The Other Barack (10 page)

 

DURING THE YEARS OBAMA had spent on Maseno's serene campus, a single name had come to dominate the Kenyan colony. It struck fear in the hearts of British administrators as well as their compatriots back in
London, who read about it in the tabloids. Few shuddered more at its mention than the tribal chiefs who worked at their behest. But to many of the Kikuyu, the ethnic group that had historically farmed the southern part of the fertile highlands at the colony's heart for generations before the European settlers arrived, the name was a declaration of defiance, a sounding of hope in the long and grueling ordeal of British occupation.

The name was Mau Mau.

Although historians dispute the origins of the term, the Mau Mau movement of the late 1940s came to be associated with a violent uprising of Kikuyu rebels dedicated to expelling the Europeans from the country and reclaiming what they regarded as their stolen lands. The movement began with the administration of the traditional Kikuyu oath, a ritual that was invoked in the face of war or grave difficulty. But as the colonists' land seizures pushed the Kikuyu to the brink of desperation, mass oathing evolved into a secretive and violent campaign of murder and destruction that engendered an equally brutal response from the British.

By 1952, when Obama was completing his third year at Maseno, the conflict had mushroomed into an internal war that would ultimately recast the balance of power within the colony. The British tried hard to dismiss Mau Mau as an aberrant movement led by a troublesome few, but in the end the conflict would clear the way for the next stage of the battle for independence. Although the British soldiers crushed the movement militarily within a few years, they were forced to concede that the status quo in Kenya was no longer tenable. The Africans, they realized, had to be given greater representation in the country's political and economic structures, if only to establish a moderate alternative to the rebel route.

That path of protest had been first laid open many years earlier. The seeds of Kenyan nationalism were rooted in the experience of the African soldiers who served in World War I, for their far-flung travels had given them a greater understanding of their subservient role in the colonial hierarchy. It also exposed their British rulers as imperfect humans and not the omnipotent icons they had considered them to be. But it was not until the closing days of World War II that their mounting grievances against the colonial government's labor policies and restrictive agricultural practices reached a boiling point.

Part of the complaint stemmed from the successive humiliations of everyday life under colonial rule. Throughout the country Africans were routinely excluded from a host of locations and services available to Europeans. Many of Nairobi's finest hotels and restaurants exhibited signs declaring, “No Africans or Dogs Allowed.” Nor could most Africans even consider living in the city's better neighborhoods such as Muthaiga or Lavington, which were reserved largely for whites and far removed from most Africans' modest ability to pay. Instead, the natives were ushered to the crowded slums to the east, which were plagued by unsanitary conditions and intermittent police raids. And should an African happen to vex his
mzungu
employer in some way, he could only hope that the employer would not rip up his kipande, making it impossible to get other work.

No issue was more passionately contested than that of land. In the years after the war ended, the Kikuyu found that the reserves onto which they were squeezed were approaching a state of ecological exhaustion after decades of heavy farming. A postwar surge in the settlers' agricultural production that further limited the Kikuyu's ability to grow and market their own crops further worsened their situation. The arrival of mechanization struck another blow at the Kikuyu heart, as the more efficient farming techniques forced many who had toiled as “squatters” on the verdant highlands off their farms. Some returned to the already overcrowded reserves, while thousands fled to Nairobi, where unemployment and inflation had generated flammable discontent. When the Mau Mau militants offered them a way to fight for
ithaka na wiyathi
, or land and freedom, many did not hesitate.

The violence began in the countryside, where settlers' cattle were sporadically found maimed and unexplained fires erupted on their property. Local chiefs, called “loyalists” who sided with the British and had long been reviled for their brutal and corrupt ways, were discovered mysteriously dead. Widespread discontent gave rise to a form of mass oathing, in which the participants committed to the rebels' cause. One common oath was, “If I know of any enemy of our organization and fail to kill him, may this oath kill me.” Another pledge was, “If I reveal this oath to any European, may this oath kill me.”
¹⁴
Although the British government banned Mau Mau in 1950, the movement continued to gain widespread support in
both the crowded urban centers and the Kikuyu reserves. In the meantime, the militants' path of destruction expanded.

By 1952 the tide of violence reached crisis proportions. As the frantic settler community insisted that the government take aggressive action, the papers were chock-full of reports of crop burnings, murder attempts, and robberies. And then it got worse. In October Senior Chief Waruhiu wa Kungu, one of the highest-ranking officials under the colonial administration and a fierce critic of the Mau Mau movement, was shot dead in the backseat of his dark brown Hudson sedan. Supporters of Mau Mau, who had arranged the assassination, celebrated Waruhiu's death with songs and festivities. The killing sent waves of terror through the settler community and caused British administrators to abruptly escalate their response.

The Mau Mau war was waged largely by the Kikuyu and supporting factions of the Embu and Meru tribes against the British colonists in the highlands and the greater Nairobi area. But some of the deep-seated resentments that had given rise to it were also felt among the other ethnic groups, including the Luo. In the aftermath of World War II, many soldiers returned home to mounting frustrations just as their predecessors had in the previous war. The ex-servicemen opposed the African chiefs, as the historian William R. Ochieng wrote, “whom they considered as nothing but the
mzungu
's stooges. These returned soldiers began a campaign to ‘liberate' the masses of their fear of the white man.”
¹⁵

Organizations such as the Kenya African Union and the Nyanza Ex-Soldiers Association were formed to express the Africans' discontent with the soaring cost of living and mounting taxation. And as the conflagration of the late 1940s spread across the country, it came to have a direct impact on the Obama family. Hussein Onyango agreed with many of the positions that the early African political groups took and was a staunch opponent of the profiteering loyalists. But he had grave doubts that the African could overcome the white man's armies. As he explained to his eldest son: “The white man alone is like an ant. He can be easily crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together.... He will follow his leaders 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.”
¹⁶

Nonetheless, Mama Sarah, Onyango's fourth wife, says that her husband's name was put on a list of political activists and that in 1949 he was confined to a detention camp for six months. In
Dreams from My Father
, Mama Sarah reports that his name had been turned over to British authorities by a man who worked for the district commissioner whom Onyango had admonished for demanding excessive taxes from local people and keeping the money for himself.
¹⁷
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, as a steady stream of reporters journeyed to the Obama family compound, Mama Sarah told a reporter for the
Times
of London that British guards had brutally tortured her husband in order to gain information about the insurgency.

“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” the
Times
reported Sarah Hussein Obama as saying. The white soldiers, she continued, visited the prison regularly to carry out “disciplinary action” on the Africans confined there. “[Onyango] 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.” It was then, she added, “we realized that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies.”
¹⁸

Although Sarah's recollection echoes several accounts of the torture inflicted on the Kikuyu detainees in the later years of the rebellion, it is problematic. The detention centers that the British used to hold Mau Mau supporters were not established until 1952. While it is possible that Onyango might have been charged with being a subversive and imprisoned, no family member has identified the location where he was held. Several close relatives say they do not believe that he was confined at all. Although Mama Sarah told her grandson Barack Hussein Obama in the 1990s that Onyango had been detained in a camp for six months, she said in the
Times
interview that he was held for two years. But whatever the exact circumstances of his confinement, that he was confined somewhere is possible. He supposedly returned home from the camp thin, dirty, and greatly changed. As Obama quotes Mama Sarah in
Dreams
, “He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice. He was so ashamed, he refused to enter his house or tell us what had happened.”
¹⁹
Barack Obama Sr. was
at the Maseno School at the time and did not learn of the detention until later.

While Barack was defying school authorities, government officials in Nairobi were preparing an aggressive crackdown on the insurgents. Less than one week after Waruhiu's murder, Kenya's new governor of a matter of days, Sir Evelyn Baring, received approval from London to declare a state of emergency. Under the emergency legislation and subsequent regulations, the government was free to detain suspects, deploy the military in order to maintain civil administration, and impose other laws without checking in with London.

In the early morning of October 21, 1952, the same day the emergency went into effect, Baring unleashed a surprise police roundup that was code-named Operation Jock Scott, arresting one hundred eighty suspected Mau Mau militants and activists with the Kenya African Union. Nairobi police, assisted by British reinforcements, loaded the offenders into their trucks and carted them ceremoniously to the Nairobi police station. Baring's hope was that a dramatic show of force would bring the movement to its knees and convince the settlers—if not the world—that the British authorities were in control.

One of the biggest catches of the roundup was Jomo Kenyatta, the Kikuyu president of the KAU, whom Baring and other government administrators erroneously believed was the mastermind behind the Mau Mau uprising. In fact, Kenyatta, one of the elders of the Kikuyu political oligarchy, had long tried to repress the rebels at the forefront of Mau Mau.
²⁰
Kenyatta had emerged as a moderate nationalist among the “mission boys” of the 1920s, and he regarded the fierce, young militants who had spearheaded the Mau Mau movement as impetuous and their radical tactics unwise. Although he had spoken against their violent methods, British authorities turned a deaf ear to his words, just as they did to the grievances of the Kikuyu people; instead, the highly visible and popular Kenyatta had been targeted as a prime instigator. The British authorities reasoned that his public prosecution would send a loud message to both the settlers and the other militants. The authorities' miscalculation would have far-reaching consequences and, ironically, served to enshrine the aging statesman as the presiding symbol of the nationalist cause.

Charged with “managing an unlawful society,” Kenyatta and five others were taken to the remote northern town of Kapenguria near the Ugandan border—a location that enabled the government to maintain strict control on the comings and goings at their sensational trial. The government selected conservative British Judge Ransley Thacker to hear the case. There was no jury. Thacker was given £20,000 for his service and the inconvenience of the location, a payment that was widely regarded as a bribe intended to ensure a guilty verdict. Despite little real evidence with which to prosecute the defendant group, known as the “Kapenguria Six,” Kenyatta and the others were found guilty in April of 1953 and sentenced to seven years imprisonment with hard labor followed by a lifetime of restriction. On his release in 1959, Kenyatta, then in his late sixties,
²¹
had become the country's most prominent champion for the cause of freedom as well as its undisputed leader.

Far from bringing an end to the insurgency, however, Kenyatta's arrest only exacerbated the ongoing conflict. Within months of the declaration of emergency, bands of armed freedom fighters based in the Aberdare Mountain range and the forests of Mount Kenya stepped up their campaign in earnest. There followed a series of highly visible murders, the most notorious of which was the slaying of the Ruck family. In January 1953 Kikuyu fighters hacked to death Esme and Roger Ruck, a hardworking and well-liked young British couple, on their remote farm. Their six-year-old son, Michael, was slaughtered as he lay in his bed. The sordid killings, photographs of which appeared the world over, marked a critical turning point in the war.

In the months following the Rucks' deaths, the government implemented a draconian series of measures that further inflamed the situation. The Emergency Regulations authorized collective punishments, detention without trial, the seizure of convicts' property, and the suspension of due process. In addition, the range of offenses for which capital punishment could be imposed was vastly expanded. The purpose of these extreme measures was to reestablish colonial domination and to satisfy the settlers' near-hysterical calls for dramatic actions against the rebels.