British, and they would come and visit us on motorcycles and using cars. They were very good friends. He loved all the whites and they loved him.

  We had a very big home, a typical African home, with all the family there. There used to be so many. Many cousins have since died, which has reduced the number. There were five houses there, five huts, for the first mother, the second mother, the girls, Barack’s house, and Baba’s [Father’s].

  In those days there was no water in the compound as there is today. We had to fetch water down by the river. We would have to walk about two miles for the water. There were crocuta [spotted hyena]—these were very common. Even if you went out with two or three others, they would come and attack you. They always went for your buttocks. So we could not go out by ourselves.