by Sally Jacobs
The addition of some home brew invariably enlivened such addresses. Although the Muslim faith prohibits the drinking of alcohol, Onyango was nonetheless a large consumer of chang’aa, a traditional alcoholic drink distilled from grains such as maize or sorghum.32 Another popular drink made at the family compound was busaa, brewed from millet or sorghum.
But Hussein Onyango typically put strict limits on entertainment, for he was determined that his son get the kind of formal education that he himself had tasted in the earliest mission schools. By the time Barack came of school age in the 1940s, those mission schools dominated education in East Africa, where the agenda was predominantly focused on reading, writing, and teachings from the Bible. Barack attended the Gendia Primary School, started by the Seventh Day Adventist church in 1906 and located about three miles from his home. Each morning, he would fall in with the straggling groups of children who strode the wide dirt paths to school. In the absence of motor vehicles, Kenyan schoolchildren routinely walked many miles to their school in small groups, often singing praise songs along the way. Sometimes, on their way home, Barack and other boys would play a popular form of hockey called adhula, in which sticks made from date trees were used to shoot a ball into a rival clan’s territory.33
Barack was fortunate that, due to his father’s job, he often had shoes to wear on those long walks to school, unlike many children whose families were unable to afford such a luxury. So precious were those shoes, however, that children often carried them to school rather than wear them out on the rock-strewn journey. But in most other respects Onyango was a difficult and exacting father who did not hesitate to cane his children if they disobeyed him or to intimidate them with the threat of his infamous whip. His greatest expectations were reserved for Barack. Because Onyango had achieved much for himself and was one of the most accomplished men in the village, he was determined that Barack surpass him. “Sometimes Onyango would pull him aside and say, ‘I want you to go beyond where I am,’” said Arthur Reuben Owino. “‘People have respected me, so you also will be respected much more than me. You must study hard and pay attention. And always take care of your appearance.’”
Onyango kept a watchful eye on Barack’s studies, particularly in the subject of math, for he had learned from the mzungu the importance of calculations and record keeping. On Barack’s return from school each day, his father required him to perform his math sums out loud while standing beside a table laden with dinner. If he was unable to complete his work perfectly, he was forbidden to sit down and eat. Or he was locked in his room for the night. “Even as a young boy, Barack was very smart and prone to mischief and sometimes he would skip class because he did not feel he needed to go,” explained Wilfred Obama Kobilo, a first cousin to Barack and a businessman now living in Nairobi. “But Barack always made sure that he knew his math homework before he went home because he knew his father was waiting for him there. He knew that his father had very high expectations of him.”
Regardless of whether there was homework to be done or not, other children were forbidden to visit the Obama compound. Onyango considered them unkempt and ill-mannered, and he could not endure the noise they made. Nor were his own children permitted to visit other households to play with their friends. Once, when Barack ignored the rule and stopped at a friend’s house, Joseph Akello recalls that Onyango was furious and shouted at him when he got home, “Why would you go to someone else’s home when you have all the mangos and guavas you need here?” he demanded. “We have everything you need right here and so you must stay here.”
But every rule has its exception, even Onyango’s. When one of his employers was leaving town to head to another posting, he gave Onyango some photographs they no longer wanted. The photos, simple poses of white ladies sitting in a drawing room, were of immense curiosity back in Luoland, where many women and children had never seen a white person and cameras were the stuff of lore. A few dared to inch close to Onyango’s compound in hopes of getting a glimpse of the pale-faced ladies hanging on the walls inside, only to have him shoo them away. These white women, posed for photographs, were among the first Barack had ever seen. He gazed upon them in his childhood home, mysterious and alluring creatures that belonged to a world about which he could only imagine.
Onyango had also been given an abandoned RCA gramophone, one of the earliest record players, which trumpeted sound through a conical metal horn. Crank the handle on the side and the horn suddenly emitted a thundering torrent of Zulu drumbeats or the cascading strains of a Beethoven sonata. Turn the dial on the side of the box and suddenly the music got louder. Villagers were rapt. Immensely proud of the machine, Onyango permitted a select group to come and listen, but they had to abide by his strict rules. The gramophone was set on a stool in the middle of the compound, and children were instructed to sit quietly in front of it. Adults could come as close as the compound gate to listen, but no closer. As the strains of music swelled over the dusty yard and the panicked chickens frantically ran from the noise, Barack often leapt impulsively to his feet and began to twirl to the rhythm, but Onyango swatted him back down to the ground. No dancing was allowed. No singing, either. And after two or three songs, he abruptly shut off the machine and ordered everyone back to work.
“Barack always wanted to dance. He had the rhythm in him,” said Akello. “But Onyango only let him have so much. A couple of songs. One record. Then it was over.”
HABIBA AKUMU DREAMED of running away.
An independent spirit, she had never been happy with her domineering husband. She chafed at his incessant rules and deeply resented his tyrannical ways. Even in the highly chauvinist Luo culture of the time, in which wife beating was not uncommon, Onyango was severe. When he summoned Habiba, he insisted that she must come at his first call or face a harsh beating. He constantly complained that she did not keep their home sufficiently tidy. And when they began to have children, the tension between them grew worse.
Onyango demanded that the babies always be clad in the fine clothing that he had brought back from Nairobi. If they cried, Habiba must stop them immediately. And when he was dissatisfied with her mothering, as he frequently was, he would cane her. Twice Habiba fled back to her parents’ home in nearby Kolonde, after the births of Sarah and then Barack, and two times Onyango followed her and brought her back to Kanyadhiang. Because Habiba now belonged to Onyango, her family sided with her husband and would not let her stay with them. At least not at first.34
Nor did Onyango approve of his wife’s gregarious manner. Habiba was an outgoing and social person who liked to go visit her friends around the village, but Onyango forbade her to engage in such frivolous behavior. Habiba did not cross him directly, for she had learned to take advantage of his long absences while working in Nairobi. When he finally left, she would head out and visit as often and as long as she pleased. During the rainy season in particular, she liked to pick mushrooms and take them to her friends’ houses, where they would chat while preparing the food. But when Onyango returned, someone would whisper to him of his wife’s doings. Once again the harsh crack of his whip breaking against her skin and her beseeching cries could be heard throughout the compound.
As Habiba turned increasingly inward in the face of her husband’s brutal treatment, Onyango began to take comfort in the arms of other women. One of them, a young Muslim girl from Kendu Bay named Sarah Ogwel, stayed with him in Nairobi and eventually became his fourth wife. Today, she is known worldwide as “Mama Sarah,” the American president’s step-grandmother. Photographs of her clad in traditional African dress, poised beneath the mango tree that Onyango planted outside their home, first appeared in news stories in 2008. Now a routine stop on the tourist circuit near Lake Victoria, she often poses with a life-size paper cutout of President Obama in return for a handful of shillings.
In 1939, as the drumbeat of war again sounded around the globe, Habiba got the reprieve she’d been waiting for. When Germany began its lethal march through Europe that tri
ggered World War II, the British empire again turned to its African troops for reinforcement. This time, the empire’s African colonies would provide over 320,000 askaris, or soldiers, to the African regiment known as the King’s African Rifles to fight in the Ethiopian and Burmese theaters of war.35 Hussein Onyango did not hesitate to sign up for global adventure once again. Assigned to cook for a British captain, Onyango traveled for three years visiting the fronts in Burma, Ceylon, and Europe.36 During his absence his wives and three children lived in relative peace, despite the mounting financial difficulties many Africans experienced during the war years. The hippo whip, at last, lay blessedly coiled.
By the time World War II wound to an end, the world was a vastly different place than that into which Barack had been born. The bloody conflicts of war may have seemed far removed from the bucolic shores of Lake Victoria, but the war marked the collapse of an old world order that opened the door to a new era not only in Kenya but also across much of the African continent. Barack would come of age in the throes of a revolution that would lift his country out from under the yoke of colonial oppression. And from that, he would find himself presented with the kind of opportunities that neither he nor his father could have ever imagined.
It would take nearly fifteen years to get there. By the time the war ended in 1945, much of Europe lay in a state of physical devastation. Despite being on the winning side, the British Empire was left in economic ruin and was forced into a period of retreat that triggered the gradual dissolution of Britain’s colonial holdings. Decolonization would be a long and drawn-out process lasting nearly three decades, beginning with the surrender of the empire’s jewel of India in 1947. As the African troops began returning home, they carried with them the seeds of a fierce political nationalism that would erupt violently in a matter of months.
The returning Kenyan soldiers were changed men. Not only had they witnessed the once-vaunted white man in a state of vulnerability and retreat, but they had also gained an appreciation of political self-determination that whetted their own simmering discontent. Further exacerbating their frustrations, they came home to find conditions even worse than what they had left. Although the British recruiters who had conscripted many of them had promised better paying jobs and additional land for settlement on their return, none of that came to pass. On the contrary, taxes had increased at all levels along with the cost of living, and land was scarcer than ever.37 Meanwhile, a flood of mzungu war veterans, induced by more government settler schemes, began arriving to make their claim in the highlands, further squeezing the Kikuyu on the intolerably crowded reserves. Far from being rewarded for their military service, the returning Kenyan soldiers were made to feel ever more like second-class citizens in a White Man’s Country, where neither their opinions nor their most fundamental needs were taken into consideration.
Popular discontent with the colonial government and its repressive practices had taken tentative root in Kenyan soil many years earlier. In the years following World War I a group of young mission-educated men had boldly taken steps to challenge colonial authorities with mixed results. In Nyanza the Young Kavirondo Association was created in 1921 in protest of forced labor camps and ever-increasing taxation. At the same time the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) took on the issues of progressive land confiscation and the deteriorating conditions in the Kikuyu reserves. Its general secretary was a young man named Johnstone Kenyatta, a passionate Kikuyu who would become the country’s first president and the most dominant figure in Kenyan politics for over a half-century to come. By the late 1930s the KCA was the most prominent of a host of ethnic organizations fueled by the early churning of nationalist sentiment. There were others such as the Luo Union, the Abaluyia Association and the Nandi-Kipsigis Union, all of which gave voice to mounting unrest and a surging nationalist fervor.38
But the Kikuyu’s persistent agitation through the bureaucratic channels of petitions and appeals was what infuriated the colonial powers that be. And at the onset of World War II the government outlawed the KCA and declared the organization a threat to the empire’s security. Throughout the war virtually all rumblings of opposition were muted as the course of war riveted the world’s focus—including that of Kenya.
As the European generals began assessing the full scope of damage they had sustained at the war’s end, the Kikuyu politicians resurfaced with a far more ambitious agenda. No longer were they seeking change within the existing administrative system, but as Ogot wrote, “They were now questioning the legitimacy of colonialism itself.”39 In 1944, the Kenya African Union (KAU) was formed, and three years later Kenyatta, now calling himself Jomo, or “flaming spear,” was named its president. Kenyatta, who had been living in London studying for fifteen years, triggered a huge surge of interest in the party, and the talk quickly turned to independence. The KAU seized on the political ferment gripping the country and would become inextricably linked to the bloody and protracted uprising known as the Mau Mau rebellion.
In its early years of existence the KAU focused largely on the Kikuyu’s demand that their “stolen lands” be returned and was highly centralized in Nairobi. As a result the party did not develop a strong following in Nyanza Province.40 Many Luos turned for support from the Luo Union, a welfare association started in the 1920s to organize disparate Luo groups and workers who had been forced into a far-flung diaspora by the colonists’ demands for taxes and labor.41 The Luo Union, however, was a largely nonpolitical organization, and any challenges to the colonial administrators and their hand-picked chiefs in the immediate postwar years in Luoland were more likely to be manifest on a personal basis rather than an overtly political one. Not long after his return from the front, Hussein Onyango engaged in just such a struggle with the presiding chief of the Karachuonyo division in south Nyanza, the outcome of which would cause a dramatic upheaval in his already troubled family life.
On his return from the war, Onyango too seemed a changed man. Now nearing fifty, he still had a formidable temper, but age and experience had relaxed him somewhat. Travel had taught him much about the ways of other peoples, and he had developed a green thumb like no other. Tucked in his satchel he had brought home seedlings of pineapple plants, Blue Gum trees, and other exotic vines that he planted around the compound. He had also learned novel farming techniques and more advanced forms of the herbal medicine that he had come to know as a youth. As he was generous with his newfound knowledge, many came to him for treatments and advice. But as with many returning veterans, Onyango was also deeply disappointed in the grim economic conditions that plagued Luoland and the failure of administrators to make good on their promises. And he did not hesitate to challenge the local chief who was the face of the British in the Karachuonyo district.
His name was Paul Mboya, and like Onyango, he was as feared as he was admired. Once a pastor in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Mboya had been educated in the missionary schools and modeled himself on the white man, as evidenced from his tailored suit and tie to his cherished cup of morning tea. Although he deeply admired the British and would attend the coronation of the Queen Elizabeth II of England in 1953, he also cherished indigenous traditions and worried that the influx of foreigners would erode the Luo way of life. In 1938 he wrote a seminal book on Luo culture and history called Luo Kitgi Gi Timbegi, or “Luo Customs and Traditions,” which remains a highly respected work to this day. In his own way he did much to encourage resistance to foreign domination and encouraged Africans to take pride in their culture.42 And yet, chosen by colonial administrators in the mid-1930s to serve as chief of the district, he simultaneously assumed the duties of collecting taxes and conscripting able-bodied men for work projects and military service on the British behalf.
Mboya was a strict disciplinarian and one of the most decorated African administrators who took the British orders one step further. During his watch, villagers were required to not only pay their taxes but also brush their teeth, dig pit latrines outside their huts, and send their
children to school. If they failed to do so, they would be publicly humiliated and possibly whipped by one of Mboya’s squadron of security guards. When his long, blue Chevrolet rumbled down the dirt road, many villagers fled in hopes that “Ja British,” as they had nicknamed him, would not be able to find them.
Many in the district also believed that Mboya, like many others among the colonial government’s network of chiefs, lined his own pockets through the performance of his administrative chores. When he or his assistants collected taxes, they often demanded sums much higher than the official levy or insisted on “gifts” of grains or eggs. Men and women who were forced to participate in public works projects often received only a portion of the contracted wage or were given no payment at all. Hussein Onyango was one of very few who dared to challenge Mboya in the public meetings, or barazas, and was swiftly branded a troublemaker. Some whispered that another reason for Mboya’s intense dislike of Onyango stemmed from the fact that his clever son Barack regularly outdid Mboya’s boy at the Gendia school. But money was the issue over which they most frequently crossed horns.43
“The police would take cows for taxes, but when they went to Hussein Onyango, he refused to pay. He said Mboya was not giving them to the government but was keeping the cows himself,” said Elly Yonga Adhiambo, an Obama cousin. “Then the police would come and order the young men to work on the roads for free, and Onyango would say, ‘You cannot do that. You go tell the chief that these young men must be paid to work.’ Paul Mboya was very angry with him.”