KIK ILAW WINY ARIYO
Don’t chase two birds at once
THE INDIVIDUAL responsible for changing much of the face of East Africa in 1885 was a reckless, hot-headed young German student called Karl Peters. The son of a Lutheran minister, Peters was born in the small north German village of Neuhaus, on the banks of the river Elbe. In 1879 he left Berlin University with a degree in history and moved to London, where he stayed with a wealthy uncle. During his four years in London, Peters studied British history and its colonial policies, developing a deep contempt and loathing for the British; at the same time he became passionate about the new opportunities for German imperialist expansion. In 1884 his uncle committed suicide and Peters returned to Germany. Fired up with nationalistic zeal, and supported by like-minded contemporaries, the twenty-eight-year-old established the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation—the Society for German Colonization. At its first executive committee meeting, the group clearly defined its objectives: “the founding of German plantation and commercial colonies by securing adequate capital for colonisation, by finding and securing possession of regions suitable for colonisation, and by attracting German immigrants to those regions.”1
The express aim of their society was to propel Germany headlong into rivalry with the two leading imperial nations in Europe—Britain and France—and it did not take long for them to realize their ambitions. By 1884, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany had reversed his previous declaration that he had no wish to acquire overseas colonies.2 That year, Germany made its first real bid for membership in the colonial club when it announced territorial claims in South West Africa, in Togoland and Cameroon, as well as part of the East African coast opposite Zanzibar. Germany was joined by Belgium and Italy—two small European nations with no previous colonial ambitions—which declared an interest in Congo and the Red Sea region, respectively. Even Portugal and Spain once again became interested in claiming bits of African territory.
Fearing that the stampede to claim African territories could easily get out of hand and lead to military confrontation, Bismarck readily agreed when the Portuguese asked the Germans to convene a meeting of European powers to resolve their interests in Africa. The conference opened in Berlin on November 15, 1884, and a plethora of ambassadors and politicians attended from fourteen European countries. Few of the participants, if indeed any at all, had ever set foot in Africa. For a full three months the European nations haggled over the partition of the continent, completely ignoring any of the cultural or linguistic boundaries already established by the indigenous populations.
By the end of February 1885, Africa had been carved up into fifty irregular countries. In this new “imperial” map of Africa, borders were often drawn arbitrarily, with little or no regard for ethnic unity, regional economic ties, migratory patterns of people, or even natural boundaries. The only logic or reason that applied to the map was that of political expediency around the conference table in Berlin, and the boundaries established there have created tribal tension and conflict in Africa ever since.
On November 4, 1884—just two weeks before the negotiations began in Berlin—Karl Peters and his two companions, Karl Ludwig Jühlke and Count Joachim von Pfeil, arrived in Zanzibar intent on realizing their imperial ambitions. All three were still under the age of thirty. Their trip had not been sanctioned by the German government, and the German consul in Zanzibar showed Peters a communication from the German Foreign Office stating that Peters could expect from the government “neither Imperial protection nor any guarantees for his safety.”3 Undeterred, they disguised themselves as mechanics and crossed over to the mainland at Bagamoyo, where they began to establish a German colonial presence in East Africa. Within days, they succeeded in negotiating their first treaty with an African chief on behalf of the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Kolonisation. Encouraged by their first audacious success, the three young Germans pushed on and made several more treaties with neighboring tribes. Msovero, a local chief in Usagara, agreed to offer “all his territories with all its civil and public appurtenances to Dr. Karl Peters … for all time,” while in return, Peters agreed to “give special attention to Msovero when colonising Usagara.”4 Peters later wrote about this initiative:
As the Gesellschaft wanted to found independent German colonies under the German flag, its activity naturally was limited to those areas which at that time had not yet been taken. In fact, only Africa was suitable.… Already in November 1884 this task basically had been fulfilled by the expedition sent via Zanzibar. On December 14th 1884 I found myself, as representative of the Society for German Colonisation, as the rightful owner of 2,500 square miles of very lush tropical land, located to the west of Zanzibar.5
By the middle of December—after just six weeks in East Africa—Peters had signed a total of twelve agreements with the “sultans” of four inland regions, which gave him theoretical control of more than sixty thousand square miles of the East African mainland. In practice, of course, these treaties were hardly worth the paper they were written on, as it is unlikely that the Africans had any idea of what they were actually ceding; their real value, however, was to demonstrate to other colonial powers that Germany had prior claim to the region. The young German had achieved exactly what he needed.
Peters returned to Germany as quickly as possible, and on February 12, 1885, two weeks before the conclusion of the Berlin Conference, he founded the Deutsche Ost-Afrika Gesellschaft—the German East Africa Company—to which he assigned all his African territories. With the Berlin Conference coming to a close, Bismarck refused at first to accept responsibility for the new acquisitions in Africa. But Peters had a very strong fallback position: he threatened to cede the land to King Leopold II of Belgium. On February 17 Bismarck agreed to issue an imperial charter—a Schutzbrief—that placed all the territories acquired by the German East Africa Company under the protection of the emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm I. This impudent but brilliant move by the young German adventurer inevitably provoked vociferous complaints from established overseas interests in the region. The British had previously acquired treaties inland around the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro, and a group of entrepreneurs had ambitious plans to build a railway between the coast and Lake Victoria. Now they had some real competition.
In response to Karl Peters’ inspired initiative and the creation of a German protectorate, the British formed the British East Africa Association (BEAA). After several months of saber-rattling in London and Berlin, the Anglo-German Agreement was signed in 1886, followed by a second treaty in 1890 that consolidated the arrangements. With these two treaties, Britain and Germany agreed on their spheres of influence in East Africa. The dividing line ran from the coast south of Mombasa to a point on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, cutting straight across East Africa in a northwesterly direction, except in one place where it kinked around Mount Kilimanjaro. (Queen Victoria wanted her grandson, the German kaiser, to have his own “big mountain” in Africa.) Everywhere north of the border became the Protectorate of British East Africa, and Germany took the area south of the line. This left the Luo who lived around Winam Gulf under British rule, although a small number of Luo living farther south fell under German control.
In 1891 Peters was made Reichskommissar (imperial high commissioner) to German East Africa, but within a few years rumors began to reach Berlin of his cruel and inhumane treatment of Africans. He is said to have used local girls as concubines, and when he discovered that one of his lovers had had an affair with his manservant, he had them both hanged and their home villages destroyed. This earned him the name mukono wa damu—“the man with blood on his hands.” He was recalled to Berlin, where a judicial hearing officially condemned him for his violent attacks on African natives; he was dismissed from government service and deprived of his government pension. Ironically, Peters sought refuge in London, where he continued to develop further interests elsewhere in Africa. Back home in Germany many people still considered him to be a national hero; Kaiser Wilhelm II later reinstated him as imperial commissioner and awarded him a pension from his own private budget. Twenty years after his death in 1918, Peters was officially rehabilitated by the personal decree of Adolf Hitler, who feted him as an ideological hero, even commissioning a Nazi propaganda film in 1941 about Peters’ life. He remains a controversial figure to this day.
The creation of British East Africa took place on two levels. The first, on paper, had already been hammered out in diplomatic meetings in London and Berlin. Now the second stage was about to begin, as Britain came to terms with taking control of an area that was bigger than metropolitan France and nearly twice the size of German East Africa.6 In 1888, with an investment of £240,000, the British East Africa Association received a royal charter and was renamed the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). The ambitions of IBEAC were impressive—at least superficially; the company would act as both a trading and a development agency with a special emphasis on improving the well-being of ordinary Africans. However, neither the British nor the German government had any intention of spending state funds on colonial administration. Rather, the British government hoped to devolve responsibility for governance to a chartered company.
Like the Deutsche Ost-Afrika Gesellschaft, the Imperial British East Africa Company started badly. In German East Africa, Karl Peters’ personal misconduct focused attention on German arrogance and overbearing contempt toward Africans. In British East Africa, the problems were incompetent management and lack of business acumen. William Mackinnon—the Scottish ship owner who had been inspired by Livingstone to open trade in Zanzibar in 1872—was made chairman of the IBEAC, and he was blamed for the company’s mismanagement. Every visitor to Mombasa seemed to comment on the disorganization of his administration. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury (who never had much faith in Mackinnon), once commented that he “had no quality for pushing an enterprise which depends on decision and smartness.”7 By 1890, even his fellow directors had lost faith in Mackinnon’s unrealistic ideas and had become frustrated with his poor planning.
That year a young man called Charles William Hobley arrived in Mombasa to begin work on the coast as an IBEAC transport superintendent. First-Class Assistant Hobley would later join the colonial government and become the provincial commissioner of the Kavirondo region near Lake Victoria, the homeland of the Luo, but he came to Africa in 1890 as an inexperienced twenty-three-year-old. His memoirs give a fascinating insight into what Mombasa was like toward the end of the nineteenth century:
It could not have been healthy, for it was surrounded on three sides by the native town, and the mosquitoes were very trying to a newcomer. A mosque stood about fifty yards away, and the frequent calls to prayer, by the muezzin, were at first a novelty, but soon became tiresome monotony. Shortly before my arrival it was said that the wailing tones of the call to the faithful so frayed the nerves of a young assistant who was confined to bed with fever that he hurled a bottle at the muezzin, an injudicious act which took much explaining.8
Mombasa had long been a strategically important harbor on the East African coast. Its local name, Kisiwa M’vita, means “island of war”—a reference to centuries of bloody battles between the Portuguese, Arabs, and Africans—and the old town appears on a map by Ptolemy dated AD 150. Now that the British government had decided to keep strategic control over the Upper Nile valley, it was essential to maintain the lines of communication from Uganda to the coast. The government and the IBEAC were both mainly interested in Buganda (now part of central Uganda) rather than Kenya. But with Zanzibar ceded to the Germans, Mombasa became the gateway to East Africa for the British, and the city was placed under colonial rule on July 1, 1895.
The old town is still a maze of narrow coral-pink streets with whitewashed houses on either side, each with a traditional heavily carved wooden front door and a balcony overhead; it is little changed from Hobley’s time, except for the unsightly power lines that festoon the alleyways. The old town’s narrow streets give some relief from the sun, and it is here that the traders set up their stalls, selling anything from fruit to carpets to brassware—forerunners to the tourist curio shops that continue to turn a profit for their Muslim owners today. In 1895 countless dhows from Oman, Arabia, Somaliland, and India jostled for position in the old harbor, ready to take on their cargoes of ivory, gold, frankincense, mangrove poles, and slaves. The modern port still serves Kenya and Uganda, with shipping containers stacked high, waiting to be dispatched inland.
As the nineteenth century came to a close, the IBEAC had two major objectives: to organize trading caravans into the interior and to collect customs revenues from a string of seven company agents stationed along the coast from Vanga in the south to Lamu in the north. It also faced two major obstacles: the lack of profitable mineral resources and the absence of large navigable rivers reaching inland. Not much had changed in terms of infrastructure since Krapf had penetrated the interior fifty years before, and a round-trip from Mombasa to Lake Victoria remained a perilous, six-month-long undertaking. Human porterage was expensive here at £250 a ton, and with the abolition of the slave trade in the region, the only financially viable export from the interior was ivory.9 It was a recipe for economic disaster.
During the 1890s, the IBEAC made several attempts to find cost-effective alternatives to the Zanzibari porters who brought goods out from the interior. Donkeys and camels were brought in from the Middle East and used as pack animals, and Cape oxen were imported from South Africa to pull carts. Construction began on a few roads, and a steamer was chartered for use on the small rivers that were navigable for a short distance inland. In one particularly pathetic attempt to open up the interior, workers even laid a few miles of narrow-gauge tramway from the port of Mombasa, the wagons pushed by Africans. The tramway never served any useful purpose other than what one visitor referred to as carrying “occasional picnic parties.”
Increasingly desperate about the financial viability of British East Africa, the directors of the IBEAC began to lobby the British Tory government for a subsidy to build a proper railway. Political resistance to this “gigantic folly” arose immediately, with opponents claiming that the railway “started from nowhere” and “went nowhere.” Furthermore, Liberal politicians argued that the British government had no right to build a railway through land owned by African tribes. In response to objections that the venture would also be a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money, the IBEAC found support from an old ally; in an article published in September 1891 the Times of London declared: “It is not, after all, a very serious matter to build four or five hundred miles of railway over land that costs nothing.”10 The editorial could not have been more misguided, but the IBEAC won the day. Agreeing to fund the enterprise, the minority Tory government contended that it would bring an end to the East African slave trade, secure British control over the headwaters of the White Nile, and advance “the cause of civilisation throughout the interior of the continent.”
The estimated cost of the construction was just over £3 million, equivalent to over $450 million today.11 The final cost was nearly double.12 Soon after the inaugural plate-laying ceremony on May 30, 1896, the British tabloid newspapers began to call it the “Lunatic Line,” and not without good reason. In order to build the railway, the British shipped in some 32,000 workers from India, conveniently overlooking the paradox of using indentured laborers to build a railway to rid Africa of slavery.13 The workers received a pittance for their labors in intense heat and poor working conditions. Twenty-five hundred workers died during the construction, an average of nearly five deaths for every mile of track laid. The company also imported an additional five thousand educated Indian workers to service the project, including clerks, draftsmen, drivers, firemen, mechanics, stationmasters, and policemen.14 An estimated 20 percent of these workers remained in East Africa, where their descendants form a substantial part of the small Asian community now living permanently in Kenya.
The railway was intended as a modern transport link to carry raw materials out of the Uganda colony and to carry manufactured British goods back in. The senior British diplomat in Uganda, Sir Harry Johnston, described the enterprise as “the driving of a wedge of India two miles broad right across East Africa from Mombasa to the Victoria Nyanza.” The British started their railway line at the new station on Mombasa Island, extending to the mainland over Salisbury Bridge—diplomatically named after the British prime minister of the day. Once on the mainland, the first challenge was to cross the waterless Taru plain. The Scottish explorer Joseph Thomson first visited the region in 1878 and was the first traveler to write about the desert:
Weird and ghastly is the aspect of the greyish-coloured trees and bushes; for they are almost destitute of tender, waving branch or quivering leaf. No pliant twig or graceful foliage responds to the pleasing influence of the passing breeze. Stern and unbending, they present rigid arms or formidable thorns, as if bidding defiance to drought or storm. To heighten the sombre effect of the scene, dead trees are observable in every direction raising their shattered forms among the living, unable to hold their own in the struggle for existence.15
As the workers built the railway across the Taru plain, every drop of fresh water had to be transported from the coast to the camps. By 1898, the line reached the Tsavo River, 125 miles from Mombasa, where the construction was delayed for nine months by two lions who hunted together, mainly at night. The lions had developed a taste for human flesh and terrorized the Indian workers, causing hundreds to desert the construction camps. The pair killed at least 28 Indian and African laborers, and some accounts put the number as high as 135.16 Eventually the lions were hunted down and shot by Chief Engineer John Henry Patterson, who sold the skins to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago for $5,000. The curators laboriously repaired the skins and stuffed the two animals, and they are still on display in the museum today.
Lions proved to be a recurring disruption to construction. A year after Patterson’s successful hunt, a road engineer called O’Hara was dragged from his tent near Voi and killed by a lion, and in June 1900 Police Superintendent C. H. Ryall was sleeping in his observation saloon at Kima station when a lion entered his carriage and killed him, dragging his body through a window and into the bush. In general, man-eating lions are a rare occurrence in Africa; one explanation suggests that many of the railway workers who died of injury or disease were poorly buried, or not buried at all. Scavenging lions, stumbling across an easy meal, developed a taste for human flesh.
By 1899 nearly 300 miles of track had been laid and the line reached the foothills of the Kenya highlands—an area of swampy ground that the Maasai called En Kare Nyrobi. Here, over halfway from the coast to Lake Victoria, the company decided to build a railway depot to facilitate further construction up into the highlands. The railway headquarters relocated from Mombasa, and what started out as a tented encampment built on a fetid swamp soon became a permanent township, with proper houses for the staff. The settlement attracted Asian merchants who supplied goods and services to the workforce, and a year later the spelling of the town was changed to Nairobi. Kenya’s capital city was born.
The railhead finally reached Lake Victoria, 575 miles from Mombasa, on December 19, 1901. The terminal was called Port Florence after the wife of the chief foreman plate layer, who had tenaciously stayed with her husband during the whole of the five-year construction period. (Port Florence was later renamed Kisumu.) Several branch lines followed, and in 1931 the line was extended to both Mount Kenya in the highlands and Kampala in Uganda.
Throughout the construction of the railway, opposition arose from the tribes through whose land the track was being laid. Leading the fight were the Nandi of central Kenya. A subtribe of the Kalenjin, they were known for defending their independence and were particularly fearsome during the late nineteenth century. Many years before the railway line to Lake Victoria was even started, a Nandi orkoiyot or spiritual leader called Kimnyole arap Turukat predicted that a big snake would emerge from the eastern lake (interpreted as the Indian Ocean), belching smoke and fire, and would go on to quench its thirst in the western lake (Lake Victoria). Kimnyole also prophesied that foreigners would one day rule the Nandi lands. These forecasts only reinforced the Nandi’s fear of foreign intervention, and for years the tribe harassed anyone who tried to cross their lands—the Arab caravans generally took a long detour either north or south of Nandi territory to avoid trouble. The Nandi would not even allow individual Europeans to pass through their country without the correct papers, and in 1896 they killed a British traveler called Peter West and his twenty-three porters when he attempted an unauthorized crossing—an event that sparked an eleven-year war between the Nandi and the British.
By 1900, a year before the railhead reached Lake Victoria, the Nandi had a new orkoiyot, supreme chief Koitalel arap Samoei.17 They still fervently believed the railway was the snake from Kimnyole’s prophecy, and they united behind Koitalel to oppose the last stage of the line. They proved to be excellent guerrilla fighters in the dense forests and steep valleys of the Rift Valley, where the superior firepower of the Europeans was less effective. Even after the final track had been laid, the Nandi kept up their harassment and regularly stole the shiny copper telegraph wire to wind around their necks and arms as body ornaments.
Charles Hobley, who had now been promoted and moved to Nyanza, later commented: “The Wanandi [Nandi], with the exception of a few in the vicinity of the station, have all along viewed our presence in the country with veiled repugnance.… We were unwittingly living on the edge of a volcano.”18
The constant provocations were too much for the British, and in October 1905—four years after the line was finished—a military intelligence officer, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, was sent to negotiate with the Nandi leader. Unfortunately, one of Koitalel’s other prophesies—that British bullets would turn to water—proved not to be correct.19 According to tribal legend, as Meinertzhagen moved forward to shake hands with the Nandi leader, he drew his pistol and shot Koitalel dead. This was a signal to British troops hiding nearby to open fire on the assembled tribesmen, killing at least twenty-three more. Some reports claim that Meinertzhagen beheaded Koitalel as he lay on the ground. Other British officers complained, accusing Meinertzhagen of treachery, and the colonel was called before a military inquiry. Meinertzhagen claimed the shooting was in self-defense; the tribunal found him not guilty, although he was later transferred out of the area. In any case, Koitalel’s death had exactly the result the British had hoped for: the Nandi’s resistance was broken, and they were no longer a threat to the safety of the railway.
However, the railway was not the only object of African opposition, and the British found that the imposition of colonial rule was opposed practically everywhere. Between 1895 and 1914 the British organized a number of military raids—“punitive expeditions”—against what they called “recalcitrant tribes.” Everywhere, the British used well-armed soldiers and crack-shot mercenaries against the spears and arrows of the Kenyan tribes. For the next couple of decades, British rule in East Africa could be maintained only by the use of force.
In the Luo heartland of Nyanza, the arrival of the British could not have come at a worse time. In the early 1880s the region had been hit by a series of natural disasters that drastically reduced many of the tribal populations in the area, including the cattle-raiding Maasai. When Johann Krapf first encountered the Maasai in 1848, he wrote that the Maasai “are dreaded as warriors, laying all to waste with fire and sword, so that the weaker tribes do not venture to resist them in the open field, but leave them in possession of their herds, and seek only to save themselves by the quickest possible flight.”
But the diseases that devastated East Africa in the 1880s, including rinderpest and bovine lung disease, were particularly hard on those whose livelihoods depended on cattle, such as the Maasai and to a lesser extent the Luo. A generation after Krapf explored central Kenya, the Austrian explorer Oscar Baumann traveled extensively through Maasai lands, and in 1891 he witnessed at first hand the devastation that had been wreaked on the region: “There were women wasted to skeletons from whose eyes the madness of starvation glared … warriors scarcely able to crawl on all fours, and apathetic, languishing elders. Swarms of vultures followed them from high, awaiting their certain victims.”20 By one estimate, two-thirds of the Maasai died during this period. Weakened by disease and famine as well as the loss of their cattle, the Maasai never recovered their numbers.
In western Kenya, the Luo too were suffering. The livestock diseases were joined by a succession of locust invasions between 1885 and 1890 that devastated the crops in Luoland and brought the onset of the ong’ong’a famine of 1889.21 These devastating pressures on the population created a virtual civil war throughout Luoland, as clan fought neighboring clan over cattle, land, and grazing rights.
Although no Europeans were present to witness the catastrophic effects of disease and famine, among the Luo the memory of such traumatic events has been faithfully passed down by word of mouth, from one generation to the next. John Ndalo, a close Obama relative from Kendu Bay, vividly recalls the stories of cattle plague and famine that his father and grandfathers had experienced:
Many homes lost their family. People were fighting, and if you had even a little food, people would come in a great number and invade your family and take everything away. For those whose cattle survived, we organized raids and went in big numbers with spears and arrows … and bring back all their cattle.
When we had exhausted the food within the other clans of the Luo, we went to attack other tribes, including the Luhyas, who are our immediate neighbors, and even some of the cattle we got from the Maasai …
The famine also led to more wars and the invention of the buffalo shield. The buffalo skin was very strong, and we knew it would resist any spear, so it led to a lot of rearmament in the African society. So we were looking everywhere for the buffalo, everywhere, because there used to be many more here in this area. So the young men had to kill them.
Weakened by famine, the Luo were struck down by smallpox, which had also ravaged the Maasai. The death rate in Luoland was so high that it led to widespread depopulation throughout the lake region, forcing thousands of people to reconsolidate and move to new areas. This migration reintroduced the tsetse fly in areas previously free of the insects, spreading an epidemic of human trypanosomiasis that killed at least 250,000 people between 1902 and 1908. John Ndalo remembers the days when trypanosomiasis was common around Kendu Bay:
The sickness name in Dholuo is called nyalolwe—sleeping sickness. We were taught to clear all the bushes where the animals were, because the tsetse fly was in the bushes and if they bit the cattle, the cows would die.
When a tsetse fly bites a human being and you are out there tending your cattle, you fall asleep suddenly, and when you are sleeping all the cattle will just wander off!
In 1895, the year that President Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama was born, the British appointed Charles William Hobley to be the new regional colonial administrator in Nyanza. Hobley was becoming an old hand in Kenya, having worked in Mombasa for the IBEAC since 1890. Hobley soon established his administrative headquarters in Mumias, about forty miles north of Winam Gulf, where he found mixed attitudes toward colonization among the Luo.
Hobley believed that the British could only control the region through force: “The reaction of a native race to control by a civilized Government varies according to their nature, and to their form of government, but in every case a conflict of some kind is inevitable, before the lower race fully accepts the dictum of the ruling power.”22 Starting in 1896, Hobley mounted a series of vicious punitive expeditions against the Luo clans who opposed British rule. He referred to the Luo as “the Kavirondo,” and on several occasions between 1896 and 1900 the British confronted what they called “recalcitrant Kavirondo sections” in open battle. The Luo’s arrows and spears were no match for the Maxim machine gun and the Hotchkiss cannon, and several hundred Luo warriors were killed in each clash. Usually the British followed up their attacks by confiscating the livestock and destroying the houses of the Luo. In this way the British established a form of colonial dictatorship, imposed and maintained by violence, and totally indifferent to the needs or wishes of the Africans.
Not all the Luo clans were hostile to the British, and the colonists became adept at “divide and rule” as they pitted clan against clan. (The Luo have a saying for it: Kik ilaw winy ariyo—“Don’t chase two birds at once.”) Those groups who accepted colonial authority were treated as “friendlies” and received special privileges. British policy called for colonial administrations to be based on indigenous political systems, so the new administrative borders were designed to mirror the boundaries of the pinje, or Luo clan system. However, unlike the traditional Luo ruoth, who acted as guardians of traditional laws and customs, the newly appointed chiefs signed up by the British were effectively African civil servants, paid for and given their wide-ranging powers by the imperial authority. In this way, the colonial administrators recruited local labor to impose control in the region and to collect the taxes that were beginning to be levied on the Africans.
One such chief was Paul Mboya, who governed the Kendu Bay area when Hussein Onyango was living there in the 1930s. An important man in the community, Mboya had been the first Luo to be ordained as a pastor in the Seventh-Day Adventist church. Later the British made him chief in Karachuonyo in south Nyanza, and then secretary of the regional African District Council.23 Sarah Obama’s youngest brother, Abdo Omar Okech, said that his brother-in-law made an enemy of Mboya by standing up to him over forced labor:
Onyango wanted Africans to walk freely. So he had this argument with Paul, because during those times, there was forced labor, which was introduced by the white men. The chief’s representatives would come around and take you to work on the farms. Paul organized this because he was the chief, but Onyango opposed this. Paul was misusing his power. If somebody said they were sick and could not go out and work for the white men, Paul would just take you forcefully because he was a powerful man.
Another favorite of the British was Ng’ong’a Odima, the chief in charge of the whole of the Alego region, north of Winam Gulf. A reliable and enthusiastic supporter of British rule, Odima grew wealthy and powerful from the benevolence of the colonial administration; like many of the new breed of African officials, he also abused his position. The chiefs, who were frequently employed as hut counters and tax collectors, often overcharged villagers, refused to issue them receipts for payments, and forced people to feed them during the course of their administrative duties.24 The Luo historian Bethwell Ogot believes this early form of patronage ultimately led to the normalization of dishonest profiteering in Kenyan society:
Thus new allies were co-opted by the British and new pivots of patronage were created at different levels of the social and political system. In this way, corruption began to manifest itself [in Kenya] in various forms such as nepotism, bribery, looting and gradually it became entrenched and tolerated as an essential ingredient of governance.25
The system worked effectively, and within a very few years the Luo were pacified, becoming loyal supporters of British rule in Kenya. According to Hobley, the great advantage of the “Kavirondo” was that:
Once they were beaten they readily made peace and, once they had made peace, it was peace, for within a few hours the women were in camp selling food, and one had no anxiety about a subsequent treacherous attack either at night or on the road. Under these circumstances mutual respect gradually supervened and we became great friends.26
Having quelled the opposition of the Luo and other tribes by the early twentieth century, the IBEAC turned its attention to the finances of the railway. The final cost of over £5.5 million was 80 percent over budget, and the British realized that the line had no chance of paying for itself.
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 his 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
One Mumbo prediction held that all Europeans would disappear from their country. When German troops crossed the border from German East Africa and attacked the British garrison at Kisii in 1914, the Africans took this as a confirmation of Mumbo’s forecast. They rose up and plundered administrative and missionary centers throughout the region—although this particular response came primarily from the Gusii tribe, rather than the Luo. The British were harsh in their suppression of the rebellion, killing more than 150 Africans.
Many of the Mumbo leaders were deported to a detention camp on an island off Kismayo in the Indian Ocean, now part of southern Somalia. However, the threat of expulsion did not deter Mumbo’s most devout followers, and despite frequent arrests and deportations by the British authorities, they continued their insurrection throughout the interwar years.
The border with the German protectorate was only seventy-five miles from Nairobi, and the outbreak of war brought panic to the white settlers. Many planters left their farms and fled to the city, carrying any weapon they could lay their hands on: elephant guns, shotguns, sporting rifles. Twelve hundred settlers were accepted for service in the East African Mounted Rifles (EAMR), and the rest were asked to return to their farms. Uniforms were not immediately available, so recruits handed over their shirts and volunteer women sewed the letters EAMR on their shoulders.42 The makeshift army began commandeering horses from farmers. The colony declared martial law, ordering all “enemy aliens” rounded up and incarcerated.
British East Africa was going to war.