by Sally Jacobs
Along with a handful of other prestigious secondary schools such as the Alliance High School and St. Mary’s, Maseno produced a good number of the first wave of Kenya’s nationalists on its bucolic campus, where students were exposed to critical thinking and met for the first time Luos from other parts of Nyanza Province. Educated in the array of mission schools that dotted the country, the first generation of political leaders, including first president Jomo Kenyatta, who attended the Church of Scotland mission school in Thogoto, were often dubbed the “mission boys.” Obama’s class produced its own educated elite, and a good number of the boys whom he met during his four years at Maseno would go on to claim some of the highest-ranking jobs in Kenyan government and business.
The school’s graduates had a proud history. Maseno students were among those who in 1921 founded one of the nation’s earliest political protest organizations called the Young Kavirondo Association, dedicated to protesting the oppressive colonial rule. Bitterly opposed to the kipande—or the identification pass—rising taxes, and the government’s forced labor practices, these young men were part of a new generation that would soon displace the tribal chiefs. Their angry voices of discontent were echoed by another group of mission boys in Nairobi founded in the same year, called the Young Kikuyu Association. When the Kikuyu group’s leader, Harry Thuku, was arrested on charges of sedition in 1922, twenty-five of the thousands of protestors outside the jail were gunned down in what became Kenya’s first political protest. Three decades later those early rumblings of nationalist sentiment would erupt in widespread rebellion.
Life on the Maseno campus, a trim expanse of playing fields and brick dormitories located a few hundred yards from the equator, was modeled closely on the ways of the British public school system. Students wore uniforms of khaki shorts and white shirts, and teachers were clad in bush jackets and shorts with long stockings hugging their calves.6 Discipline was the watchword, and those who strayed off the pathway and onto the closely cropped grass or who failed to nod in deference to a passing teacher would find themselves cleaning the latrines or being publicly whipped. Prayers were held promptly before breakfast and again after dinner, and readings from the Bible were part of the daily routine. The curriculum, taught largely by European teachers, provided a liberal serving of British literature, including the works of Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy.7 When Obama entered in 1949,8 the principal was Mr. A. W. Mayor, whom Ogot describes in his biography, My Footprints on the Sands of Time, as “a lean, mean-looking and pipe-smoking person who taught us English language and literature.”9
Their experience at Maseno marked students so deeply that decades later some graduates claim to still be able to identify “a Maseno boy” with ease. Part of it is the crisp British accent that many carried into adulthood, and part of it is an imperceptible bearing that they alone could distinguish. “You know we were highly Anglicanized. We tried to behave like upper-class Englishmen, which was silly, but we admired them,” said Wilson Ndolo Ayah, a former member of Parliament and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the early 1990s, who was two years ahead of Obama at Maseno. “There are just certain behaviors you do not get involved in because you are from the school. You can tell from a person’s language, their demeanor, and that kind of thing that they went to Maseno. The behavior is very restrained, very disciplined. I would say the discipline was effortless.”
However, not all graduates saw the net effect of a Maseno education in quite the same way. In his biography, Not Yet Uhuru, Odinga declares that both the colonial government and settlers were upset that the missions produced “jumped-up Englishmen” rather than the “quiescent tribal subjects” that they would have preferred. But the outspoken Odinga also noted that the independent thinkers who walked out the mission schools’ doors soon lost their bite. They became, he wrote, “tame middle men, shadows and subjects of White mission men, and any stirrings in them to become independent leaders of their people were suppressed by their allegiance to the mission hierarchy and the fact that, once educated, they were absorbed into the government machine.”10
Into this highly regimented academic training ground came the teenage Obama. Muslim by birth, contrarian by nature, and survivor of a tumultuous youth, he was a problematic fit. The twenty-five-mile distance to school, which he walked a couple of times a year, was the easy part. Like any other student, Obama trekked there with a band of others heading to their different institutions, his clothes carried over his head in a wooden suitcase. Students would often pause for the night at the home of family members or others willing to lend a hand toward the educational cause. As usual, Obama excelled at his studies. On the small, brown card that is his school record—Index No. 3422—it is noted that he was promoted from Class B to Class A, which was reserved for the brightest students. Principal B. L. Bowers, who by then had replaced Mayor, wrote in neat script that Obama was “very keen, steady, trustworthy and friendly. Concentrates, reliable and out-going.”11
Nowhere did Obama excel with more flourish than on the school’s debate team, which regularly squared off with some of the other top-notch schools. The topics ranged widely, but some of the students’ favorite subjects related to the European colonial rule. Debater A would take the African side: The Europeans had robbed the Africans of the finest agricultural land in the White Highlands and pocketed profits that rightly belonged to the African. Debater B would take the British side: The settlers had brought improved farming techniques and were providing a better grade of beans and maize for the Kenyans. Or the subject of polygamy: On the one hand it was an un-Christian practice that should be abandoned immediately, and on the other hand it was a valued cultural tradition that would swell the ranks of Kenyans who hoped to contain the European presence. Obama had no proscribed point of view, as his classmates recall it. For him, the push back was the point, the intellectual gamesmanship the aim. “He wouldn’t miss a single debate,” recalled Owino, his hair parted neatly to the side in a classic style one sported by politicians and called the “lorry” as it requires a barber to cut a path through the hair big enough for a truck, or British lorry, to pass through.12 “I think what he stood for was alternative reasoning. If you say this, he would insist that. He was a very persuasive man, and he will in the end get you on his side. But he could be foolishly frank, you know, because if you want to hit your head against a stone, you know in the end what you will have: a broken head.”
After one year at Maseno, Obama boldly began to direct his alternative reasoning at his teachers and the student prefects charged with keeping order. He soon gained a reputation for chronic misbehavior. When a prefect once ordered him to clean a classroom as penalty for being late to class, Obama arrogantly pointed out that his own grades were superior to the prefect’s and flatly refused. As his schoolmate Oyiro Ayoro, a school captain in charge of discipline, recalls it, “Barack said, ‘I will not do it. After all, what number were you last term? Your job is cleanliness, not mine. I repeat, what number were you?’”
Obama’s offenses, his schoolmates recall, were many. He refused to wipe his dinner dishes dry as was required, insisting instead on laying them in the sun. He was chronically late to class and complained about the school’s diet of cabbage and ugali, a staple porridge of cornmeal and water. Although notoriously lax in his own reading, he admonished other boys for not reading more diligently. He sneaked off campus with a friend and got drunk with some village rowdies. And he perpetually committed the cardinal sin: He walked on the school’s immaculate green lawn. Once, when a prefect came upon Obama indolently lying upon the manicured carpet of grass, his shirt stained green, he demanded to know what Obama was doing. “‘This school has given us nothing comfortable to sit on, that is why I am lying here,” Ayoro recalls Obama saying. “‘We should have more comfortable chairs to sit on while studying.’”
School administrators were taking note. At the conclusion of each school day, the entire student body gathered outside the chapel for evening
prayers. As the students stood in half circles with their dormitory mates, the principal routinely reviewed the events of the day and made announcements about the day to come. In his concluding remarks he commented on any students who had exhibited problematic behavior during the day. “Barack was very disobedient and his name came up often,” recalled Yekohada Francis Masakhalia, a close friend of Obama’s and an economist who served as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning in the 1980s. “[Principal] Mayor would announce very clearly that Barack Obama was a very bright student but he had problems with his character. The rest of us tried to avoid being named in such a way.”
Obama was already being singled out for his oppositional nature, but there were other things that set him apart as well. Ndolo Ayah, who was a neighbor of Obama’s in later years, often wondered if Obama’s Muslim background made him feel different from the other boys at school, presumably none of whom had been raised in the Muslim faith. Most of the students, who had been taught the ways of the Christian church early on, accepted the strict discipline at Maseno with ease. But not Obama. “I always had the feeling that maybe his Muslim background had some kind of effect on his Maseno days because there is no reason why he would have behaved the way he did. Maybe because he grew up not having to go to church or read the Bible, it struck him differently when he did have to do those things.”
Toward the end of Obama’s fourth year at Maseno, a letter arrived in Principal Bowers’s office. The handwritten letter, which was unsigned, was a lengthy rant against the school, its faculty, and traditions, according to Leo Odera Omolo, a friend of Obama’s and a veteran Kenyan journalist. The mail service was inadequate, the food served inedible. The faculty was second rate, and the uniforms antiquated and unnecessary. The list was long.
Bowers, a heavyset former biology teacher who was easily exasperated, detected a familiar tone in the cascade of complaints that sounded suspiciously like one of his more notorious students. He decided to turn the matter over to a special investigative branch of the police to examine the handwriting on the letter. But before the police could look into the situation, Bowers decided to take action of his own.
At the end of every academic year, Maseno’s principal reviewed each student’s report card and made a recommendation whether they continue to the next level of study or not. The procedure was largely routine, as virtually all the boys were referred to a higher level. But when Obama’s name came up in the spring of 1953, Bowers penned a definitive rejection on his file, apparently irate at Obama’s behavior and suspecting he was the author of the critical letter. Obama, he wrote, was not to complete his studies at Maseno. What’s more, he was “not recommended to join any other high school in Kenya,” according to Ayoro, one of several students who recall the incident.
Bowers terse words were damning. Without the school’s endorsement, Obama, then sixteen, could not take the next step in his education or obtain the Cambridge School Certificate that he urgently needed to apply for college. That fact would sabotage his fervent efforts to seek higher education in the years ahead. On hearing that his son had left Maseno in disgrace, Hussein Onyango was beside himself. And when Obama appeared at his compound a week later, Onyango beat him so hard with a stick that the boy’s back bled. A furious Onyango ordered him to go to Mombasa, where he would live with a cousin and earn his own living. “You will learn the value of education now,” Onyango called after him. “I will see how you enjoy yourself, earning your own meals.”13
DURING THE YEARS OBAMA had spent on Maseno’s serene campus, a single name had come to dominate the Kenyan colony. It struck fear in the hearts of British administrators as well as their compatriots back in London, who read about it in the tabloids. Few shuddered more at its mention than the tribal chiefs who worked at their behest. But to many of the Kikuyu, the ethnic group that had historically farmed the southern part of the fertile highlands at the colony’s heart for generations before the European settlers arrived, the name was a declaration of defiance, a sounding of hope in the long and grueling ordeal of British occupation.
The name was Mau Mau.
Although historians dispute the origins of the term, the Mau Mau movement of the late 1940s came to be associated with a violent uprising of Kikuyu rebels dedicated to expelling the Europeans from the country and reclaiming what they regarded as their stolen lands. The movement began with the administration of the traditional Kikuyu oath, a ritual that was invoked in the face of war or grave difficulty. But as the colonists’ land seizures pushed the Kikuyu to the brink of desperation, mass oathing evolved into a secretive and violent campaign of murder and destruction that engendered an equally brutal response from the British.
By 1952, when Obama was completing his third year at Maseno, the conflict had mushroomed into an internal war that would ultimately recast the balance of power within the colony. The British tried hard to dismiss Mau Mau as an aberrant movement led by a troublesome few, but in the end the conflict would clear the way for the next stage of the battle for independence. Although the British soldiers crushed the movement militarily within a few years, they were forced to concede that the status quo in Kenya was no longer tenable. The Africans, they realized, had to be given greater representation in the country’s political and economic structures, if only to establish a moderate alternative to the rebel route.
That path of protest had been first laid open many years earlier. The seeds of Kenyan nationalism were rooted in the experience of the African soldiers who served in World War I, for their far-flung travels had given them a greater understanding of their subservient role in the colonial hierarchy. It also exposed their British rulers as imperfect humans and not the omnipotent icons they had considered them to be. But it was not until the closing days of World War II that their mounting grievances against the colonial government’s labor policies and restrictive agricultural practices reached a boiling point.
Part of the complaint stemmed from the successive humiliations of everyday life under colonial rule. Throughout the country Africans were routinely excluded from a host of locations and services available to Europeans. Many of Nairobi’s finest hotels and restaurants exhibited signs declaring, “No Africans or Dogs Allowed.” Nor could most Africans even consider living in the city’s better neighborhoods such as Muthaiga or Lavington, which were reserved largely for whites and far removed from most Africans’ modest ability to pay. Instead, the natives were ushered to the crowded slums to the east, which were plagued by unsanitary conditions and intermittent police raids. And should an African happen to vex his mzungu employer in some way, he could only hope that the employer would not rip up his kipande, making it impossible to get other work.
No issue was more passionately contested than that of land. In the years after the war ended, the Kikuyu found that the reserves onto which they were squeezed were approaching a state of ecological exhaustion after decades of heavy farming. A postwar surge in the settlers’ agricultural production that further limited the Kikuyu’s ability to grow and market their own crops further worsened their situation. The arrival of mechanization struck another blow at the Kikuyu heart, as the more efficient farming techniques forced many who had toiled as “squatters” on the verdant highlands off their farms. Some returned to the already overcrowded reserves, while thousands fled to Nairobi, where unemployment and inflation had generated flammable discontent. When the Mau Mau militants offered them a way to fight for ithaka na wiyathi, or land and freedom, many did not hesitate.
The violence began in the countryside, where settlers’ cattle were sporadically found maimed and unexplained fires erupted on their property. Local chiefs, called “loyalists” who sided with the British and had long been reviled for their brutal and corrupt ways, were discovered mysteriously dead. Widespread discontent gave rise to a form of mass oathing, in which the participants committed to the rebels’ cause. One common oath was, “If I know of any enemy of our organization and fail to kill him, may thi
s oath kill me.” Another pledge was, “If I reveal this oath to any European, may this oath kill me.”14 Although the British government banned Mau Mau in 1950, the movement continued to gain widespread support in both the crowded urban centers and the Kikuyu reserves. In the meantime, the militants’ path of destruction expanded.
By 1952 the tide of violence reached crisis proportions. As the frantic settler community insisted that the government take aggressive action, the papers were chock-full of reports of crop burnings, murder attempts, and robberies. And then it got worse. In October Senior Chief Waruhiu wa Kungu, one of the highest-ranking officials under the colonial administration and a fierce critic of the Mau Mau movement, was shot dead in the backseat of his dark brown Hudson sedan. Supporters of Mau Mau, who had arranged the assassination, celebrated Waruhiu’s death with songs and festivities. The killing sent waves of terror through the settler community and caused British administrators to abruptly escalate their response.
The Mau Mau war was waged largely by the Kikuyu and supporting factions of the Embu and Meru tribes against the British colonists in the highlands and the greater Nairobi area. But some of the deep-seated resentments that had given rise to it were also felt among the other ethnic groups, including the Luo. In the aftermath of World War II, many soldiers returned home to mounting frustrations just as their predecessors had in the previous war. The ex-servicemen opposed the African chiefs, as the historian William R. Ochieng wrote, “whom they considered as nothing but the mzungu’s stooges. These returned soldiers began a campaign to ‘liberate’ the masses of their fear of the white man.”15