Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, became involved with the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after World War 2. Reporters for the London Times recently wrote about H.O. Obama’s experiences in the British-ruled Kenya of those years that
- He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.
“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr [president-elect] Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.
Mrs Onyango, 87, described how “white soldiers” visited the prison every two or three days to carry out “disciplinary action” on the inmates suspected of subversive activities.
“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,” she said The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said.
Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has exhaustively documented the mass incarceration and intimidation campaign the British ran against suspected Kenyan independence activists in her recent book Imperial Reckoning. What she documented there tracked very closely with what Sarah Onyango told the Times reporters about her late husband’s treatment (except that according to Elkins’s documentation, around 150,000 of the Kenyan incarcerees may have ended up dead.)
Elkins also noted that life had become particularly difficult for the Kenyan indigenes, and their anti-British fervor had increased, when the British decided to plant many more white settlers into Kenya after the war, displacing hundreds of thousands of indigenous African farmers from their land and resources and confining them to “reserves” that had pitifully few natural resources that rapidly became depleted as the additional displaced Africans were all trucked in.
In my late-2006 review of Elkins’s book, (PDF here), I noted that the “anti-Mau-Mau” campaign the British carried out, very brutally, in Kenya in the 1950s was a sort of “bridge experience” that linked the many equally brutal campaigns of counter-insurgency that colonial settler regimes around the world had waged for many earlier decades against the indigenous people of the lands where they settled, and some of the later COIN campaigns (Algeria, Vietnam, etc) that constituted, in effect, the “last throes” of settler colonialism.
Elkins’s work was also notable because she had access both to several portions of good British archives and to some living survivors of the concentration camps whom, after learning some local languages, she was able to interview for her work.
But settler colonialism hasn’t gone away, has it? It lives on in the lengthy campaign that Israel maintains to this very day to implant its settlers in occupied Arab lands, stealing the land and associated natural resources from their indigenous owners and forcing the indigenes into tightly controlled “reservations”, penal areas, large open-air concentration camps, and actual prisons. This campaign involves– just as in British Kenya or apartheid South Africa– a ruthless effort to oppress and punish anyone who tries to make a sustained objection to the ongoing projects of settlement aggrandizement.
The London Times is making some of its archives available online these days. On this portal page, you’ll find links to several (generally PDF) contemporary articles and photo-spreads about the anti-Mau-Mau campaign in the 1950s. Many of the accounts look as if they were about Israel in Gaza and the West Bank today. (You can also find a link to an even older Times story, titled, “Gandhi’s Salt March: Extremist Leader in Illegal Salt Collection.” No comment needed.)
President-elect Obama has written eloquently about the “Dreams of his father.” I hope he also takes some time to reflect on the meaning, in today’s world, of the actual experiences of his grandfather.
Obama’s silence means that he is complicit in what is happening in Gaza. He has on many recent occassions commented about economic and other foreign issues, but nothing about Gaza at all. He is guilty by his silence
Is Obama guilty, stegbar? I think you are a bit hasty to say so. Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch has lambasted Obama often enough, but Cockburn points out that in this matter of Gaza, it is a cause of considerable frustration to the Israelis that Obama has kept quiet. We don’t have any guarantee that after he is sworn in (that is, in a few days’ time) he will be any good, but we can say that right now that the best thing he can do is study the situation.
On Helena’s post: There is no doubt that the Israeli state is settler colonialism just like Kenya was. I arrived in Kenya at the age of three in 1948, the year before Barack Obama’s grandfather was carted off to “King George Hotel”, as prison was sometimes jocularly referred to in those days, I dare say with an edge of menace to anybody other than a small white boy.
Within fifteen years Kenya was an independent nation, and as for myself I was by then working in Nairobi and tremendously impressed with Uhuru. I would say I was in love with it. And I still am.
What I have seen since then is the near-completion of the anti-colonial project in Africa (only Western Sahara still remains directly colonised) but on a world scale, the promise of Uhuru has not been fulfilled.
The legitimation of settler colonialism in Israel threatens the entire anti-colonial project. I think it is intended to do so. For example, South Africa, of all countries, and contrary to its own heroic recent history, still feels obliged to support a “two state solution”. This was stated again today, in the election manifesto of the African National Congress. I was so disappointed.
The killing in Gaza is a sort of revenge on anyone (like myself as I have explained), and on all the billions of people who jubilated at what we thought was the final end of colonialism, and at the bright future we felt was on its way.
It ain’t so, and it will never be so, say the Israelis and their supporters, and they are everywhere, and they always seem to be on top, and in charge. I’m so glad for this site. One could go barmy with grief and loneliness at times.
Very interesting and a reminder that the myth of British Imperial divestment, post 1945, is very simplistic.
Unlike Dominic I never went to Kenya but I had close relatives who did, serving in the KAR. I was in Malaya, also very young, where a desperate defence of tin mines and rubber plantations (dollar earners both) was being carried on.
Just as in Kenya, the real issue was not Independence (Merdeka) but how to manage it so that it would not change property relationships.
Another look at Geoffrey Palmer’s character, Lionel, in the well-known UK series, As Time Goes By. According to the show, Lionel went to Kenya as a farmer after his service in the Korean War, and stayed there, allegedly, until the early 1990’s. At that time he returned to London & accidentally met up again with his teenage sweetheart.
How historically accurate would his lengthy stay have been? How much was whitewashed?
It is a cause of immediate pain, dislocation, misery, and death to the Palestinians that Obama has kept quiet. I do not share any sympathy for the poor Israelis in this matter. And I am afraid that I am unsympathetic to Obama’s need for a second term at this point in his “brilliant career”. I do not at all agree that the best he can do is study the situation.
The killing in Gaza is a sort of revenge on the Palestinians, any confusion we may have of our own sensibilities and themselves notwithstanding.
South Africa still feels obliged to support a “two state solution” because the Palestinians still want a Palestinian state and the South Africans, of all people, support them.
It is very good that the equivalence of British colonial occupation and Israeli colonial occupation is made at this time. I have trouble sometimes understanding the position of the BBC, for instance, vis a vis Palestine until I remember the fiction of the British Empire and the White Man’s Burden, apparently still as ardently subscribed in Britain as America’s “world-wide fight for democracy” is in my home. The failure of Barak Obama at the moment of truth is tragic and sad to behold. And deadly for the people of Gaza.
Hi Francis Lee,
Thanks for your strong and thoughtful response. I am glad that it is common cause between us that colonialism defines the Israel/Palestine situation (and defines the BBC, too). Concerning Obama, either of our views could be confirmed, or overturned, in a matter of days, when he is inaugurated. Let us therefore wait and see about that.
But there is an important disagreement between you and me. Important to me, at least. And I would like to explore it a little further here, so as to find out, perhaps, a little more about the temper of the JWN community in general as well as about yourself, if you would be so kind as to help me.
You wrote: [SA suppports 2-state] “because the Palestinians still want a Palestinian state”. Whether this is literally true or not in terms of the South African polity’s decision-making processes and its plural and contradictory political interests, could be disputed, but I would rather also leave that (factual) point aside for now.
But supposing that South Africa decided that if the unifying slogan of its own struggle, namely “one-person-one-vote-in-a-unitary-state” was “just” for Israel/Palestine, as much as it was just for South Africa, and if by some test. it could be shown that “the Palestinians”, in total, still wanted two states (or as I would say, one-and-a-bantustan), then would South Africa be justified in pursuing a principled one-state policy vis-a-vis Palestine (i.e. in spite of the Palestinians)?
I think that we would, but you, I am sure, would disagree and say that South Africa would have to support 2-state against its better judgement because the Palestinians asked for it.
My personal “Damascus experience” was not really the euphoric and indelible “Uhuru” days. As with “Merdeka” in Malaysia (I imagine) the stage-management was rigged by the Imperialists, especially in Nairobi where I was. It was intoxicating but as Bevin points out, it was largely a swindle. (But with some real content, nonetheless).
No, the moment of truth was when one came to understand that one had to fight for one’s own freedom, and that this was and is the same fight as the fight for colonial freedom, and that one consequently had to make judgements and act upon them. Righteousness did not come second-hand, and the anti-colonial struggle was indivisible, and constituted, then as now, the humanism of our times.
The white, or metropolitan, revolutionary must be a “Subject” (i.e. exercise agency) as much as the oppressed masses must be. Nothing less is demanded of him (me in this case)
Hence, to say that we as South African revolutionaries support 2-state because the Palestinians want us to, is incorrect in theory. We have to make the decision; nobody can make it for us, not even the Palestinians. There are no second-hand revolutionaries. I draw sustenance from Paulo Freire on this. The position of the subordinate intellectual (or “subcommandante” as the Zapatistas would have it) is a false position. It is a disguised kind of patronisation.
South Africa is a place that has been and still is full of rich lessons of this kind.
Not to close, but only to finish this particular post, let me say that if one had decided what a Just World should be, then, like Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, one would be morally bound to fight for it. In these terms, the greatest possible moral failure is to deny one’s own agency, or freedom. So one must have not a Damascus, but a Bhagavad-Gita experience. This is obviously not a new question. It is as old as history, but it remains the question of the moment, I think.
So, I challenge you to show me why I would be wrong to say: One-state is right, and just, for Israel/Palestine, even if the Palestinians are ready to settle for 2-state.