KUDHO CHUOYO NG’AMA ONYONE
A thorn only pricks the one who steps on it
The township of Oyugis lies to the south of Kendu Bay and straddles the primary trucking route from Kisumu to Kisii. To the first-time visitor, this typical ramshackle Kenyan town is total chaos. Dangerously overloaded minibuses—the ubiquitous matatus—screech to a halt every few minutes to squeeze even more passengers inside; pedestrians risk life and limb every time they cross the road, first dodging a fuel tanker from one direction, then a pair of speeding matatus jostling for position from the other. You can buy almost anything on the main street: beautiful ripe fruit, a secondhand T-shirt, a bottle of warm beer, or a woman for the afternoon. Oyugis has a reputation for having one of the highest HIV/AIDS mortality rates in East Africa. It is also well known as the home of some of the best coffin makers in western Kenya.
Down the side streets leading off the main road, life is a little safer, as the potholed dirt roads force even the most reckless drivers to slow down. Here you find the smaller businesses—dressmakers, food stalls, and corner shops selling telephone credit. On most days an old woman sits here selling charcoal by the side of the road; on a good day, she makes $2 profit. Her name is Hawa Auma Hussein Onyango, wife of the late David Magak, and she is the closest living blood relative to the president of the United States:
I am the daughter of Hussein Onyango Obama and the sister of Barack Obama senior and the aunt of the president. His first child was Sarah Nyaoke, the second was Barack, and the third is me. I was born in 1942 in the Kendu Bay area. We migrated to K’ogelo when I was still young. I was still being fed on the breast.
I first met Auma at the Obama inauguration party in Kendu Bay, when she introduced herself in a torrent of incomprehensible Dholuo. She told me in no uncertain terms that it was my duty to write about the forgotten Obamas of Kendu Bay. She has one of the biggest toothless smiles in the world, and she instantly became one of my favorite Kenyan “aunts.” The day after the inauguration party, I went to see her in her small hut, a half-hour walk from the center of Oyugis. She told me that she was too young to remember living in Kendu Bay, but she remembers life in the family compound in K’ogelo, with her father, his two wives, and her two older siblings:
When my father left the army [in 1941], he came back and became a professional cook. He used to work for the whites in Nairobi until he came back to K’ogelo to retire. My father was a friend toward the British, and they would come and visit us on motorcycles and using cars. They were very good friends. He loved all the whites and they loved him.
We had a very big home, a typical African home, with all the family there. There used to be so many. Many cousins have since died, which has reduced the number. There were five houses there, five huts, for the first mother, the second mother, the girls, Barack’s house, and Baba’s [Father’s].
In those days there was no water in the compound as there is today. We had to fetch water down by the river. We would have to walk about two miles for the water. There were crocuta [spotted hyena]—these were very common. Even if you went out with two or three others, they would come and attack you. They always went for your buttocks. So we could not go out by ourselves.
At the time there were also lots of leopards. Baba also had a lot of poultry—he had all the chickens and all the turkeys and other small animals in our home. But then the leopards would come and eat them. One day I was sitting next to our cat—a big fat cat, our family pet. A leopard came and took the cat. I cried so much. I was very little.
Soon after moving to their new home in K’ogelo, Sarah Obama gave birth to her first child, Omar, in June 1944. Hussein Onyango went on to father three more children with Sarah: Zeituni Onyango Obama in 1952, and two more sons, Yusuf and Sayid. For much of the time, Onyango was still working as a cook in Nairobi, but when he came back to K’ogelo he worked hard on his smallholding. The land had been left derelict since his brother Ndalo died in the early 1920s and bush had taken over. Yet within a year Onyango had cleared the undergrowth and started to apply modern farming ideas, which he had learned from people in Nairobi. Soon he had enough of a surplus to sell at the local market.
Today his wife Sarah holds court in K’ogelo, sitting under one of the mango trees that Onyango planted soon after he moved to the village. On one of my visits there, Sarah waved her arm across the compound: “Look at all these fruit trees that he left here—he planted these. He wanted all this to be beautiful. He had lots of paw-paw plants, and oranges, all these mangoes, everything here.”
Life in K’ogelo, however, was not a bed of roses. Onyango’s fourth wife, Habiba Akumu, had never wanted to leave Kendu Bay, doing so only because her parents pressured her into going with her children. Now life was as she had feared: she was lonely, she was away from her family, and she had been displaced by Sarah as her husband’s favorite wife. According to Hawa Auma, Akumu and Sarah did not get along well, and this only exacerbated Akumu’s loneliness. But Akumu was proud and stubborn, and she continued to stand up to Onyango’s excessive demands for cleanliness and obedience. Their arguments became more frequent and more violent.
Auma told me that one day Onyango had a furious row with Akumu, and things came to a head: “My father then went out to dig a very big grave, to go and kill my mother.” After Auma’s unexpected revelation, she told me that she did not want to talk anymore; she was tired from sitting in the hot sun selling charcoal all day, and thinking of her mother upset her too much.
As a farmer, Onyango must have spent a lot of time in those early days in K’ogelo turning over the soil; Auma could only have been a very young girl at the time, so perhaps she had misunderstood the situation. Still, the story was too intriguing to pass up. Knowing that Akumu came from a village close to Kendu Bay, I decided to try my luck at tracing her family. Like many of the small villages in the area, Simbi Kolonde lies some distance off the main thoroughfare along a bone-rattling dirt road. The track runs around the edge of Simbi Lake—a deep volcanic lake that is steeped in myth. One story claims that when an old woman visited the village many years previously, no one had offered the hospitality that was expected under the circumstances. In a fit of anger, the old woman created a massive flood that swamped the village and drowned all the people, leaving the magnificent lake. Fortunately, my own experience was the exact opposite, and not for the first time during my research I arrived unannounced at a home, only to be welcomed with warmth and kindness. Here I found Charles Odonei Ojuka and Joseph Nyabondo, both brothers of Akumu. We spent a couple of hours or so chatting about life in the past, then I casually asked Charles if he knew why Akumu left Onyango:
Onyango used to love cleanliness, and he being a clean man, he never wanted his face to be touched by dirt. He didn’t like anything that is called dirt to be around him. So that is the number one cause which brought the disagreement with Akumu. There was a fight between Akumu and Onyango in K’ogelo—a quarrel. He dug a grave and he was going to cut her up and bury her there. An old man [a neighbor] came and helped Akumu, otherwise she would have been killed.
The old man came and wrestled with Onyango, then Akumu escaped and walked all the way to Kisumu by foot [forty miles]. I think there was some problem because having married the other wife Sarah, it might have put a lot of pressure on Akumu. When Akumu came back [to Kendu Bay], Onyango never followed her, to look for her or to be reconciled with her. He just left her.
When Akumu came over to this side [of the gulf ], the man who came to marry Akumu was called Salmon Orinda, and she gave birth to another five children. She was buried here when she died in 2006.
In her desperation to get away from Onyango, Akumu had abandoned her children, leaving Sarah Obama to raise President Obama’s father. Sarah said that Barack senior was nine years old when Akumu left, so this must have happened in late 1944 or early 1945, shortly after the family moved to K’ogelo.
Akumu’s three children—Sarah Nyaoke, Barack, and young Auma—were not happy in K’ogelo either. Auma claims they were not looked after, and often went hungry:
Sarah was very bad to us and she really inflicted a lot of pain on us. She never wanted us in any way when we were young children … she mistreated us because she didn’t want us to have food. Then every time and again she kept on beating us. She forced Sarah Nyaoke and Barack to work on the farm. If they could not work when they were very young, then nobody would eat, so [sometimes] we did not eat for many days.
Akumu’s three young children decided to run away. Sarah Nyaoke was only eleven at the time, Barack senior was nine, and Auma was still a toddler. Together, they set out on the seventy-five-mile trek back to their mother in Kendu Bay. Little Auma was too young to walk far, and her brother and sister tried to carry her, but she became too much of a burden:
They were walking all the way to Lake Victoria, and this was very difficult for them. They left me behind. You need to know this, that Barack and Sarah left me because I was heavy, and they could not carry me. I was left alone, crying by the sisal plantation.
Now, there were leopards near me, looking at me. I think they were sympathetic toward me. They never wanted to interfere with me. Then women from the community came and picked me up and took me home. I was still very young, but I can’t remember how old. I was still a toddler.
In fact, Auma must have been three years old at the time. Sarah Nyaoke and Barack wandered for several days before a local chief found them walking near the lake at a village called Nyakach—seventy miles from K’ogelo. The two children had managed to walk almost all the way back to Kendu Bay before being returned to Onyango and Sarah in K’ogelo.
Not surprisingly, Sarah Obama has a very different recollection of these dramatic events back in 1945. When first asked about Akumu, Sarah replied dismissively, “Who is Akumu?” But her memory soon returned: “She left when the father of the president was nine years old. And by that time, he had never started schooling [in K’ogelo]. So it was me—Mama Sarah—who protected and took care of them!”
I asked Sarah why she thought Akumu left K’ogelo. “She never liked this place, saying that people would kill her here,” she told me. “So she went, and left me to take care of Barack senior.”
Once Akumu’s three children had been returned to K’ogelo, life for everybody began to get back to normal. Hussein Onyango had always made education a high priority; he had enrolled Peter Oluoch in the Kisii high school in the 1930s, and now it was time for his own son to go to school. Barack senior started at the Gendia SDA primary school near Kendu Bay, but Sarah recalls that he found the schooling to be too easy: “He came back after the first day and told his father that he could not study there because his class was taught by a woman and he knew everything she had to teach him. This attitude he had learned from his father, so Onyango could say nothing.”1
Once they were settled into their new homestead in K’ogelo, Barack went to another school in the nearby village of Ng’iya, a five-mile walk from his new home.
Barack’s primary school teacher from Ng’iya, Samson Chilo Were, lives in retirement in a small settlement called Malumboa. The village is in a very remote part of western Kenya, close to Got Ramogi, where the first Luo settled in Kenya five hundred years ago. I visited him during the rainy season, and even a four-wheel-drive vehicle could not make it all the way to Samson’s house, so we went the last half mile on foot, wading ankle deep in mud and water. Samson was delighted to have unexpected visitors. He said he was born in April 1922, which made him eighty-seven years old, and apart from a slight deafness he showed little evidence of his advanced years—certainly his memory seemed as good as ever:
I taught [Barack] Obama in standard five when I was teaching in Ng’iya primary school for boys. He was a smart boy, very clever in class. Very keen at hearing what we were telling him. Every time he learned well—English, Swahili—he did it properly. He liked sports and he liked singing as well. He was a very good singer and a very good dancer.
We started before eight in the morning and school finished after games around 5 p.m. There were only six classrooms, just mud huts—there were no permanent huts then. We used to make iron sheets out of old oil drums for the roof.
At that time, the whole school was about two hundred [students], because many parents didn’t like school. They thought it was a waste of time. The parents liked their children to look after their cows. School was a white man’s thing. The school fees were three [Kenyan] shillings [a few dollars at today’s prices] a year, at most. His father used to pay for his uniform—it was a white shirt and brown shorts. Even at secondary school there were no long trousers at that time. They were all walking barefoot.
Samson also knew Hussein Onyango, who often invited the schoolteacher to his compound for a meal. Like everybody else I had met, Samson stressed Onyango’s priority on education and obedience:
Onyango used to prepare a meal for me at [his] home. He was very keen on education, on [Barack] Obama getting an education. Onyango was keen like a white man; he knew how to be organized like a white man.
He was a very harsh man as well. He would not allow Obama to joke with school. He wanted Obama to study and become a good man in the future. Sometimes Obama would hang around because he didn’t want to go to school, so Onyango would bang everything! “You’ve not gone to school yet and you are still here! Wake up and go to school.” And he would chase him to school.
In 1948 Onyango donated land adjacent to his compound to build the first primary school in K’ogelo, and twenty years later a secondary school was constructed with money partly donated by Barack senior. But even though Hussein Onyango stressed the importance of education for his sons, he was a traditional African at heart and he put less emphasis on the education of girls. After all, the reasoning went, why spend good money to educate your daughters if they were only going to leave home and become part of another family? So neither Sarah Nyaoke nor Hawa Auma went to school, and to this day Auma cannot read or write.
Some African families were more progressive about schooling girls, giving their daughters the benefit of at least a primary education. One such local girl was Magdalene Otin, who went to school with Barack Obama. Magdalene still lives in a traditional Luo roundhouse, which is something of a rarity in Kenya today: their fragile construction means that they seldom last more than thirty years, and most “modern” huts are now built square with a roof of corrugated iron. After many inquiries in and around K’ogelo, I was eventually directed to Magdalene’s hut, which was a short walk from the dirt road that led into the village. After some searching, I found her house hidden among trees and fields of tall maize.
Magdalene couldn’t remember how long she had lived there, but she told me it was “a very long time”; her hut must have been at least fifty years old. A thick mud wall ran around the inside like a doughnut, and she entertained her guests in the center of the hut—the “hole” in the doughnut—where there was a small table and several chairs. Between the inner and outer walls was a small, private space that provided a tiny sleeping area, plus dry storage for grain and a place for her chickens. The birds obviously felt at home, wandering in and out all the time in search of something to peck. Even with the birds, Magdalene’s home was spotless. She had few other personal possessions, except for a dozen framed family portraits—her husband was long dead, as were seven of her eight children.
Magdalene was tiny, frail, and shy. She didn’t know how old she was, but she did remember when Barack Obama senior went to school in Ng’iya, so she was probably in her mid-seventies, although a lifetime in the fields had made her look much older. The first three times I visited Magdalene she seemed overwhelmed by the attention of a mzungu and unsure of herself, not wanting to speak out of turn or inappropriately. On my second visit she insisted on preparing a meal of boiled chicken and ugali, the traditional dish of maize flour cooked to a thick dough. In the traditional way of Luo women, Magdalene served her guests (all of them men), but she did not eat. Instead she gently berated us for not eating enough, and kept piling more food on our plates; she then sat opposite with the other womenfolk from the compound, and watched us eat.
On my fourth visit to see Magdalene, she finally opened up and started to talk about her past:
I grew up with Obama. Barack loved school—he attended school regularly, and this was because his father was very strict and would not allow him to stay at home. Obama liked football—most African children like football. But he would come home early, not like the other children. He had to put the cows back in the pen—they couldn’t be left out late. If they are rained on badly they get sick, and we didn’t have the drugs for them that we have today.
I asked her what life was like in K’ogelo back in the late 1940s:
In those days the population was very small, and the trees were very tall and bushy. We had to meander through the trees to go anywhere. There were leopards and hyenas and all the other animals you talk about. And many snakes. I was very much afraid of the hyenas in those days. They are gluttons—I think they’re worse than leopards. We could only fetch water in the mornings because they chased us later in the day. They go for the buttocks of humans, as this is the bit that’s fat and soft.
I asked her if the animals were still dangerous today:
It’s the leopards which have killed most of our children. They took two children here just a couple of years ago. They go up in trees, and jump on them when they’re going to school. They twist your neck and you’re dead. If the hyenas kill you, they will eat you right there, but the leopards will always drag you away to a safe distance.
After his primary schooling in Ng’iya, in 1950 Barack senior sat for what was then called the Kenya African Preliminary Examination. This selection exam, based on the British education system, was designed to identify the brightest African students for admission to secondary school. Barack senior easily exceeded the standard required to gain admission to the prestigious Maseno high school, which was, and still is, one of the top boarding schools in Kenya. The Maseno school lies almost equidistant between K’ogelo and the main town, Kisumu; established in 1906 by the Church Mission Society (CMS), it is the second oldest secondary school in Kenya. Presumably Onyango had no religious objection to sending Barack to a Christian school, even though he was raising his son as a Muslim. Maseno was founded as part of the British initiative to tutor the sons of local chiefs, thereby creating an educated elite to work for the colonial administration. Today, the school looks much like any provincial English boarding school from the 1930s, except for the tumbili (vervet monkeys) playing around the roofs of the classrooms, and the simple black-and-white painted sign on the main driveway telling visitors that they are about to cross the equator from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern.
Maseno was substantially more expensive than Ng’iya primary school, and like parents the world over, Onyango and Sarah struggled to find the money for their son’s school fees. Despite being a practicing Muslim, Sarah decided the best way to earn some much-needed extra cash was to brew chang’aa to sell to the neighbors. Sarah earned a useful income from her brewing until Onyango came home one afternoon and discovered her fermentation vats. He was furious, tipping them over and refusing to allow Sarah to continue her home brewing. Instead, she resorted to a less profitable trade in homemade chapatis.
In 1951, Barack’s second year at Maseno, a new headmaster arrived. B. L. Bowers, who stayed at the school until 1969, was the longest-serving principal in the history of Maseno. Even by the standards of the early 1950s, Bowers—a white Anglican missionary from the United Kingdom—had a reputation for strictness, and he would ultimately prove to be the young Barack’s nemesis. But for the first couple of years at least, Barack excelled. One of his old friends and drinking companions, the journalist Leo Odera, recalled the elder Barack’s achievements at school:
Barack had a very excellent record in form one, form two, and form three. He was top in mathematics, English, and almost every subject. But his personal conduct from the end of form three was not so excellent; academically he was okay, but became difficult.
The student records at Maseno go back to 1906, and the administrators retain the reports of every boy who has passed through the school since it opened. Barack Obama senior’s records are kept securely in a safe in the principal’s office, rather than in the school archives. The documents are concise to the point of pithiness. Obama senior’s fading brown card, index number 3422, explains that Barack was a bright boy and had been promoted from Class B to A. In graceful handwriting, Bowers notes that the young Obama was “very keen, steady, trustworthy and friendly. Concentrates, reliable and out-going.” It was a good report, but things started to go downhill soon after that.
By the time Obama reached form three at Maseno, he was seventeen years old and his attitude toward the staff and discipline at the school began to change. Sarah Obama recalls that he was rebellious—he would sneak girls into the dormitories or raid the nearby farms with his friends, stealing chickens and yams because the school food was not very appetizing. However, Leo Odera tells a much more complicated story about what happened in Barack senior’s final year at the school, which ultimately led to his downfall:
As he was moving to senior classes, he became rude and arrogant. He did not like to do the manual work, like when the boys were clearing the bush or working the plow.… This developed friction between him and the principal, because at the school, the work was done communally and collectively. The teacher may assign you [the task] to go and clear an area of the school where grass was overgrown, but Barack didn’t like doing these things.
At Maseno, when Obama senior was in form three and progressing well as one of the top students, something strange happened. Some of the senior boys wrote a nasty letter, accusing and outlining some serious grievances the students had about the school administration. The letter was anonymous and unsigned. But because Barack Obama senior had been identified as the cleverest boy and politically minded, he became the prime suspect.
The principal was furious, and so was the board of governors. The school authority then threatened to invite the dreaded Special Branch Police [the directorate of security intelligence].
Obama senior got wind that he was to be investigated, and that handwriting experts had been summoned to the school to come and examine the offensive letter. So Obama left the school voluntarily. He was never expelled as such, but opted out of his own volition, leaving behind the belief by the other students that he’d had a hand in the authorship of the offending letter.
Barack would have been wise to have heeded the Luo proverb kudho chwoyo ng’ama onyone—“a thorn only pricks the one who steps on it.”
Hussein Onyango was furious with his son; after all, he and Sarah had saved every penny they had to give him the best education that was available to a black student in Kenya at the time, and Barack had thrown the opportunity away. Onyango’s response was predictable: he beat Barack with a stick until his back bled. Then, still angry, he effectively threw him out by sending him to work in Mombasa with the parting words “I will see how you enjoy yourself, earning your own meals.”2 Barack had no choice but to obey his father, and he left for Mombasa immediately.
Meanwhile, political and civil unrest had been brewing across the protectorate for several years, and Kenya was about to suffer one of the most deeply shocking and violent decades experienced by any British colony. The 1950s were dominated by the Mau Mau insurgency—a brutal and violent grassroots rebellion by Africans against white colonial rule. Like many such revolts in history, it started slowly. Ever since the 1920s the indigenous Africans had grown increasingly resentful over the way the white settlers had reduced their wages, and over the much reviled kipande—the identity card that was introduced after the First World War, without which no African could gain employment. (The white settlers frequently punished badly behaved workers by tearing up their kipande, making it impossible for them to find work elsewhere.)
The early 1920s had also seen the emergence of African political groups such as the Young Kikuyu Association, led by Harry Thuku, and the Young Kavirondo Association, founded by the Luo of Nyanza. However, the colonial government soon became concerned about what they considered to be “seditious” activities by the leaders of these organizations. On March 14, 1922, Harry Thuku was arrested in Nairobi and exiled for eight years, without charge or trial. Within two days of Thuku’s arrest, between seven thousand and eight thousand of his supporters protested outside the police station in Nairobi where he was detained. The police, armed with rifles and fixed bayonets, attempted to control the crowd; stones were thrown, shots were fired, and the crowd panicked. The official report into the incident claimed that twenty-one Africans were killed, including four women. Unofficial reports from staff at the mortuary claim that fifty-six bodies were brought in. The riot was the first violent political protest in Kenya’s history, but worse confrontations were to come, and the killings only added to the growing resentment among Africans that they had no hand in the governance of their own country.
In Luoland, a young teacher called Jonathan Okwiri established the Young Kavirondo Association in the same year as Thuku’s arrest. Among other things, the group also called for the abolition of the infamous kipande, a reduction in hut and poll tax, an increase in wages, and the abolition of forced labor.3 This time the colonial administration used less confrontational means to control the movement. They persuaded the Young Kavirondo Association to make W. E. Owen, the Anglican archdeacon of Kavirondo, their president; the authorities claimed that he would make an excellent intermediary to negotiate with the colonial government. Instead, Owen subverted their political initiatives and persuaded the group to focus on nonpolitical issues such as better housing, food, and hygiene. In a master stroke, he even convinced the group to change its name to the Kavirondo Taxpayers’ Welfare Association, rendering what might have been a grassroots activist movement utterly impotent.
In the 1930s the issue of land ownership became the focus of even greater political dissent—perhaps even the crucial political grievance in Kenya, according to the historian David Anderson.4 This resentment had first taken root in 1902, when the first white settlers claimed the most fertile hills around Nairobi. Within three decades the settler farms had grown in size and fences were beginning to enclose them, which worsened the land shortage problem for the Africans, especially for the Kikuyu of central Kenya. What Anderson calls “the tyranny of property” only fueled the Africans’ sense of injustice, but the government continued to thwart Kikuyu attempts at political organization. A new group called the Kikuyu Central Association replaced the banned Young Kikuyu Association, but this too was outlawed in 1941 when the colonial government clamped down on African dissent during the Second World War.
Between 1939 and 1945 the colony was put on a war footing as Italian troops massed on Kenya’s northern border with Ethiopia and Somaliland. The British responded to this threat by sending the KAR north, and Hussein Onyango went with the force to Addis Ababa. But as the war came to a close, the colonial government turned its attention at last to improving political representation for Africans. In 1944 Kenya became the first East African territory to include an African on its Legislative Council. The government progressively increased the number of local representatives to eight by 1951, although none of them was elected; instead, they were appointed by the governor from a list of names submitted by the local authorities. Not surprisingly, this did not satisfy African demands for either political equality or democracy. Nor was the injustice of land ownership being addressed: in 1948, 1.25 million Kikuyu were restricted to living on just two thousand square miles of farmland, whereas thirty thousand white settlers occupied six times as much space.5 Inevitably, the most fertile land was almost entirely in the hands of the colonists.
The Kikuyu were led by Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta had lived in Britain throughout most of the 1930s, studying anthropology at London University and also traveling to other European countries as well as the Soviet Union. During his time abroad, he married an Englishwoman called Edna Clarke, who became his second wife. Shortly after returning to Kenya in September 1946, he became president of the newly formed Kenya African Union (KAU) and the leading advocate for a peaceful transition to African majority rule. The KAU, which had been established in 1944 to articulate local grievances against the colonial administration, attempted to be more politically inclusive than the banned Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) by avoiding tribal politics. However, the KAU progressively fell under Kikuyu domination until it was generally regarded as little more than a reincarnation of the KCA. Kenyatta’s powerful, domineering personality was resented by some of the political leaders, and especially by the Luo.6 This tension between the Kikuyu and the Luo was just the beginning of the deep-rooted problem of tribalism in Kenyan politics, a conflict that would eventually plunge the country into turmoil.
Some critics, especially among the Kikuyu, thought that Kenyatta’s approach was not producing results quickly enough. The land issue had caused thousands of Kikuyu to migrate into towns and cities in search of work; as a consequence, Nairobi’s population doubled between 1938 and 1952. Increasing poverty, rising unemployment, and growing urban overpopulation plagued the colony.
During the late 1940s the general council of the banned KCA began a campaign of civil disobedience to protest the land issue. Members took what were said to be traditional Kikuyu ritual oaths to strengthen their commitment to the secret group; the militants believed that if they broke their oaths, they would be killed by supernatural forces. These oathing rituals often included the sacrifice of animals or the drinking of animal blood. By 1950, what had begun as a peaceful movement to organize civil disobedience was getting out of hand. Rumors circulated among the British that members of the group indulged in cannibalism, bestiality with goats, and wild orgies, and that the ritual oaths included a commitment to kill, dismember, and burn white settlers. Although mostly either untrue or greatly exaggerated, these stories would help convince the British government to send troops out to Kenya in 1952 to support the colonists.
After the Second World War, Nairobi had become a fertile recruiting ground for the militants. The genteel colonial city of whitewashed government offices and luxury hotels was gradually becoming surrounded by squalid shanties and seedy slums, as more and more landless Africans moved into the city. With few jobs and fewer opportunities, many could not resist the temptation to drift into petty crime; in the absence of an effective police force, criminal gangs began to control the poor areas, and street crime, robbery, smuggling, and protection rackets increased alarmingly. As is so often the case, though, impoverished Africans, rather than wealthy white colonials, suffered most from the violence and crime. The Kikuyu gangs controlled the slums, and by early 1950 the Nairobi-based urban militants known as the Muhimu started to organize mass oathings throughout central Kenya. Guns and ammunition were plentiful throughout the colony, brought back by the seventy-five thousand Africans who had served in the King’s African Rifles during the war, and the Muhimu set about collecting whatever weapons they could find, in preparation for what they saw as an inevitable armed struggle to free themselves from colonial rule.
Nobody is really quite sure how the name Mau Mau came to be used for the insurgents who set themselves on a course of violence to achieve independence from the British. The Kikuyu never used the name to describe themselves, and some argue that the white settlers invented the name to ridicule the rebellion. Others maintain that the name refers to the mountains in the Rift Valley, where the rebellious Kikuyu took refuge during the hostilities; or it might have been a corruption of Muhimu. Still others claim it is an acronym for Mzungu aende ulaya—mwafrica apate uhuru, which, loosely translated from Swahili, means “The white man should return to Europe—the African should gain freedom.”7
As the Kikuyu had suffered most from the confiscation of their land by the white settlers, most of the violence during the Mau Mau period occurred in the White Highlands and the Rift Valley—the traditional home of the Kikuyu. However, the general state of unrest in the late 1940s and early 1950s had an unsettling effect throughout the colony, and in Nyanza the repercussions of the violence involved even Hussein Onyango.
In Dreams from My Father, President Obama relates the story told to him by his stepgrandmother Sarah of how her husband was arrested in 1949, during the very early years of the Mau Mau insurrection. Like many Luo in Nyanza, Onyango went to political meetings where there was much talk of independence. Although he believed in principle that independence was a good thing for the colony, he was skeptical whether it was really possible. Onyango warned his son Barack senior that it was unlikely that anything would come of the initiative:
“How can the African defeat the white man when he cannot even make his own bicycle?” he would say to Barack. “The white man alone is like an ant. He can easily be crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together. His nation, his business—these things are more important to him than himself. He will follow the leadership and not question orders. Black men are not like this. Even the most foolish black man thinks he knows better than the wise man. That is why the black man will always lose.”8
Onyango was not particularly politically minded, and in many ways he greatly admired the British. Yet despite his loyalty and long service to the British going back thirty years, he was arrested and interned during the early years of the troubles. In 1949 Onyango was accused of being a subversive by an African who harbored a long-standing grudge against him.
Mau Mau was not yet a serious threat to the colonial government, but the first rumblings of dissent were emerging from underground groups. Onyango’s accuser, so Sarah Obama claims, had been cheating people by charging them excessive taxes and then pocketing the surplus. This practice was far from unusual, as the local chiefs selected by the British wielded wide-ranging powers. According to Sarah, Onyango had challenged the man over his embezzlement, and the chief waited for a chance to take his revenge. He accused Onyango of being a supporter of the rebels, and her husband was arrested and taken away to a detention camp. The penal regime set up in the camps to deal with suspected Mau Mau supporters was brutal, and Sarah claims that Onyango sustained regular beatings at the hands of his keepers:
The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening until he confessed.… He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down.… That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies. My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.9
Nobody can be absolutely sure who it was that accused Hussein Onyango of supporting the Mau Mau, and Sarah Obama does not name him. However, one serious contender is Paul Mboya from Kendu Bay. Onyango had been at loggerheads with Mboya ever since Mboya had been appointed chief in central Karachuonyo around 1935, and Obama had later taken him to task over recruiting forced labor. Even though he had stepped down by 1946, Mboya still wielded considerable influence with the colonial authorities. Perhaps Mboya thought that he had at last extracted his revenge on Onyango for constantly challenging his authority in Kendu Bay.
Whoever was responsible, it was a traumatic period for Onyango. The old man remained in custody for over six months, and he certainly would have been interrogated by the Special Branch—in those early years of the Mau Mau uprising, the British were desperate to find out as much as they could about the emerging movement and any arrest was taken seriously. He was ultimately cleared of all charges and released, returning home a broken man—thin, dirty, with a head full of lice, and permanently scarred from his beatings in the detention center. From that day, Sarah Obama claims, Onyango became an old man.
By the middle of 1951 rumors of secret Mau Mau meetings in the forests outside Nairobi were beginning to filter back to the colonial government. In early 1952 there were arson attacks against white farmers in Nanyuki and also against government chiefs in Nyeri, both important towns in the White Highlands. However, attacks on the white settlers were rare, and the main violence was directed against other Africans who were seen as being “loyal” to the whites. In this respect, the Mau Mau insurrection was as much an internal conflict—a civil war where African turned on his fellow African—as it was a struggle for independence against the colonial powers. Certainly, black Africans suffered infinitely more than the white colonials.
One typical victim of the Mau Mau was Mutuaro Onsoti, a Luo from the Kisii area of south Nyanza.10 Onsoti had been employed by a white farmer, James Kean, to help control the disruption caused on his farm by his Kikuyu squatter laborers. In May 1952, Onsoti told his employer that he suspected that Mau Mau activists were plotting to take over his farm. Kean was concerned about the safety of his foreman after this revelation, but was unable to prevent a brutal attack on Onsoti by four Kikuyu squatters on August 25. His decapitated body was recovered from the woods on the following day, but his head was never found.
In October 1952 Governor-General Sir Evelyn Baring cabled London to request that a state of emergency be declared in the colony. This would allow the governor special powers to detain suspects, deploy the military, and impose other laws without further reference to London. The Colonial Office was loath to devolve such power to the Kenyan government, which had a reputation for being reactionary and unpredictable. However, Whitehall reluctantly granted his request on October 14, and Baring began rounding up KAU activists and suspected Mau Mau leaders in an offensive code-named Operation Jock Scott. Many senior officials in the KAU had no association with Mau Mau at all, but Baring was convinced the tactic would stop the insurrection in its tracks.
Not everybody was quite so confident that Baring’s plan to screen and inter suspected Mau Mau sympathizers would be successful. One of the more thoughtful and insightful white highlanders drafted a memorandum to the governor:
It is obviously illogical that any person of European extraction could, by looking at an African and examining his papers, know whether or not he has Mau Mau inclinations.… The methods adopted so far usually culminate in a parade of Kikuyu, and any that can produce a current hut-tax receipt and an employment card, or appear to be unaggressive, are released. Others who cannot produce these documents are frequently detained, and more often than not a proportion of these quite decent people are forced into close association with criminals and taken off to some detention camp. These decent people, or any of them who are in a state of indecision, immediately build up the utmost contempt for the methods of law and order, and are ripe for Mau Mau allegiance, either now or when released from detention.11
A week after the declaration of a state of emergency, the Lancashire Fusiliers flew in from Egypt to supplement three battalions of the King’s African Rifles who were recalled from abroad. The authorities still lacked good-quality intelligence when hostilities began in earnest in late 1952, so the colonial forces struck out blindly to suppress the violence. The brutal period of repression that followed would permanently change the image of Kenya as a paradise for the white colonials. In the words of the historian David Anderson:
Before Mau Mau, Kenya had an entirely different image. In the iconography of the British imperial endeavour, it was the land of sunshine, gin slings and smiling, obedient servants, where the industrious white colonizer could enjoy a temperate life of peace and plenty in a tropical land. This was “white man’s country,” with its rolling, fertile highlands. Sturdy settler farmers had made their homes here, building a little piece of England in a foreign field.… Mau Mau shattered this patronizing pretence in the most poignant, disturbing manner, as trusted servants turned on their masters and slaughtered them.12
News of the intended arrests under the emergency powers leaked out, allowing the real revolutionaries to flee to their forest refuges in the Aberdare Mountains, while the moderates stayed put and awaited their fate. Many Africans considered Jomo Kenyatta to be a moderate leader, but he failed to unambiguously denounce Mau Mau violence to the satisfaction of the colonial government. Kenyatta knew exactly what to expect: he was arrested on November 18, 1952, and flown to a remote district station in Kapenguria, which reportedly had no telephone or rail communications with the rest of Kenya. He was charged, together with five other Kikuyu leaders, with “managing and being a member” of Mau Mau. They became known as the “Kapenguria Six,” and their trial lasted for fifty-nine days—the longest and most sensational trial in British colonial history. The main prosecution witness, a Kikuyu called Rawson Mbugua Macharia, claimed that he had taken a Mau Mau oath in the presence of Kenyatta. (Macharia was the only witness at the trial to give evidence that linked Kenyatta with Mau Mau directly, yet six years later he swore an affidavit that he and six others had perjured themselves, and that some of them had been rewarded with land for their testimony.) For security reasons the trial was held without a jury, and the British judge received £20,000 (nearly $1.1 million adjusted for 2010 prices) to travel to Africa to put Kenyatta behind bars. (Many claim this fee was a bribe to gain Kenyatta’s conviction.) In April 1953 Kenyatta was found guilty and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment with hard labor, and indefinite restriction thereafter; the British Privy Council refused his appeal the following year.
For the ordinary Kikuyu, the emergency brought terror and privation. Large bands of Mau Mau fighters moved freely around the highland forests of the Aberdare Mountains and Mount Kenya, attacking isolated police posts and terrorizing and killing Africans loyal to the white settlers. A typical group of insurgents numbered about a hundred; they operated mainly at night and took refuge in the forest during the days. Some of them had learned the techniques of guerrilla fighting during the war, when they assisted the British army against the Japanese in the Burmese jungle.
On January 24, 1953, two British settlers, Roger and Esme Ruck, together with their six-year-old son, Michael, were hacked to death by Mau Mau fighters on their isolated farm in Kinangop, together with one of their farmworkers who came to their assistance. The Rucks were a hardworking and respected farming couple in their early thirties, and they played an active role in the community. Esme Ruck ran a clinic on their farm, where she treated squatters in the area free of charge; her husband was a member of the Kenya Police Reserve. They were the embodiment of everything that white settlers held dear in postwar Kenya.
Panic immediately spread among the white community, and the Rucks’ murder became a turning point in the war for the colonials, who demanded that the government toughen its response to the crisis. The day after the murders, white Kenyans massed outside Government House in Nairobi, calling for the cordon of “nigger police” who were holding the crowd at bay to be taken away. Some demonstrators even stubbed their cigarettes out on the arms of the black constables in an attempt to break through the police line. Sir Michael Blundell, the acknowledged leader of the settler community in Kenya at the time, was in a crisis meeting inside Government House with the governor-general. When he came out to try to pacify the crowd, he was shocked by their mood:
This was my first experience of men and women who had momentarily lost all control of themselves and had become merged together as an insensate unthinking mass. I can see now individual pictures of the scene—a man with a beard and a strong foreign accent clutching his pistol as he shouted and raved; another with a quiet scholarly intellectual face, whom I knew to be a musician and a scientist, was crouched down by the terrace, twitching all over and swirling with a cascade of remarkable and blistering words, while an occasional fleck of foam came from his mouth.13
A few days after the Rucks’ murder, it became clear that their killers had been employed by them for several years—loyal workers who had suddenly turned and butchered them without warning. As a consequence, long-standing relationships and friendships between black and white could no longer be trusted. White settlers, including women, armed themselves with any weapon they could lay their hands on, and they fortified their farms as best as they could. Some of the farmers dismissed their Kikuyu staff because nobody could tell Mau Mau sympathizers from loyal servants.
Only a week before the brutal murders in Kinangop, Governor-General Sir Evelyn Baring had sanctioned the death penalty for anyone caught administering the Mau Mau oath. (The oath was often forced upon Kikuyu tribesmen at the point of a knife, and they were threatened with death if they failed to kill a European farmer when ordered.) Now, in the first few months of 1953, the authorities mounted a new offensive against Mau Mau, killing hundreds of suspects and arresting thousands more on suspicion of being members of the insurgency. At the height of the crisis more than 70,000 suspected Mau Mau supporters were held in British detention camps, and throughout the eight years of conflict at least 150,000 Africans spent some time in detention, including Hussein Onyango and his son Barack senior. (In her controversial book on the Mau Mau, historian Caroline Elkins claims the number of Africans detained was much greater than the official British figures, anywhere between 160,000 and 320,000.)14
On March 26, 1953, the Mau Mau demonstrated that they could organize a large-scale attack with impunity. In response to the declaration of emergency and the mass roundup of KAU officials and Mau Mau suspects, the insurgents sought revenge—not on the whites but on fellow Kikuyus. That evening, a patrol in the town of Lari was called to investigate a body. They found nailed to a tree the mutilated remains of a local man known to be loyal to the British. It was a trap; his body had obviously been left there so that its inevitable discovery would lure the Home Guard away from the town. When they returned, they found that nearly a thousand Mau Mau fighters had attacked the settlement.
The Mau Mau assault on Lari was carefully planned, with the insurgents organized into four or five gangs numbering more than a hundred men each. The gangs had systematically moved through the unprotected homesteads of Lari, killing and mutilating as they went. They tied ropes around the huts to prevent the occupants from opening their doors, then set fire to the thatched roofs. As the occupants struggled to escape through the windows, they were butchered from outside. The Home Guard patrol reached Lari at 10:00 p.m., just as the attackers had finished their gruesome work; more than 120 people, mostly women and children, were killed or seriously injured. No other attack by the Mau Mau during the emergency had the same terrifying impact on public opinion.
At first the killings were thought to be random, but as the true horror of the night began to unfold, the real target of the raid became clear. The heads of those households that were attacked were loyal to the British—members of the Home Guard, local chiefs, councilors, and outspoken critics of the Mau Mau. The following night a police outpost near Naivasha in the Rift Valley was also attacked; three black policemen were killed, and the Mau Mau rebels released 173 suspects being held by the police. They also captured fifty rifles and twenty-five machine guns, together with a large quantity of ammunition. The attacks changed the way Africans viewed the conflict, and the ordinary Kikuyu began to realize that they were now embroiled in a civil war as the Mau Mau inflicted a reign of terror on their own people.
As with the murder of Mutuaro Onsoti, the foreman from Kisii, these murders of other Africans were often particularly brutal, and intended to terrorize the population. One district officer reported: “There was one murder of an old man at Ruathia; he was chopped in two halves because he has given evidence against the Mau Mau in court … and down by the river below Gituge we found the corpse of an African Court Process Server who had likewise been strangled for informing against the Mau Mau.”15 Many Christian Kikuyu refused to take the Mau Mau oath because they believed that taking the blood of a goat was blasphemous; this left them vulnerable to attack. One Mau Mau fighter recalled, “We generally left the Christians alone. But if they informed on us, we would kill them and sometimes cut out their tongue. We had no choice.”16
More than eighteen hundred Kenyan civilians are known to have been murdered by the Mau Mau during the emergency; hundreds more disappeared and their bodies were never found.17
The British authorities were also guilty of carnage, especially during the “screening” process that was designed to isolate the hard-core Mau Mau supporters from innocent Kikuyus rounded up in error. The interrogation process was designed to terrorize the Mau Mau supporters, first by breaking the spirit of the detainees, and then by making them confess. Onyango had endured a similar procedure when he was arrested in 1949, but the techniques now used by some of the colonial authorities were much more brutal. In her book on the insurrection, historian Caroline Elkins assembled damning evidence of extensive human rights abuses:
Teams made up of settlers, British district officers, members of the Kenya police force, African loyalists, and even soldiers from the British military forces demanded confessions and intelligence, and used torture to get them … electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin and hot eggs were thrust up men’s rectums and women’s vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence.18
At least one detainee had his testicles cut off and was then made to eat them. “Things got a little out of hand,” one witness told Elkins when referring to another incident. “By the time we cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.” Another British officer described, with remarkable openness, his exasperation with an uncooperative suspect during an interrogation:
They wouldn’t say a thing, of course, and one of them, a tall coal-black bastard, kept grinning at me, real insolent. I slapped him hard, but he kept right on grinning at me, so I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could. He went down in a heap but when he finally got up on his feet he grinned at me again and I snapped, I really did. I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don’t remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn’t tell me where to find the rest of the gang I’d kill them too. They didn’t say a word so I shot them both. One wasn’t dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn’t believe me but all he said was, “Bury them and see the wall is cleared up.”19
In the early hours of the morning of October 21, 1956, four years to the day after Kenya entered a state of emergency, a tribal policeman shot and captured the insurgent leader Dedan Kimathi as he tried to break out of his forest hideout near the town of Nyeri—a Mau Mau hotspot. Kimathi’s capture and subsequent execution by hanging marked the end of the forest war against the Mau Mau.
The official number of casualties among the European settlers during Mau Mau was 32 dead and 26 wounded, and British records claim that 11,503 Kenyans were killed. David Anderson maintains the real figure was nearer 20,000, and Caroline Elkins has controversially estimated that at least 70,000 Kikuyu died, possibly hundreds of thousands.* The demographer John Blacker has recently estimated the total number of African deaths to be about 50,000, half of whom were children under the age of ten.20 The real figure will never be known with any certainty, but it must surely run into tens of thousands of Kenyans—most of them innocent civilians.
There is little doubt that the very worst of the atrocities committed by the British and white Kenyans were limited to a small number of people, as indeed was the case within the Kikuyu population. For the most part, the white community struggled to maintain law and order during a very difficult, violent, and uncertain period in Kenya’s history. Nevertheless, many people in a position of power were guilty of overlooking the many acts of violence by members of the white community against black Kenyans during the Mau Mau rebellion, making the decade one of the most shameful and inglorious episodes in British colonial history.
*Caroline Elkins’ highest figures have been challenged on the grounds of unsound statistics.