The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  In the nineteen-fifties, the colonial government tried to smash African uprisings by any means necessary--land confiscation, midnight roundups, forced marches, mass arrests, detention, forced labor, food and sleep deprivation, rape, torture, and executions. The government fed the British and the world press lurid tales of savage Mau Maus, rebel gangsters, led by the anti-colonialist fighter Dedan Kimathi, taking wild occultist oaths to slaughter Europeans, who, after all, had come to the "Dark Continent" in the nineteenth century with nothing more than a "civilizing mission" in mind. Except in the most liberal and left-wing circles, very little was said against the anti-Mau Mau campaign, or against colonialism as it was actually practiced. The rebel Kenyans, the colonial British charged, had not taken an oath of ithaka na wiyathi, land and freedom, as they had claimed, but, rather, a "black-magic" vow to kill.

  The colonial government set in motion an elaborate system of exaggeration and repetition that spawned stories all over the world about bloodthirsty Africans and the noble civil servants and soldiers fighting to prevent the collapse of civilization. Those stories--in British newspapers, on the radio, in Life magazine--tilled the emotional ground and provided the political pretext for a campaign of vicious retribution. The colonial government established many detention centers--Langata, Kamiti, Embakasi, Gatundu, Mweru, Athi River, Manyani, Mackinnon Road--that historians, such as Caroline Elkins, later termed the "Kenyan gulag." The British claimed that these detention camps held only a few thousand Kikuyu temporarily and were merely a tool of re-education, rehab centers where classes in elementary civics and handicrafts were taught. In fact, when the colonial administration declared a state of emergency, in 1952, it went on a campaign of "pacification" reminiscent of the worst state terror rampages in history. The campaign of mass arrests only increased in its virulence with the commencement, in April 1954, of Operation Anvil, as Britain's soldiers, under General Sir George Erskine, sought to purge Nairobi of all Kikuyu. In the years of the Mau Mau rebellion, fewer than a hundred Europeans were killed; the British killed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Africans. The Mau Mau leader, Dedan Kimathi, was arrested in 1956, hanged, and buried in an unmarked grave.

  "During the Emergency," Mboya wrote in his memoir, Freedom and After, "most publicity was centered around what the Mau Mau did and very little was concerned with what the security forces did. The many Africans who disappeared never to be seen again, the many people arrested in the night who never came back, the fact that some security forces were reportedly paid so many shillings for each person they shot--these were atrocities that came out only in part during court hearings at the time. It is unlikely that the full story will ever come out, because at most district headquarters there have been bonfires of documents relating to the Emergency period, but there are many facts which cannot be burned into oblivion."

  The full story did not emerge until the twenty-first century, but when it did the evidence was overwhelming. After spending years combing the British and African archives, the historian Caroline Elkins concluded that the camps held well over a million Kenyans. Prisoners were often subjected to hideous methods of torture, which had been employed in British Malaya and in other imperial outposts. For her book Imperial Reckoning, Elkins interviewed hundreds of Kenyans who had survived the depredations of the period, including a Kikuyu woman named Margaret Nyaruai, who was questioned by a British officer. Nyaruai was asked:

  Questions like the number of oaths I had taken, where my husband went, where two of my stepbrothers had gone (they had gone into the forest). I was badly whipped, while naked. They didn't care that I had just given birth. In fact, I think my baby was lucky it was not killed like the rest.... Apart from beatings, women used to have banana leaves and flowers inserted into their vaginas and rectums, as well as have their breasts squeezed with a pair of pliers; after which, a woman would say everything because of the pain.... Even the men had their testicles squeezed with pliers to make them confess! After such things were done to me, I told them everything. I survived after the torture, but I still have a lot of pain in my body even today from it.

  The cruelty, Elkins writes, was limited only by the "sadistic imagination of its perpetrators." One woman she interviewed, Salome Maina, told her that members of the colonial forces beat her, kicked her, bashed heads together, shoved a concoction of paprika pepper and water into her "birth canal"--all in an attempt to force a confession of complicity with the Mau Mau. After she recovered from those humiliations, she said, she was subjected to electric shock:

  The small conductor was either placed on the tongue, on the arm, or anywhere else they desired. At first, I was made to hold it in my hands, and it swirled me around until I found myself hitting the wall. When it was placed on your tongue, held in place with some kind of wire, it would shake you until you wouldn't even realize when it was removed.

  Although some critics charged Elkins with minimizing the violence of Africans against Europeans, most of their charges seem to be the result of historical disbelief, of having to accommodate a murderous colonial legacy that had been talked about so rarely, and with so little understanding, in both Africa and in the West. This was the Kenya of Barack Obama, Sr.,'s memory, of his youth and early manhood.

  During the 2008 American Presidential campaign, many foreign reporters called on Sarah Ogwel, in the village of Kogelo, and, with each visiting television truck and satellite dish, she sat dutifully under her mango tree or in her house and submitted to questions about her husband, her stepson, her grandson. According to an interview Ogwel gave to the Times of London, a white employer had denounced Onyango to the colonial authorities in 1949 and he was arrested, suspected of consorting with "troublemakers." The Mau Mau movement was recognized by colonial authorities in their documents only the following year, 1950; Hussein Onyango Obama was a Luo, not a Kikuyu; and yet it is entirely possible that the British determined that he was sympathetic to the anti-colonial movement. It was not the detention that made news around the world--Obama mentions it in Dreams from My Father--but, rather, Sarah Ogwel's detailed description of his treatment in prison.

  "The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed," the Times reported Sarah Ogwel as saying. She said that "white soldiers" visited the prison every few days to carry out "disciplinary action" on the inmates. "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." Ogwel said she was not able to visit or send food. He was beaten until he promised "never to rejoin any groupings opposed to the white man's rule." Some of Onyango's fellow prisoners, she said, died from the torture they experienced in prison.

  As a young man, Onyango had not disdained the British. He was the first in his village to wear a shirt and trousers and he had sought out employment with the British as a cook. But now, coming home from detention, he was embittered. "That was the time we realized that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies," Sarah Ogwel said. "My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained."

  Onyango's fate, and Sarah's description of it in the Times, is plausible, if undocumented. Even though the colonial authorities began "systematic" torture only in 1952, Africans suspected of political disloyalty were sometimes arrested before that and were badly treated. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes that his grandfather was detained for six months and came home looking old, thin, dirty--too traumatized, at first, to say much about his experience. "He had difficulty walking," Obama writes, "and his head was full of lice." Scholars also say that at the time of Ogwel's interview, the political atmosphere in Kenya was tense and was playing havoc with issues of historical memory and accounting. After decades of silence, shame, and ignorance, the air was filled with claims that are not always easy to verify in every detail. Onyango was almost certainly mistreated in a miserable jail, but the detail
s remain imprecise.

  Barack Obama, Sr., was no less headstrong than his father, and a great deal more educated. When he was a child, he refused to go to the school closest to his home, where the teacher was a woman. "When the pupils were naughty, they would get spanked," Sarah Ogwel recalled. "He told me, 'I'm not going to be spanked by a woman.'" Instead, she enrolled Barack in a primary school six miles away, and he either walked or she rode him there on her bicycle. He was hardworking and prideful. "I got the best grades today," he would tell Ogwel when he came home from school. "I am the cleverest boy." Barack attended the Gendia Primary School, the Ng'iya Intermediate School, and, from 1950 to 1953, the Maseno National School, run by the Anglican Church. Like Tom Mboya, Obama did well in his exams and got outstanding grades, but he was expelled, for all kinds of infractions: sneaking into the girls' dormitory, stealing chickens from a nearby farm. He left Maseno without a certificate of graduation. When Barack was expelled from school Onyango beat him with a stick until his back was a bloody mess.

  In 1956, Barack moved to Nairobi to work as a clerk. While he was in Luoland, he met a girl named Kezia at a village dance party. She was sixteen. "He asked to dance with me during the party and I could not turn him down," she said. "He picked me from several girls present. A few days later, I married him. He paid fourteen cows as dowry, which were delivered in two batches. This was because he loved me greatly."

  Barack, like most young educated Africans, admired Kenyatta and the anti-colonial movement. He was even detained for a few days for the crime of attending a meeting in Nairobi of K.A.N.U., the Kenya African National Union.

  Obama was stuck. He could get nowhere without a formal education and a degree. Some of his friends from Maseno won spots at Makarere University, in Uganda. Others went on from Makarere to study in England. In his spare time, with the encouragement of two American teachers working in Nairobi--Helen Roberts, of Palo Alto, and Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, of Maryland--Obama took correspondence courses to get his secondary-school equivalence certificate. He took a kind of college application exam at the American Embassy and scored well. He wrote dozens of letters to American universities--the historically black college Morgan State, Santa Barbara Junior College, San Francisco State among them--and was finally accepted by the University of Hawaii, a modest school in a fledgling Pacific outpost of America. Tom Mboya's airlift program would bring him there. Elizabeth Mooney Kirk underwrote some of Obama's expenses in Hawaii.

  "My father was very impressed by Obama's intelligence," Mboya's daughter Susan said. "My father was not much older than Obama, but he developed a paternal relationship with him and hoped his studies would lead him somewhere great, and somewhere useful for Kenya."

  In September, 1959, Obama prepared to leave for the United States. He and Kezia already had a son, named Roy, and Kezia was three months pregnant with a girl they named Auma. Obama told his wife that he would surely return, that she should wait for him. Few would deny him the chance to make the journey. A brazenly confident young man, Obama boasted to his friends that after he had studied economics abroad he would return home to "shape the destiny of Africa."

  "Tom Mboya, what he did for me and Obama and the others, is more than we could ever have expressed," Frederick Okatcha, who went to Michigan State to study educational psychology, said. "The airlift saved us! We took off from Nairobi and none of us had ever been anywhere. We'd never flown in a plane. When we landed in Khartoum a little while later to refuel, we all thought we had reached America! I grew up about fifteen miles from Obama. For years I never wore shoes. We had things like witchcraft, which is embedded in traditional society. My maternal grandfather worried that jealous witch doctors would bewitch our flight to America. Those were things people believed in. Obama, by the time he finished high school, had attended British-influenced schools so the shock was not so severe. But all of our lives would change forever, so completely."

  "There was so much excitement during that time," Pamela Mboya, the wife of Tom Mboya, said. As a young woman she had gone to college in Ohio on the first airlift. "We were going to the U.S. to be educated so we could come back and take over--and that's exactly what we did."

  A couple of months into Obama's Presidency, a writer asked Bob Dylan about reading Dreams from My Father. Dylan, who had been uncharacteristically swept up in the campaign ("We've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up"), said that he had been struck by Obama's complicated background: "He's like a fictional character, but he's real." Dylan comes from the long American tradition of self-summoned men and women: in his case, a Jew from the Minnesota Iron Range, who braided together various roots from the national ground--Woody Guthrie, the Delta blues, Hank Williams, the Beats, Elvis Presley--to create a unique voice of his own. Dylan read about Obama's parents, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr., and recognized what a unique set of influences, maps, histories, and genetic codes they contained for their unborn son: "First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas, though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers. Guerrillas. 'Wizard of Oz' Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot-type heritage--cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean, it's just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love." For Dylan, whose mind races to the mythopoetic, if not to the strictly accurate, the story of Obama's origins and identity is "like an odyssey except in reverse."

  What does Dylan mean by that? "First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii," he said. "Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise--so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise." He was also born with an endlessly complicated family legacy, one that stretched from the shores of Lake Victoria to the American plains. Obama's grandmother could recite, as if in a Homeric song, the generations of Luo on his father's side. And as a genealogist at the Library of Congress, William Addams Reitwiesner, discovered, Obama's ancestors included Jesse Payne, of Monongalia County, West Virginia, who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, owned slaves named Moriah, Isaac, Sarah, Selah, Old Violet, Young Violet, and Little William. A great-great-great-grandfather, Christopher Columbus Clark, fought for the Union Army.

  In his speeches, Obama usually alluded to Kansas as a kind of counterpoint to faraway Kenya, a locus of Midwestern familiarity--the opposite of (that dubious word) "exotic." But Kansas, for him, is something deeper, more resonant, the crossroads of the Confederacy and the Union, the nexus of the battle between pro-slavery forces and abolitionist insurrection; it is the site of Brown v. Board of Education; and it is, for his grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn, a place of soul-defeating dullness. Kansas was the "dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty."

  It took a long time for Obama to learn to negotiate between the restlessness in his parents' makeup and a rooted worldliness that he could live with. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, spent her life in constant motion, as much at home in a Javanese village as she ever was in El Dorado, Kansas, where she went to grade school. Everywhere she landed, in a rural outpost in Pakistan or a densely populated Indonesian city, she looked around and said wryly, "Gee, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

  Once, after a campaign stop in Kansas, a reporter on the plane asked Obama about his family's legacy of wanderlust, and, from his answer, it was evident that he viewed all the movement--his grandparents' constant flight, his mother's yearning to stay in motion--as something he wanted to avoid for himself. "Part of me settling in Chicago and marrying Michelle was a conscious decision to root myself," he said. "There's a glamour, there's a romance to that kind of life and there's a part of that still in me. But there's a curse to it as well. You need a frame for the canvas, because too much freedom's not freedom." Then he laugh
ed and said, "I'm waxing too poetic here."

  Stanley Armour Dunham's parents, Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, Sr., and Ruth Lucille Armour, were stolid Baptists, and when they were young parents they opened a modest restaurant, the Travellers Cafe, next to an old firehouse on William Street in downtown Wichita. Their promise as a young family did not last. Ruth Dunham killed herself, and Stanley, who was eight years old, found her body. The date was November 26, 1926. In his memoir, Obama alludes to his great-grandfather's "philandering" as a possible reason for Ruth's suicide. (The local press obituaries ascribe the death to ptomaine poisoning, Washington Post reporter David Maraniss discovered.) Not long after his wife's death, Ralph Dunham ran off, leaving Stanley and his brother, Ralph, Jr., to be raised by their maternal grandparents in El Dorado, the county seat of Butler County.

  In 1918, the year Stanley was born, El Dorado had been an oil-boom town for a few years; through the nineteen-twenties, the region was responsible for nine per cent of the oil in the world. The Depression snuffed out the boom. El Dorado suffered foreclosures and unemployment. Stanley did not usually seem devastated by his bleak beginnings. As he grew up, he became a gregarious, argumentative kid. Sometimes, he betrayed a sense of fury and outrage. In high school, he managed to get suspended for punching the principal in the face. Later, he spent a few years riding rail cars cross-country and working odd jobs. For a while, at least, he seemed like someone aspiring to a role in "Bound for Glory."

  When Stanley returned to Wichita, he met a smart, rather quiet girl named Madelyn Lee Payne. Her parents, Rolla Charles (R.C.) Payne and Leona Bell Payne, were Methodists. "They read the Bible," Obama writes, "but generally shunned the tent-revival circuit, preferring a straight-backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and temperance over both." Her circumstances were more comfortable than Stanley's and her childhood was far less traumatic. Born in Peru, Kansas, in 1922, Madelyn grew up in the nearby town of Augusta. She was a studious girl and spent her spare time with friends at the drugstores and soda fountains in town: Cooper's, Carr's, Grant's. When they wanted air-conditioning in the summer they went to the movies. Nearly all five thousand people in the town were white. "There were only two black families in Augusta," her friend Francine Pummill recalled. The population was solidly Republican, Madelyn's parents very much included. R.C. worked as a clerk on an oil pipeline and the family lived in a small company house. Despite the family's adherence to strict Methodist rules--no drinking, no dancing, no card-playing--Madelyn used to sneak off to Wichita with her friends to go to the Blue Moon Club and hear the big bands that were passing through: Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. Kansas was dry but at the Blue Moon you could get a drink, even if you were under-age.