The Obamas Page 19
As he was moving to senior classes, he became rude and arrogant. He did not like to do the manual work, like when the boys were clearing the bush or working the plow.… This developed friction between him and the principal, because at the school, the work was done communally and collectively. The teacher may assign you [the task] to go and clear an area of the school where grass was overgrown, but Barack didn’t like doing these things.
At Maseno, when Obama senior was in form three and progressing well as one of the top students, something strange happened. Some of the senior boys wrote a nasty letter, accusing and outlining some serious grievances the students had about the school administration. The letter was anonymous and unsigned. But because Barack Obama senior had been identified as the cleverest boy and politically minded, he became the prime suspect.
The principal was furious, and so was the board of governors. The school authority then threatened to invite the dreaded Special Branch Police [the directorate of security intelligence].
Obama senior got wind that he was to be investigated, and that handwriting experts had been summoned to the school to come and examine the offensive letter. So Obama left the school voluntarily. He was never expelled as such, but opted out of his own volition, leaving behind the belief by the other students that he’d had a hand in the authorship of the offending letter.
Barack would have been wise to have heeded the Luo proverb kudho chwoyo ng’ama onyone—“a thorn only pricks the one who steps on it.”
Hussein Onyango was furious with his son; after all, he and Sarah had saved every penny they had to give him the best education that was available to a black student in Kenya at the time, and Barack had thrown the opportunity away. Onyango’s response was predictable: he beat Barack with a stick until his back bled. Then, still angry, he effectively threw him out by sending him to work in Mombasa with the parting words “I will see how you enjoy yourself, earning your own meals.”2 Barack had no choice but to obey his father, and he left for Mombasa immediately.
Meanwhile, political and civil unrest had been brewing across the protectorate for several years, and Kenya was about to suffer one of the most deeply shocking and violent decades experienced by any British colony. The 1950s were dominated by the Mau Mau insurgency—a brutal and violent grassroots rebellion by Africans against white colonial rule. Like many such revolts in history, it started slowly. Ever since the 1920s the indigenous Africans had grown increasingly resentful over the way the white settlers had reduced their wages, and over the much reviled kipande—the identity card that was introduced after the First World War, without which no African could gain employment. (The white settlers frequently punished badly behaved workers by tearing up their kipande, making it impossible for them to find work elsewhere.)
The early 1920s had also seen the emergence of African political groups such as the Young Kikuyu Association, led by Harry Thuku, and the Young Kavirondo Association, founded by the Luo of Nyanza. However, the colonial government soon became concerned about what they considered to be “seditious” activities by the leaders of these organizations. On March 14, 1922, Harry Thuku was arrested in Nairobi and exiled for eight years, without charge or trial. Within two days of Thuku’s arrest, between seven thousand and eight thousand of his supporters protested outside the police station in Nairobi where he was detained. The police, armed with rifles and fixed bayonets, attempted to control the crowd; stones were thrown, shots were fired, and the crowd panicked. The official report into the incident claimed that twenty-one Africans were killed, including four women. Unofficial reports from staff at the mortuary claim that fifty-six bodies were brought in. The riot was the first violent political protest in Kenya’s history, but worse confrontations were to come, and the killings only added to the growing resentment among Africans that they had no hand in the governance of their own country.
In Luoland, a young teacher called Jonathan Okwiri established the Young Kavirondo Association in the same year as Thuku’s arrest. Among other things, the group also called for the abolition of the infamous kipande, a reduction in hut and poll tax, an increase in wages, and the abolition of forced labor.3 This time the colonial administration used less confrontational means to control the movement. They persuaded the Young Kavirondo Association to make W. E. Owen, the Anglican archdeacon of Kavirondo, their president; the authorities claimed that he would make an excellent intermediary to negotiate with the colonial government. Instead, Owen subverted their political initiatives and persuaded the group to focus on nonpolitical issues such as better housing, food, and hygiene. In a master stroke, he even convinced the group to change its name to the Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association, rendering what might have been a grassroots activist movement utterly impotent.
In the 1930s the issue of land ownership became the focus of even greater political dissent—perhaps even the crucial political grievance in Kenya, according to the historian David Anderson.4 This resentment had first taken root in 1902, when the first white settlers claimed the most fertile hills around Nairobi. Within three decades the settler farms had grown in size and fences were beginning to enclose them, which worsened the land shortage problem for the Africans, especially for the Kikuyu of central Kenya. What Anderson calls “the tyranny of property” only fueled the Africans’ sense of injustice, but the government continued to thwart Kikuyu attempts at political organization. A new group called the Kikuyu Central Association replaced the banned Young Kikuyu Association, but this too was outlawed in 1941 when the colonial government clamped down on African dissent during the Second World War.
Between 1939 and 1945 the colony was put on a war footing as Italian troops massed on Kenya’s northern border with Ethiopia and Somaliland. The British responded to this threat by sending the KAR north, and Hussein Onyango went with the force to Addis Ababa. But as the war came to a close, the colonial government turned its attention at last to improving political representation for Africans. In 1944 Kenya became the first East African territory to include an African on its Legislative Council. The government progressively increased the number of local representatives to eight by 1951, although none of them was elected; instead, they were appointed by the governor from a list of names submitted by the local authorities. Not surprisingly, this did not satisfy African demands for either political equality or democracy. Nor was the injustice of land ownership being addressed: in 1948, 1.25 million Kikuyu were restricted to living on just two thousand square miles of farmland, whereas thirty thousand white settlers occupied six times as much space.5 Inevitably, the most fertile land was almost entirely in the hands of the colonists.
The Kikuyu were led by Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta had lived in Britain throughout most of the 1930s, studying anthropology at London University and also traveling to other European countries as well as the Soviet Union. During his time abroad, he married an Englishwoman called Edna Clarke, who became his second wife. Shortly after returning to Kenya in September 1946, he became president of the newly formed Kenya African Union (KAU) and the leading advocate for a peaceful transition to African majority rule. The KAU, which had been established in 1944 to articulate local grievances against the colonial administration, attempted to be more politically inclusive than the banned Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) by avoiding tribal politics. However, the KAU progressively fell under Kikuyu domination until it was generally regarded as little more than a reincarnation of the KCA. Kenyatta’s powerful, domineering personality was resented by some of the political leaders, and especially by the Luo.6 This tension between the Kikuyu and the Luo was just the beginning of the deep-rooted problem of tribalism in Kenyan politics, a conflict that would eventually plunge the country into turmoil.
Some critics, especially among the Kikuyu, thought that Kenyatta’s approach was not producing results quickly enough. The land issue had caused thousands of Kikuyu to migrate into towns and cities in search of work; as a consequence, Nairobi’s population doubled between 1938 and 1952. Increasing pov
erty, rising unemployment, and growing urban overpopulation plagued the colony.
During the late 1940s the general council of the banned KCA began a campaign of civil disobedience to protest the land issue. Members took what were said to be traditional Kikuyu ritual oaths to strengthen their commitment to the secret group; the militants believed that if they broke their oaths, they would be killed by supernatural forces. These oathing rituals often included the sacrifice of animals or the drinking of animal blood. By 1950, what had begun as a peaceful movement to organize civil disobedience was getting out of hand. Rumors circulated among the British that members of the group indulged in cannibalism, bestiality with goats, and wild orgies, and that the ritual oaths included a commitment to kill, dismember, and burn white settlers. Although mostly either untrue or greatly exaggerated, these stories would help convince the British government to send troops out to Kenya in 1952 to support the colonists.
After the Second World War, Nairobi had become a fertile recruiting ground for the militants. The genteel colonial city of whitewashed government offices and luxury hotels was gradually becoming surrounded by squalid shanties and seedy slums, as more and more landless Africans moved into the city. With few jobs and fewer opportunities, many could not resist the temptation to drift into petty crime; in the absence of an effective police force, criminal gangs began to control the poor areas, and street crime, robbery, smuggling, and protection rackets increased alarmingly. As is so often the case, though, impoverished Africans, rather than wealthy white colonials, suffered most from the violence and crime. The Kikuyu gangs controlled the slums, and by early 1950 the Nairobi-based urban militants known as the Muhimu started to organize mass oathings throughout central Kenya. Guns and ammunition were plentiful throughout the colony, brought back by the seventy-five thousand Africans who had served in the King’s African Rifles during the war, and the Muhimu set about collecting whatever weapons they could find, in preparation for what they saw as an inevitable armed struggle to free themselves from colonial rule.
Nobody is really quite sure how the name Mau Mau came to be used for the insurgents who set themselves on a course of violence to achieve independence from the British. The Kikuyu never used the name to describe themselves, and some argue that the white settlers invented the name to ridicule the rebellion. Others maintain that the name refers to the mountains in the Rift Valley, where the rebellious Kikuyu took refuge during the hostilities; or it might have been a corruption of Muhimu. Still others claim it is an acronym for Mzungu aende ulaya—mwafrica apate uhuru, which, loosely translated from Swahili, means “The white man should return to Europe—the African should gain freedom.”7
As the Kikuyu had suffered most from the confiscation of their land by the white settlers, most of the violence during the Mau Mau period occurred in the White Highlands and the Rift Valley—the traditional home of the Kikuyu. However, the general state of unrest in the late 1940s and early 1950s had an unsettling effect throughout the colony, and in Nyanza the repercussions of the violence involved even Hussein Onyango.
In Dreams from My Father, President Obama relates the story told to him by his stepgrandmother Sarah of how her husband was arrested in 1949, during the very early years of the Mau Mau insurrection. Like many Luo in Nyanza, Onyango went to political meetings where there was much talk of independence. Although he believed in principle that independence was a good thing for the colony, he was skeptical whether it was really possible. Onyango warned his son Barack senior that it was unlikely that anything would come of the initiative:
“How can the African defeat the white man when he cannot even make his own bicycle?” he would say to Barack. “The white man alone is like an ant. He can easily be crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together. His nation, his business—these things are more important to him than himself. He will follow the leadership and not question orders. Black men are not like this. Even the most foolish black man thinks he knows better than the wise man. That is why the black man will always lose.”8
Onyango was not particularly politically minded, and in many ways he greatly admired the British. Yet despite his loyalty and long service to the British going back thirty years, he was arrested and interned during the early years of the troubles. In 1949 Onyango was accused of being a subversive by an African who harbored a long-standing grudge against him.
Mau Mau was not yet a serious threat to the colonial government, but the first rumblings of dissent were emerging from underground groups. Onyango’s accuser, so Sarah Obama claims, had been cheating people by charging them excessive taxes and then pocketing the surplus. This practice was far from unusual, as the local chiefs selected by the British wielded wide-ranging powers. According to Sarah, Onyango had challenged the man over his embezzlement, and the chief waited for a chance to take his revenge. He accused Onyango of being a supporter of the rebels, and her husband was arrested and taken away to a detention camp. The penal regime set up in the camps to deal with suspected Mau Mau supporters was brutal, and Sarah claims that Onyango sustained regular beatings at the hands of his keepers:
The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening until he confessed.… He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down.… That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies. My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.9
Nobody can be absolutely sure who it was that accused Hussein Onyango of supporting the Mau Mau, and Sarah Obama does not name him. However, one serious contender is Paul Mboya from Kendu Bay. Onyango had been at loggerheads with Mboya ever since Mboya had been appointed chief in central Karachuonyo around 1935, and Obama had later taken him to task over recruiting forced labor. Even though he had stepped down by 1946, Mboya still wielded considerable influence with the colonial authorities. Perhaps Mboya thought that he had at last extracted his revenge on Onyango for constantly challenging his authority in Kendu Bay.
Whoever was responsible, it was a traumatic period for Onyango. The old man remained in custody for over six months, and he certainly would have been interrogated by the Special Branch—in those early years of the Mau Mau uprising, the British were desperate to find out as much as they could about the emerging movement and any arrest was taken seriously. He was ultimately cleared of all charges and released, returning home a broken man—thin, dirty, with a head full of lice, and permanently scarred from his beatings in the detention center. From that day, Sarah Obama claims, Onyango became an old man.
By the middle of 1951 rumors of secret Mau Mau meetings in the forests outside Nairobi were beginning to filter back to the colonial government. In early 1952 there were arson attacks against white farmers in Nanyuki and also against government chiefs in Nyeri, both important towns in the White Highlands. However, attacks on the white settlers were rare, and the main violence was directed against other Africans who were seen as being “loyal” to the whites. In this respect, the Mau Mau insurrection was as much an internal conflict—a civil war where African turned on his fellow African—as it was a struggle for independence against the colonial powers. Certainly, black Africans suffered infinitely more than the white colonials.
One typical victim of the Mau Mau was Mutuaro Onsoti, a Luo from the Kisii area of south Nyanza.10 Onsoti had been employed by a white farmer, James Kean, to help control the disruption caused on his farm by his Kikuyu squatter laborers. In May 1952, Onsoti told his employer that he suspected that Mau Mau activists were plotting to take over his farm. Kean was concerned about the safety of his foreman after this revelation, but was unable to prevent a brutal attack on Onsoti by four Kikuyu squatters on August 25. His decapitated body was recovered from the woods on the following day, but his head was never found.
In October 1952 Governor-General Sir Ev
elyn Baring cabled London to request that a state of emergency be declared in the colony. This would allow the governor special powers to detain suspects, deploy the military, and impose other laws without further reference to London. The Colonial Office was loath to devolve such power to the Kenyan government, which had a reputation for being reactionary and unpredictable. However, Whitehall reluctantly granted his request on October 14, and Baring began rounding up KAU activists and suspected Mau Mau leaders in an offensive code-named Operation Jock Scott. Many senior officials in the KAU had no association with Mau Mau at all, but Baring was convinced the tactic would stop the insurrection in its tracks.
Not everybody was quite so confident that Baring’s plan to screen and inter suspected Mau Mau sympathizers would be successful. One of the more thoughtful and insightful white highlanders drafted a memorandum to the governor:
It is obviously illogical that any person of European extraction could, by looking at an African and examining his papers, know whether or not he has Mau Mau inclinations.… The methods adopted so far usually culminate in a parade of Kikuyu, and any that can produce a current hut-tax receipt and an employment card, or appear to be unaggressive, are released. Others who cannot produce these documents are frequently detained, and more often than not a proportion of these quite decent people are forced into close association with criminals and taken off to some detention camp. These decent people, or any of them who are in a state of indecision, immediately build up the utmost contempt for the methods of law and order, and are ripe for Mau Mau allegiance, either now or when released from detention.11