PAND NYALUO DHOGE ARIYO
An old knife has two edges
AS THE clouds of war began to roll in over the fields of Flanders in the summer of 1914, there was a widely accepted understanding in East Africa between colonial Britain and Germany that war on the continent was pointless. By 1914 Britain controlled a quarter of the African continent, and the German colonies were five times larger than the Fatherland. Despite the skepticism voiced by both Bismarck and Gladstone in the 1880s about the wisdom of colonizing Africa, by the beginning of the twentieth century both nations were beginning to profit from their overseas ventures. The two colonial nations also faced similar problems in trying to administer large African populations, and open hostility was not in either party’s interest. It was a comfortable alliance, and Dr. W. S. Solf, the German secretary of state for the colonies, willingly accepted that his nation’s ambitions in Africa would best be served by being “England’s junior partner.”1
Prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, most of the operations by the King’s African Rifles (KAR) were little more than “large scale cattle raids” against the native population.2 The military forces in the two colonies in East Africa were finely balanced in numbers: in the summer of 1914, Britain had 2,383 officers and askaris (African soldiers) in the KAR, and Germany had 2,756 troops. One resident of Nairobi wrote that British East Africa “was not prepared. Why should it have been, with a German colony cheek-by-jowl across the border? … German East Africa was much too near to be dangerous.”3 However, this peaceful coexistence was not to last, and the first shots discharged in anger during the First World War were fired not in Europe but in Africa.
On August 5, 1914, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, British troops from the Uganda protectorate attacked a German river outpost near Lake Victoria. Ten days later, troops in German East Africa attempted to take the small coastal port of Taveta, a dozen miles inside British East Africa, where a German volunteer soldier called Bröker became the first combatant to die on foreign soil. In south Nyanza in western Kenya, near panic ensued the next month when a detachment of German troops led by Captain Wilhelm Bock von Wülfingen took the undefended British post at Kisii. KAR troops reclaimed the town after fierce fighting and several deaths, but the British now worried that the strategic railhead and port at Kisumu were vulnerable to attack.
By the autumn of 1914, then, German and British forces in East Africa were actively at war, and the conflict continued until after the armistice in Europe. For the first time, ordinary Africans were dragged into a war between European nations, mainly as porters. For weeks and months on end, they were required to march eighteen miles or more a day through the jungle, enduring intense heat and often torrential rain. They survived on meager rations and minimal medical support.
Of the 165,000 African porters who were employed in the KAR Carrier Corps in British East Africa during the war, more than 50,000 died—a much higher casualty rate than on the Western Front. This extraordinary figure represented one in eight of the adult male population in Kenya and Uganda. The war devastated large areas, laid waste to farming land, and brought hunger, disease, and death to ordinary African civilians; thousands more perished in the global influenza pandemic that followed the war. The Afro-American writer and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his seminal 1915 essay, “The African Roots of War,” that “a great cloud swept over sea and settled on Africa … twenty centuries after Christ, black Africa, prostrate, raped and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe.”4
By 1914 all local insurrections in British East Africa had been suppressed, including the Mumbo rebellion in south Nyanza, and the British had established an effective and comprehensive administration across their territory. Having buckled under colonial rule, the Africans now demonstrated remarkable stoicism in coping with the outbreak of a European war on their continent. Despite the occasional brutality shown by the colonials toward the local people, plenty of Africans admired and respected the organization and stability that British rule brought to the region. In fact, some of the tribes that had been most resistant to British rule in the 1890s contributed many combatants to the KAR—perhaps because the KAR offered an opportunity for young Africans to maintain their warrior status in a society increasingly dominated and controlled by the British. One young African summed up the situation by claiming that the army “was a suitable job for a warrior … It showed that we were men.”5 This was particularly the case with the Nandi, who had fought long and hard against the construction of the Uganda Railway at the turn of the century. Ten years later, they contributed a greater percentage of their male population to the KAR than any other tribe in Kenya.6
In Nyanza, the Luo had mixed responses to the conflict. Initially, finding volunteers in south Nyanza was relatively easy; the disruption caused by the Mumbo cult had led to high unemployment among the Africans in the region. However, the British soon ran out of willing recruits as young African men started volunteering to work on white farms in order to avoid the Carrier Corps, and their colonial masters had to resort to more persuasive means. In a modern equivalent of the press gang used by the British Royal Navy during the eighteenth century, the authorities rounded up young men when they were at sporting events or other public gatherings or out herding their livestock. To meet their strict quotas, local chiefs sometimes seized unwilling recruits from their homes at night. According to John Ndalo, nobody in the Kendu Bay area wanted to fight, and they were all forcibly conscripted:
They were using the local chiefs to identify the homes with the young men who were capable of fighting. So the chiefs would come into the locality and say, at such and such a home, we want one young man, or two or three. In the First World War, there were no volunteers—they used to pick young men and take them by force.
However, even these drastic measures did not fulfill the quotas and the colonial government was obliged to introduce legislation to allow the conscription of Africans. In the first twelve months of the war, 4,572 Africans from central Nyanza alone were pressed into service with the KAR, and their numbers continued to increase as the war progressed.
Thousands of young Luo men joined the army, eventually dominating the battalions of the KAR.7 Of all the major tribes in Kenya, only the seminomadic Maasai avoided active service, although they did provide valuable military intelligence along the border with German East Africa (as did the Maasai living on the other side of the border for the Germans). Hans Poeschel, the editor of the colonial newspaper Deutsch-Ostafrika Zeitung, wrote that they must have been reluctant to take up arms on behalf of the British because the Maasai “had grown to know the English … as still greater cattle-thieves than they themselves.”8
For several years running up to the outbreak of war, Onyango Obama had been living away from his family with the white missionaries in and around Kisumu; he was part of the first generation of young Luo boys to benefit from an education in a mission school. Onyango was clever and ambitious, and by 1914 he could read and write both English and Swahili. Sarah Obama claims that he also learned about administration from the British and was familiar with paper records and land titles.9 Inevitably, Onyango’s grasp of administration, as well as his ability to speak Dholuo, Swahili, and English, made him an ideal recruit for the KAR Carrier Corps, because the British desperately needed translators to pass down commands from the white officers to the African porters, scouts, cooks, guards, and wagon drivers. According to Sarah Obama, Onyango’s first job in the KAR was overseeing the African teams who were building roads as part of the war effort.
The Carrier Corps was essential for warfare in East Africa. The region had very few roads suitable for mechanized vehicles, and the prevalence of the tsetse fly prevented the use of draft animals, leaving human porters as the only viable means of moving military equipment around the region. John Ainsworth, one of the ablest British administrators in British East Africa, was impressed with the Luo porters during the war:
A very large portion of the responsibility for producing porters fell on the Nyanza Province. It can be said with truth that they helped to win the war. The Kavirondo porter became a very well-known feature in “German East” during the war. He was usually referred to as omera (a Luo word meaning “brother”).10
Sir Philip Mitchell, who fought in Togoland, Cameroon, and East Africa and later became governor of Kenya in 1944, claims that it took three porters to support a single armed soldier on the front line in East Africa.11 He also regretted the terrible loss of life sustained by the Africans in the KAR Carrier Corps: “The heaviest sufferers were the porters, among whom loss of life was greatest and lamentable; faithful men, who did what they had to do with little complaint and great endurance; but who ought never to have been asked to do it, and who suffered much which should have been prevented.”
John Ndalo too remembers that the conditions were tough and the casualties high: “During that time, there was no organized form of transport, so the soldiers were walking and many died on the road. So we lost quite a lot of Luo young men. They were working as porters as well as fighting.”
In addition to supplying recruits to the Carrier Corps, the inhabitants of Nyanza were required to contribute to the war effort in other ways. In the last year of the war the people of central Nyanza provided more than two thousand head of cattle as well as three thousand goats. The dreaded hut tax was also further increased.
To the Africans, the Europeans were fighting an incomprehensible war. The missionaries and colonial administrators had spent years condemning intertribal wars as sinful and uncivilized, but now the Africans were being recruited for what they saw as just another intertribal war—only on a much larger scale. They could not understand why they were marching for days into a strange and inhospitable country, only to fight an enemy from whom they took little or nothing; why not fight a quick campaign, seize their cattle and women, and then go home? Sir Philip Mitchell understood the Africans’ bewilderment:
The White Men, hitherto seen by the native people in small numbers of superior, almost fabulous, people, all apparently of one tribe, with similar habits and common interests were suddenly found to belong to different tribes which were fighting each other and required African help to do it. Not only was it no longer a shocking and dangerous thing to offer violence to a Mzungu; on the contrary, if he was on the other side, it was a soldier’s duty to attack him, and kill him if possible or to take him prisoner, and even Chiefs and villages could earn rewards from the other side for what was in fact treason and rebellion against their lawful Government.12
The German colonies fought their European neighbors in Africa with varying degrees of success. Togoland, Cameroon, and German South West Africa (Namibia) fell to Allied forces by the early months of 1915, with the exception of the German stronghold of Mora in Cameroon, which held out until February 1916. However, it was a very different story in German East Africa (consisting of today’s Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda), where the German commander led a brilliant campaign with the support of well-trained askaris. Colonel (later General) Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck understood the special demands of fighting a war on African soil, and he also spoke fluent Swahili—this alone helped to earn him the respect and admiration of his African troops. Unlike the British, he also recruited black officers. Von Lettow-Vorbeck understood that, strategically, East Africa would never be anything other than a sideshow during the First World War. His instructions from Berlin were to maintain the defense of the colony at all costs, but he knew he had no real hope of winning this campaign. Instead, he was determined to tie down as many British troops as possible, thereby denying them a place on the Western Front.13 Through a combination of preemptive strikes on towns such as Kisii and brazen attacks on the Uganda Railway, he not only captured badly needed weapons and supplies but also kept more than 150,000 Allied troops fighting in East Africa throughout the war.
In March 1916 the British launched a formidable offensive against the Germans under the command of General Jan Christian Smuts, who had more than 45,000 troops at his immediate disposal—four times the number of Germans. Hopelessly outnumbered, the German commander nonetheless fought an effective rearguard action as he retreated south through German East Africa. During this campaign Onyango Obama was moved from his road-building duties in British East Africa and transferred to German East Africa to support the growing offensive. For almost a year the Germans and their loyal African askaris survived as best they could, alternately living off the land and enjoying supplies captured from the advancing Allied forces. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s army was so successful at acquiring provisions and equipment from the enemy that by the end of the war the German forces had more ammunition than they could carry. Nevertheless, the Germans knew they could not repulse the Allied forces, who pursued them relentlessly across German East Africa and into Portuguese-controlled Mozambique.
By early November 1918 rumors were beginning to circulate among the German forces that the war was nearly over, but von Lettow-Vorbeck remained convinced that any end to the conflict would be favorable to Germany. Chased around East Africa by British forces for the past several years, he and his army had little idea of the real situation in Europe. He expressed disbelief when the British commissioner told him what was happening back home in the Fatherland:
The Commissioner told me that the German fleet had revolted, and that a revolution had also broken out in Germany; further, if he was to accept a report which was official but had not yet been confirmed, the Kaiser had abdicated on November 10th. All this news seemed to me improbable, and I did not believe it until it was confirmed on my way home months later.14
As the commander of German forces in East Africa, von Lettow-Vorbeck had no choice but to offer his surrender to Brigadier General W. F. S. Edwards. Under a storm-laden sky at Abercorn on the border between German East Africa and northern Rhodesia, hostilities ceased at 11:00 a.m. on November 25, 1918—exactly two weeks after the armistice was signed in Europe. Not only had the first shots of the war been fired in Africa, but so too were the last. Von Lettow-Vorbeck’s army had the distinction of being the only German forces to have occupied British-controlled soil during the Great War.
Among British imperialists there was an almost palpable excitement about the new opportunities in Africa. For the first time they had the chance to paint Africa “Empire Red” from south to north, and Cecil Rhodes’ dream of a “Cape to Cairo” route became a reality. The British could now travel from the extreme south of the continent to the Mediterranean Sea without ever leaving the British Empire; the journey took fifty-three days, traveling 4,456 miles by railway, 2,004 miles on river and lake steamers, and just 363 miles by road.
In 1919, not only did the Treaty of Versailles set out the terms of peace in Europe, but article 22 divided the German colonies between other European nations. This division of territory was just as important as that produced by the Berlin conference of 1885, and once again the Africans were given no voice in their future. Granted, some missionaries were tasked with canvassing African opinion and representing them at the conference in France, but like the politicians, the missionaries had their own vested interests and agenda. The one significant concession made to “African interests” at Versailles was the acknowledgment that, in the words of one historian, Africans “could no longer be bandied about like so many sheep.”15 At the insistence of the United States—which was now beginning to assume a much greater role in international politics—the ex-colonies of Germany were not to be simply handed over to the victorious Allies; instead, they were to become “mandates,” administered under the auspices of the newly founded League of Nations. These mandates declared:
To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization … [and that] … the tutelage of such people should be entrusted to advanced nations who, by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position, can best undertake this responsibility and who are willing to accept it.16
The so-called Class B mandates covered all of the former German colonies in Africa. In German East Africa specifically, Ruanda and Urundi (now called Rwanda and Burundi) would be administered with the Belgian Congo, with the rest of Deutsch-Ostafrika falling under British military rule, consisting of the territory that would become known as Tanganyika.
Despite the grandiose, paternalistic ideals behind the League of Nations, any ordinary African would be hard pressed the see the distinction between a “colony” and a “mandate.” As the historian Brian Digre has explained, mandates were simply “imperialism’s new clothes.”17 It would take another World War, when Africans again fought and died alongside Europeans, before there was any real progress toward self-governance for Africans. Even so, the end of the First World War marked a turning point in the history of East Africa, and a nascent independence movement was beginning to emerge.
Between 1914 and 1918, Africans fought alongside their white masters, and the experience transformed the image that the black man had of the white. Previously, the European had been feared—he was a superhuman, capable of killing on a whim and curing at a stroke. Now, having spent four long and arduous years living, sleeping, and dying alongside white officers, often advising them in the secrets of jungle warfare, Africans realized there was nothing omnipotent about their colonial masters.
They had also been introduced to the new technology of the European, as one postwar reporter noted:
Men who a few years ago had never seen a white man, to whom the mechanism of a tap or a doorhandle is still an inscrutable mystery, have been trained to carry into action on their heads the field wireless or the latest quick-firing gun. Men of tribes which had never advanced so far in civilisation as to use wheeled transport, who a few years ago would have run shrieking from the sight of a train, have been steadied till they learned to pull great motor lorries out of the mud, to plod patiently along hardly stepping to one side while convoy after convoy of oxcarts, mule carts and motor vehicles grazed by them, till they hardly turned their heads at the whirr of passing aircraft.18
For some young Luo warriors—as with many of the other African tribes—the white man’s war was traumatic. They had long known tribal war and death, but this European conflict was on a scale and magnitude far beyond anything they could have imagined. The rules of the white man’s war were also different from those of the African, and the traditional tribal taboos had been broken, leaving a persistent, lingering anxiety about the consequences. The African askaris had lived in huts and camps that were obviously cursed with the deaths of others, and they had witnessed horrific injuries and diseases inflicted on their comrades, who were then violated in death by being buried in mass graves with strangers.
Some returning Africans could not face the future and took their own lives—suicide being a rare occurrence in Africa. Others were reluctant to talk about what they had experienced, for fear they would be banished from their community. Military doctors diagnosed the condition among the Africans as a mental illness similar to shell-shock, but circumstances and complaints differed both among individuals and among tribes. The Kikuyu in particular were badly affected, with many young men classified as temporarily insane. The Luo, of course, feared that because the bodies of their fallen comrades could never be buried in Luoland, their spirits would become demons—jachien.
Onyango Obama was away from Nyanza for the whole of the war. After road duties he joined the British force that was pursuing the Germans south out of German East Africa. He also spent some time in Zanzibar, which was a British protectorate throughout the war years. There he encountered Islam for the first time. As a young boy he had been brought up to worship the Luo god Nyasaye, who was manifest in everyday things, including the sun, the moon, the lake, and some wild animals. At mission school he had been introduced to Christianity; he was baptized and even took the very English name of Johnson for a short time. But for Onyango, like many Africans at the time, the Christian message of love and compassion toward all men was difficult to reconcile with the white man’s apparent willingness to go to war. Onyango saw the Christian doctrine of showing mercy toward one’s fellow man as ambiguous, even a sign of weakness—nothing more than sentimental gibberish. So it is not surprising that Islam should have appealed to Onyango, who appreciated the structure and discipline it brought to his life.
Members of Onyango’s family think there were other reasons behind his embrace of Islam. John Ndalo thought that at least part of the appeal was the women: “Onyango was an adventurous person and he went to many places, including during the First World War. He met many different people, including Muslims. He even married Muslim wives. So, he had a liking of the Muslim people and he had a liking of the Muslim ladies.”
Charles Oluoch thought similarly:
These Muslim ladies, they know how to treat men. Onyango was attracted to these Muslim ladies because they are different from our women. They are more submissive.
The Christians, when they came, they believed that polygamy was wrong. But Muslims, they gave you the assurance that you can have even five wives.… So I think he found it to be more comfortable in Islam than Christianity.
As part of his conversion, Onyango took the Arab name Hussein, which he later passed on to his eldest son, who in turn gave it to Onyango’s grandson, President Barack Hussein Obama. However, Onyango’s conversion to Islam was anathema to his family back home, who were adopting Christianity under the teachings of the Seventh-Day Adventists. Onyango seems to have taken satisfaction in being different, and no doubt he relished his independence.
Onyango stayed in Zanzibar for a couple of years after the war and did not return to Kendu Bay until 1920. By this time, his family had given up any hope of seeing him alive—after all, he had been away for six years without making any contact. When he eventually returned home, he had to persuade them he was real: “See, this is the real Onyango—it is me!” he is claimed to have said.
Hussein Onyango was still only twenty-five, and under normal circumstances he would have moved back to his father’s homestead and looked for a wife. But he was too proud to return, and besides, his faith now made him even more of an outsider in the eyes of his family. Instead he sought to establish a life for himself in Kendu Bay, away from his family. Fortunately, land was still available, so Onyango set about clearing an area some distance away from his father’s homestead where he could establish his own compound. He did not initially build himself a traditional simba, but chose instead to live in an army-issue tent. People thought that he was crazy, and this only added to his estrangement from his family.
After demobilization thousands of young Africans returned home to find a society in turmoil. East Africa had not seen such a drain on manpower since the 1870s, when Arab slave traders had taken twenty-five thousand Africans a year. For more than four years the normal, supportive African village life had been in limbo; families were dislocated, aging parents neglected, farms abandoned. Young men returned—some of them ill, traumatized, or disabled—to find that their traditional way of life had gone. Meanwhile, their chiefs were rewarded for their loyalty to the British, first for recruiting young men and then for rounding up any deserters. Not surprisingly, the Africans blamed their colonial masters for their postwar problems.
In south Nyanza, the war had disrupted a profitable trade with the region bordering German East Africa, and the population was suffering the consequences. In 1918 the rains had failed in western Kenya, bringing a famine in 1919. The Luo called the famine kanga, after the name of the returning soldiers, and an estimated 155,000 people in British East Africa died from starvation that year—three times the number of porters who died in the war. John Ndalo, who was a young child at the time, remembers the locust swarms that exacerbated the food shortages in Nyanza:
The locusts used to invade this place. They came over the trees and they ate all the leaves and everything, and just left the trees as sticks.… There was no food for cattle and there was no food for people.
We devised a method, because they were eating all our food. We said that we must eat them.… We’d come very early in the morning and collect them, and then we’d have to boil them for food, and they were very nutritious. Even now, we still eat the locusts—it’s called ongogo here. You put salt on them so they are tastier.
If famine and locust swarms were not enough, the Spanish influenza pandemic was sweeping the world in the aftermath of war. In the two years between 1918 and 1920 many more died of influenza worldwide than in four years of combat. The Scottish medical missionary Dr. Horace Philp estimated that in south Nyanza district alone five thousand people died from flu, and many more from smallpox and plague.19 Yet not a single trained medical doctor or pharmacist was available after the war to help the debilitated population of south Nyanza.
The families of the war veterans also received little help from the authorities. Parents and wives who had lost their men hoped for compensation, but nothing was forthcoming. The government announced that unless the men had been officially registered (a procedure that was introduced only in 1915 and was not universal until 1923), no payment would be made, because it would be impossible to trace the relatives.
Still other changes came after the war. In 1915 the government had accepted the white settlers’ demand for greater security of land tenure, extending the leases on their farms in the White Highlands from 99 to 999 years. The next year, the British increased the hut and poll taxes on the Africans to help pay for the war. After the end of hostilities, the British government formally annexed British East Africa, declared it to be a Crown colony, and renamed it Kenya* after the mountain in its center. The government also introduced new, onerous demands on the African population: laborers’ wages were reduced by a third; a certificate of identification—the kipande—was introduced to catch those who ran away from their employers; every male over sixteen was fingerprinted; direct taxation was increased to sixteen shillings a head; and women and girls were compelled to work on white-owned farms. Harry Thuku, a Kikuyu leader who founded the Young Kikuyu Association in 1921 to oppose colonial rule, explained in his autobiography how the women were recruited to work on the new farms:
A settler who wanted labour for his farm would write to the DC [District Commissioner].… The DC sent a letter to the chief or headman to supply such and such a number, and the chief in turn had his tribal retainers to carry out this business. They would simply go to people’s houses—very often where there were beautiful women and daughters—and point out which were to come and work. Sometimes they had to work a distance from home and the number of girls who got pregnant in this way was very great.20
The white population too experienced postwar changes, but these were much more favorably received. The introduction of a new soldier settlement scheme was designed to double the European farming population in Kenya. In order to accommodate the anticipated influx of white farmers, the government claimed a further five thousand square miles of the highlands—land taken mainly from the Kikuyu.
By the early 1920s, Hussein Onyango had established his independence by building a proper homestead in Kendu Bay. His neighbors admired the fine hut he had built himself; he kept it scrupulously clean and filled it with fascinating objects that he had brought back from the war. Onyango only added to his mystique when he produced a small wooden box that could speak like a human. The whole community congregated to witness this miracle. One of the elders, his great-uncle Aguk, suggested they should destroy it, as it was obviously their ancestors who had come back to life—the voices could only belong to the much feared jachien. Onyango’s older brother Ndalo disagreed: instead, he said, they should take the box apart so that they could see the small people talking inside. Onyango patiently explained that the box was called a radio, and it allowed people to talk to one another across long distances. Some of the villagers were not convinced, and they insisted that they would never return to his house until he had cleansed his hut of the spirits with an animal sacrifice.
On a later occasion, Onyango told the skeptical villagers that he could go to an office in Kisumu and talk to people in Nairobi. James Otieno, who is now a very old man living in K’ogelo, was a young boy at the time; he remembers people blowing horns and beating drums to call everyone together. Some of the men were heard murmuring that Onyango had gone completely mad, while others claimed that he had been turned into a witch. Some even accused him of using the story to lure Africans together so that they could be tricked into being sold to the white man. The bravest of the community left Kendu Bay early one morning and accompanied Onyango to the Kisumu railway station. From there he went to the telegraph office, where just as he had promised, a message came through from his white employers in Nairobi.
Onyango had finished building his hut in K’obama, but the impoverished countryside of south Nyanza offered little to a restless young man. So he returned to Nairobi, where he began to build a reputation among the white colonialists as a reliable house servant and cook. In this respect Onyango resembled many Africans at this time who were obliged to work for cash to pay their taxes. Besides, rural life was hard in Luoland after the war, and Onyango thought himself better off in Nairobi, learning the white man’s ways. Sarah Obama claims that Onyango’s many employers during this time included Hugh Cholmondeley, the third Baron Delamere, de facto leader of the white community in Kenya and founding member of what became known as the “Happy Valley” set—a clique of wealthy British colonials whose pleasure-seeking habits involved riotous parties, drug taking, and wife swapping.
Around the time that Hussein Onyango decided to work in Nairobi, his older brother, Ndalo, left Kendu Bay and returned to the ancestral home in K’ogelo, which his great-grandfather Obong’o had left in the 1830s. It was a major change for Ndalo—he had two wives and young children, and all his immediate family were in Kendu Bay. The circumstances surrounding his departure comprise a typical Luo story of squabbling and infighting. His grandson, Charles Oluoch, explained to me what happened:
There were three sons, but Ndalo and Onyango were similar in character. Oguta—their youngest brother—was somebody very polite. But Ndalo was always aggressive and he was very boastful. He was told [by another Kendu Bay villager] he was jadak [a foreigner]—“You are disturbing us!” He was a very proud man. So he took his two wives and his cattle and he walked from here up to Alego [a distance of 80 miles].
Moving onto the land his great-grandfather Obong’o had vacated nearly a hundred years previously, Ndalo cleared the land, planted his crops, and built huts for himself and his two wives. He also took to riding a bull around the village, looking very regal; this earned him the nickname “King George,” after the reigning British monarch. Here in K’ogelo at least, nobody could call him jadak.
Two years later in 1922 Ndalo’s senior wife, Odero, gave birth to their second son, Peter Oluoch, who became father to Charles and his older brother, Wilson. When Peter was three, Ndalo and his two wives died unexpectedly, leaving Peter and his two siblings orphaned. People say that the three adults died very suddenly, within a couple of days of becoming ill, and K’ogelo villagers were convinced that a curse had been placed on the family and their homestead. In reality, the cause of their deaths was almost certainly smallpox. The disfigurement and pustules that form on the body of smallpox victims could only have added to the horror their neighbors felt at such a shocking family catastrophe, reinforcing the belief that witchcraft was the cause. A second tragedy was about to befall the family within days of their deaths, as Charles Oluoch explained: “When they died, my father was three years old, so it was around 1925. When people were wailing [at the funeral], he fell into the fire and he was burnt. And it was my aunt, who was called Drusilla, who was the one who rescued him from that fire. At the time he could not walk fully.” Peter Oluoch was scarred for the rest of his life.
After the funeral, distant relatives of Ndalo offered to take care of the three young children, as is the Luo custom. But Hussein Onyango would have none of it, and despite not being married, he insisted on taking his two nephews and his niece with him back to Kendu Bay:
Onyango took them and brought them back here [to Kendu Bay], to their grandmothers. When my father [Peter] was at school age, Onyango adopted him. So where he worked, all these whites, they knew him as the son of Onyango.… He also converted him to be a Muslim. Even these Muslims in Kendu Bay, they thought my father was the first son of Onyango.
Odero [the eldest boy] stayed with his grandmother, but Onyango took my father. There was something he admired about him. You know, Onyango was a very harsh person—he’d call you and he’d like you to run. I think my father knew how to work Onyango.
Onyango decided that Peter Oluoch should join him in Nairobi, where he would receive a better education than in Kendu Bay. However, the rest of the family were unanimously against the idea. After all, Onyango was considered to be a madman—or at best, very odd. How could he possibly look after a young boy when he didn’t even have a wife? But Hussein Onyango had made up his mind, and together they left to take the ferry from Kendu Bay to Kisumu. Distraught, the women of K’obama followed them down to the jetty, and one—who was more hysterical than most—threw herself into the waters of Winam Gulf as the boat left for Kisumu, in a last-minute attempt to rescue Peter.
The early 1920s saw the beginnings of a grassroots rebellion against the colonial government, both in Nyanza and in the Kikuyu lands. In 1921 Harry Thuku founded the Young Kikuyu Association to protest against unreasonable taxation and the much reviled kipande system. Kipande, which literally translates to “a piece,” referred to a small steel cylinder containing identity papers that every African laborer had to wear constantly if he hoped to find employment. The following year, Thuku founded the East African Association, which campaigned against the forced labor of women and girls. But both efforts were short lived. Thuku was arrested for his political activities on March 14, 1922, and exiled, without charge, to the remote Northern Frontier province. He remained there for the next nine years.
In Nyanza province, the more politicized Luo convened a secret meeting to decide how they should protest against direct governance. The main protagonists were the young “mission boys”—the first generation of Luo boys who had been educated by the missionaries. The mission boys decided to organize a strike and a boycott of classes at Maseno school—the top mission school outside of Kisumu (and later the alma mater of President Obama’s father). The missionaries at Maseno were generally sympathetic to the principles of the boycott, having also lost some of their autonomy under the new colonial regulations. Next, Luo leaders organized a public meeting to call for the Kenya protectorate to become a colony. Nine thousand people attended the meeting on December 23, 1921, at Luanda in Gem (northwest of Kisumu)—a remarkable number at a time when the ordinary African had no access to the telegraph, telephones, or any mechanized transport. The main demand of the meeting was local autonomy for the Luo under an elected president—a ker. Following the lead of Harry Thuku, the people also voted to form a new association. The Young Kavirondo Association was the first attempt to mobilize the people of Nyanza into a militant political force. It was not particularly long lived: in 1923, in order to avoid being banned by the British, the Young Kavirondo Association rewrote its constitution and changed its name to the Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association. Nevertheless, the Young Kavirondo Association was one of the first African-led political movements in Kenya, and not only did it challenge British colonial rule, but it also laid the foundation for Luo tribal politics in an independent Kenya more than forty years later.
Hussein Onyango, however, was not really interested in politics. By the mid-1920s he was an accomplished and successful cook, working for the British in Nairobi and the Rift Valley. Onyango had come to admire the British, especially their discipline and organization. In this respect, Onyango was not alone among the Luo. The Kikuyu had lost huge areas of their land to the white farmers and been forced onto tribal reserves with poor farming land, but the Luo were spared such draconian measures. It suited the British to “divide and rule” the different Kenyan tribes, and many Luo found well-paid jobs working for white families or for the colonial administration. Recognizing that the Luo had a reputation for intelligence (something the Luo put down to their high-protein diet of fish and meat), the British had encouraged the education of the young mission boys, hoping they would form the foundation of an Africanized administration in East Africa.
By African standards, Onyango prospered; the good money he was earning in Nairobi allowed him to acquire more cattle back in Kendu Bay, and his hut was always spotlessly clean. But his family and neighbors in Kendu Bay still thought he was odd, for Onyango lived like a white man, even when he was home in Luoland. He ate at a wooden table with a knife and fork, and he wore European clothes, which were always scrupulously neat and tidy. He insisted that people take off their shoes and wash their feet before entering. Inevitably, Onyango became the focus of village gossip, especially as he had still not married. According to President Obama’s memoir, Onyango married three women. However, several elders in Kendu Bay indicated that the reality was much more complicated than that. Charles Oluoch had his own theory about his uncle’s complex relationships with women:
Onyango was his own man, and he knew how to find women. He had so many friends, and if they liked him, they would say, “I have a sister here.…” He used to travel a lot—Onyango had the spirit of adventure. [And] it took him time to settle, to have his own family, whilst his other brothers overtook him [with a family] when they were younger.
One of his brothers-in-law, Abdo Omar Okech, also knew all about Onyango’s reputation as a ladies’ man, and he explained why he thought Onyango was so successful with women:
Onyango was a medicine man and he knew a lot about herbs which could cure people. Because of this, many women liked him.
Most of these ladies were not married, but when they looked at him, I think because of his build, they just loved him. They just fell for him. He must have been a very attractive man because of all these women. A woman would come and stay with him for a month or two, then he would kick them out and take another one.
John Ndalo, who lived close to Onyango’s compound in Kendu Bay, recalled the women he finally married:
There was a lady from Kawango in Mumias [in central Nyanza], and he even took cattle to Mumias and paid a bride price. Then there was Halima, and then Sofia Odera from Karungu, beyond Homa Bay in South Nyanza. Then Habiba Akumu, then Sarah.
Onyango was already up to his Islamic limit of five wives, and they were only the ones he had actually married, but John Ndalo tried to clarify the situation:
In Africa, if you don’t have a child with your wife, it is very easy to marry another one. In our culture, we only recognize somebody as your wife if you take the cattle. But we cannot rule out if there were some who were “good friends,” because you can stay with them for one or two years, but we do not recognize them [as a wife], because you have not taken the cattle.
Nobody can remember the name of Onyango’s first wife from Kawango, but they do remember that he paid her family twenty head of cattle as a bride-price. When she did not produce a child, Onyango divorced her, but out of pride he never went back for his cows, which was unusual for a Luo.
Onyango had very high standards of cleanliness and behavior, and he also had a violent temper. Even by the harsh standards of Luo husbands in those days, Onyango was cruel toward his women. John Ndalo said, “Onyango loved to welcome visitors. If his women did not behave well in front of them, then he would beat them there, right in front of the visitors. He would not wait.”
By the late 1920s, Onyango found a respectful and gentle woman who tolerated his outbursts and beatings. Halima came from Ugenya, a region in central Nyanza, north of Siaya, and he met her when he was working for a white man in the area. Onyango was now in his early thirties, and like any Luo husband in that situation, he looked forward to his new wife producing a son and heir quickly. Unfortunately, their union was not blessed with children. Clearly Onyango was not infertile, as he went on to father eight children with his later wives, but a married man without children soon becomes a subject of gossip in Kenya.
Sarah Obama tells the story of Onyango visiting a Nairobi dance hall one night, whereupon he was confronted by a drunk: “Onyango, you are already an older man [he was in his mid-thirties at the time]. You have cattle, and you have a wife, and yet you have no children. Tell me, is something the matter between your legs?”21 Onyango was furious, but the cruel words found their mark, and he returned home to Kendu Bay determined to find another wife who could give him children.
So Onyango married again, this time a young girl called Sofia Odera from Homa Bay, a fishing village about twelve miles west of Kendu Bay. John Ndalo recalls that Onyango paid fifteen head of cattle this time as the bride-price, but when Sofia and Onyango parted company, childless, Onyango again was too proud to reclaim his cows.
Onyango’s father, Obama, died around 1930. Although they had been estranged when Onyango was young, father and son had since reconciled and Obama had contributed cattle to Onyango’s bride-prices. A successful, traditional Luo tribesman, Obama left five widows—Nyaoke (the mother of Onyango and great-grandmother to the president), Auma, Mwanda, Odera, and Augo. Between them they bore him eight sons and several daughters. However after his death, Obama’s hut was not destroyed in the Luo tradition; instead, his wives continued to live there, although they were inherited by other men.
In the small village of Kanyadhiang I met a close relative of Onyango called Laban Opiyo. His father’s sister was Nyaoke, Obama’s first wife, making Laban a first cousin to Onyango and great-uncle to President Obama. A small, thin, frail man who has spent his whole life working in the sun, Laban looked every one of his eighty-seven years. Born in 1922, Laban was only about eight when Onyango’s father died, but he still remembers the event clearly:
I knew him very well. Obama was a tall man, a huge man, and well built. He married three girls just from our village here. There was Nyaoke and Mwanda, and then Auma, all from the same clan. But Nyaoke and Auma were real sisters. He kept working until he was very old—he loved farming. He didn’t go to school. When he was an old man, he went to his simba, his hut, to attend to his garden, and he sat there on a small stool, gardening. I know he was very, very old when he died.
Onyango was in Nairobi [at the time]. He brought a gun—a rifle. He said that by 9 p.m., everyone had to be at his father’s home. When he reached the compound, he fired into the air. At the first gunshot, everybody ran into the houses because they had never heard anything like this before. I counted six gunshots.… I kept asking him, “What is this that is sending fire into heaven?” And we were very much afraid, because we had never heard a gun before, never. That is one thing that I can really remember about Hussein Onyango. He used that gun to send off his father in a dignified way.
Obama had a traditional burial. Before he died, he slaughtered his biggest bull and its skin was used as his shroud. He was buried the next day—his body could not be preserved like today. He was probably in his seventies when he died. When they buried him, they had a ceremony called tero buru—it is “taking the dust”—to scare away the dead spirits. They used to run here and there, sing songs and had mock fights. They also slaughtered a big cockerel.
By 1926, twenty-two thousand Africans in the protectorate were working in domestic service—about one in every seven gainfully employed men.22 In an attempt to monitor this sector, the colonial authorities introduced a system of worker registration after the Great War, issuing to Onyango and others like him a small red book. On its cover was the title DOMESTIC SERVANT’S POCKET REGISTER, followed in smaller type by: ISSUED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE REGISTRATION OF DOMESTIC SERVANT’S ORDINANCE, 1928, COLONY AND PROTECTORATE OF KENYA. During his first visit to Kenya in 1987, Barack Obama junior’s half sister Auma showed him Onyango’s registration document, which Sarah keeps in her hut in K’ogelo.23 Onyango’s booklet is faded now and the spine is broken, but the contents provide a fascinating glimpse of Onyango’s life at the time.
Inside the cover are Onyango’s two thumbprints—a standard identification mark at the time, even though Onyango could sign his own name as well as read and write English proficiently. The introduction inside the document explains its purpose:
The object of this Ordinance is to provide every person employed in a domestic capacity with a record of such employment, and to safeguard his or her interests as well as to protect employers against the employment of persons who have rendered themselves unsuitable for such work.
The term servant was defined as “cook, house servant, waiter, butler, nurse, valet, bar boy, footman, or chauffeur, or washermen.”
The British took their official documents very seriously, and anyone found defacing the booklet was “liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred shillings or imprisonment not exceeding six months or both.” The fine was more than a month’s earnings for a Kenyan house servant.
Further into the book are Onyango’s full registration details:
The back of the book is reserved for notes, mainly references from previous employers, which explains why the authorities took any defacement or alteration of the booklet so seriously. From the citations, Onyango was clearly highly respected by most of his white employers; Captain C. Harford, who gives his address as Government House in Nairobi, wrote that Onyango “performed his duties as personal boy with admirable diligence.” Mr. A. G. Dickson noted that “he can read and write English and follows any recipes … apart from other things his pastries are excellent.” Dr. H. H. Sherry was equally flattering and commented that Onyango “is a capable cook but the job is not big enough for him.”
However, Onyango was not always the model employee, and a certain Mr. Arthur Cole of the East Africa Survey Group noted that after a week on the job, Onyango was “found to be unsuitable and certainly not worth 60 shillings per month.” (Introduced in 1921, the East African shilling was equivalent to one shilling sterling; Onyango’s monthly wage would now be worth about $220, much the same as what a Kenyan would earn in a similar position today.) The registration book also documents the tenuous nature and short term of Onyango’s employment during this period. Mr. Dickson no longer required Onyango’s services because, he wrote: “I am no longer on Safari.” Nor is it likely that Onyango would have stayed with Arthur Cole for much longer either, after such a poor evaluation.
By 1933, Onyango was a wealthy man by Luo standards, but still he had no children. That year he was back in Kendu Bay on one of his regular visits when he saw a beautiful young girl walking along the road to market. She would eventually become the paternal grandmother of the president of the United States of America, and the circumstances surrounding their meeting and elopement were extraordinary.
Akumu was from the village of Simbi Kolonde, just a short distance outside Kendu Bay. She was tall, young, and striking, and Onyango was instantly smitten. Akumu’s youngest daughter, Auma (aunt to President Obama), explained how they met: “My mother was taking fish into the market and she was carrying one of the traditional baskets [on her head]. And when my father saw my mother, she was very beautiful. My father forced my mother to leave the fish and then grabbed her and put her into the car and sped off.”
Akumu’s family claim that she was abducted in broad daylight. Nobody knew where Onyango had hidden the young girl, and her family was distraught by his foolish and impulsive action. Auma continued the story:
My father had taken my mother forcefully, and he was cautioned by the local leadership … he was questioned and they arrested him.
Now this is what my father said: “I can’t leave this woman because I love her and I did not rape her. I want her and I love her and I will pay everything that the people want.” My father went and untied thirty-five cattle just to come and pay for this girl … because he loved her so much.
Having paid this, the authorities allowed him to take Akumu back to Nairobi. At first, my mother did not like my father, because she had not known him at all. This was a forceful marriage. But now, having taken her, he showed her a lot of respect and love, then she loved him and she agreed to stay with Onyango.
Onyango was nearly forty and Akumu was only sixteen or seventeen years old, but such an age difference was not unusual in African marriages at the time. (When Onyango married for the fifth time several years later, Sarah too was in her teens.) Akumu came from a Christian family—indeed, she was the only Christian woman Onyango ever married—but Hussein Onyango insisted that she convert to Islam, and she took the Muslim name Habiba. Their union quickly brought the long-desired result of a child for Onyango, and Sarah Nyaoke was born in 1934, followed by Barack senior (father to the president) two years later. Their third child, Hawa Auma, was born in 1942, and a fourth child, Rashidi, was born in 1944; Rashidi died from a fever when he was about ten. All of Hussein Onyango’s children were raised as Muslims.
In a pattern of married life that is still common in Kenya even today, Onyango continued to work in Nairobi as a cook while Akumu and her young children lived more than two hundred miles away in Kendu Bay. But after several years of married life, passion began to wane and Akumu and Onyango began having heated arguments. By all accounts the president’s grandmother was a strong and determined woman, and she was not prepared to tolerate what she saw as Onyango’s unrealistic expectations of discipline and cleanliness around the compound.
As the marriage began to fade, Onyango took a fifth wife. Sarah Ogwel was born into a Muslim family in Kendu Bay in 1922, and she told me that she married in 1941, when Onyango was forty-six. Her youngest brother, Abdo Omar Okech, is seventy-six and he still lives in the Muslim quarter of Kendu Bay, a stone’s throw from where he was born. He explained that his father, Omar Okech, had been a good friend of Onyango’s for years:
At that time I was only a small kid, but I overheard that my sister Sarah was to be given to Hussein. They were very good friends and my father said, “Will you marry my daughter?” According to our African customs, Sarah could not go against my father’s will.
It is possible that she would even have been given freely, but because Onyango loved my father, Hussein gave many cows to my family for her bride price.
Sarah remained married to Onyango for more years than all his other wives combined, and her brother explained Sarah’s secret:
The difference between Mama Sarah and these other women was that Sarah would not talk back to him. He loved Sarah because whatever he said, Sarah complied.
Sarah and Onyango married after Onyango returned from a brief spell of service in the King’s African Rifles during the Second World War, and they spent their first years of married life living together in Nairobi, while Akumu tended the farm back in Kendu Bay and brought up her young children.
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 surprisingly, 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.