According to his widow, Mr Onyango was denounced to the authorities by his
white employer, who sacked him on suspicion of consorting with
“troublemakers”. He may also have been the victim of a feud with an African
neighbour who worked in the district commissioner’s office. Mr Onyango,
notoriously outspoken, appears to have accused this official of corruption.
According to Mrs Onyango, her husband was arrested by two soldiers, and taken
to Kamiti prison, the national maximum-security prison outside Nairobi.
“This was like a death camp because some detainees died while being tortured,”
Mrs Onyango said. “We were not allowed to see him, not even taking him
food.” She said her husband was told that he would be killed or maimed if he
refused to reveal what he knew of the insurgency, and was beaten repeatedly
until he promised “never to rejoin any groupings opposed to the white man’s
rule”. Even after he had confessed, and renounced the insurgency, the
physical abuse allegedly continued.
Some of Mr Onyango’s fellow inmates were beaten to death with clubs, according
to Mrs Onyango. “In fact, my late husband was lucky to have left the prison
alive without any serious bodily harm, save for the permanent scars from
beatings and torture, which remained on his body till he died.”
Like all family histories, retold many years after the events, some elements
of Mrs Onyango’s account are hazy. For example, the white men she described
as “soldiers” are far more likely to have been Special Branch officers, who
wore a uniform that was indistinguishable from military uniform to most
Africans.
Mrs Onyango also described an incident of her husband’s “torture”, which was
nothing of the sort. “The white soldiers would spray his body with an
itching chemical. This, he said, could make him scratch his body till it
bled.” Almost certainly, Mr Onyango was being treated for body lice but
apparently he was so used to brutality that he assumed the routine chemical
delousing treatment was another form of abuse.
During Mr Obama’s first visit to Kenya in 1988, his grandmother recalled the
growing resentment against white colonial rule in Kenya, with rallies and
mounting violence that would explode into full-scale rebellion in 1952.
“Most of this activity centred on Kikuyuland,” she told him. “But the Luo,
too, were oppressed, a main source of forced labour. Men in our area began
to join the Kikuyu in demonstrations . . . many men were detained, some
never to be seen again.”
The British colonial authorities began a sustained campaign to quell the Mau
Mau uprising, establishing numerous detention camps that some historians
describe as “Kenya’s Gulag”, where inmates were frequently abused. “There
was torture in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, institutional and
systematic, and also casual and haphazard,” Professor Anderson writes in Histories
of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2005).
“Violence . . . was intrinsic to the system, and the use of force to compel
obedience was sanctioned at the highest level.”
At the height of the rebellion, an estimated 71,000 Kenyans were held in
prison camps. The vast majority were never convicted. Letters smuggled out
of the camps complained of systematic brutality by warders and guards.
According to the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize
for her exposé of British atrocities during the Mau Mau uprising, there were
reports of sexual violence and mutilation using “castration pliers”. “This
was an instrument devised to crush the men’s testicles,” she writes in Britain’s
Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005). “Other detainees also
described castration pliers, along with other methods of beating and
mutilating men’s testicles.”
Several hundred letters from camp inmates survive in the Kenyan National
Archives, “chronicling camp conditions, forced labour, torture, starvation
and murder”, according to Ms Elkins. One white policeman, Duncan McPherson,
told Barbara Castle, the former MP, that conditions in some detention camps
were “worse, far worse, than anything I experienced in my 4½ years as a
prisoner of the Japanese”.
Mr Onyango was 56 when he was arrested, and he emerged from imprisonment
prematurely aged and deeply embittered. In his memoir, Mr Obama described
his grandfather’s shocking physical state: “When he returned to Alego he was
very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of
lice.” For some time, he was too traumatised to speak about his experiences.
Mrs Onyango told her grandson: “From that day on, I saw that he was now an
old man.”
Understandably, Mr Onyango held a lifelong grudge against the British for the
way he had been treated, yet he was doubtful that the independence movement
would succeed. “How can the African defeat the white man,” he told his son,
“when he cannot even make his own bicycle?”
Barack Obama Sr, Mr Onyango’s son and the President-elect’s father, seems to
have inherited his father’s attitudes towards the colonial power. He was
also arrested, for attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African
National Union (Kanu), the organisation spearheading the independence
movement. Mrs Onyango told Mr Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had
been held only for a short time in the white man’s prison: “Because he was
not a leader in Kanu, Barack was released after a few days.”
Mr Onyango was a victim of the fight for Kenyan independence, but his son
became a direct beneficiary of that movement. In 1960, Barack Obama Sr
travelled on a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, as part of a
programme (sponsored by John F. Kennedy) to train young Kenyans to rule
their own country.
Mrs Onyango said that the combative spirit shown by her husband during Kenya’s
bloody independence struggle has passed down through the generations to the
future president. “This family lineage has all along been made up of
fighters,” she said. “Senator Barack Obama is fighting using his brain, like
his father, while his grandfather fought physically with the white man.”
Bloody birth of a nation
— In 1895, the British Government establishes the East Africa Protectorate and
opens up the fertile highlands of Kenya to whites
— Kenya becomes a British colony in 1920. A year later, members of the Kikuyu
tribe, angered by exclusion from political representation, form Kenya’s
first African political protest movement
— In 1952, the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule erupts and for the next
seven years Kenya is under a state of emergency
— Uprising is put down by military action and the detention of thousands of
Mau Mau suspects in prison camps. Only 32 European civilians are killed in
the violence, but more than 50,000 Africans are believed to have died
— Kenya becomes independent on December 12, 1963, with Jomo Kenyatta elected
its first President
