The Other Barack (7 page)

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.
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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 triggered 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”

Not long after Onyango returned from the battlefront, the tension between the two men finally came to an explosive head. There are many versions of the story told in Nyanza, each of which varies slightly, but the stor yline is fundamentally the same. As it is related by Joash Muga Okumu, a classmate of the elder Barack who lived in Kital Village in Karachuonyo, their final collision erupted over a trophy that Hussein Onyango had been awarded for athletic prowess during competitions held among the soldiers during the war.

Each year Paul Mboya sponsored a soccer contest among rival villages in Nyanza Province. When the competition rolled around in 1943, Mboya requested Onyango to donate the trophy so that it might be given to the victorious team under the name of “The Karachuyonyo Trophy.” An annoyed Onyango crisply informed the local council of elders, who still retained some clout in village affairs, that he would agree to the trophy's use but only if it was called “The Hussein Onyango Trophy.” Infuriated by Onyango's effrontery, Mboya declared in a public meeting with the elders that a
jadak
such as Onyango who would refuse local authorities could not be trusted. A jadak is a foreigner or a transient dweller, someone who does
not belong in a place. Among the Luo, a people intimately attached to their land, such a term can be profoundly offensive. Indeed, Mboya's words enraged Onyango. “Onyango was furious that Mboya would question his integrity,” said Okumu. “He said, ‘Doesn't Mboya know of my lineage, that I have lived in Nyanza for many generations?' And he resolved that he would move back ‘home' to Alego Kogelo at once.”