LITMIR.BIZ

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In Western Kenya, Luo people, far from the settler farms of the White Highlands, were compelled to migrate in search of wage labor. As in Kikuyu areas, this economically driven displacement challenged notions of property and belonging that revolved around the dala, or Luo homestead.⁴⁵ These ruptures around land and labor, and the social transformations that accompanied them, together with the emergence of coteries of mission-educated Kenyans, drove African politicization that was skewed along regional and “tribal” lines. By the 1920s, Kikuyu- and Luo-speaking communities had established political organizations—the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) and the Young Kavirondo Association (YKA)—concerned with the promotion of their respective material interests and the articulation of what it meant to be “Kikuyu” or “Luo” in rapidly shifting colonial landscapes.⁴⁶

      Yet, even as African politicization continued to expand and accelerate over the next two decades, whites settlers and many colonial administrators still clung to the idea that they were enacting a “civilizing mission” for the benefit of Africans mired in “tribal” primitivity and that governance should remain exclusively the domain of whites. These racist and paternalistic ideologies were well entrenched by the 1940s, and many colonialists in Kenya and in Britain believed that diverse “tribes” would never be capable of uniting under any banner of Kenyan nationalism. For example, a 1943 Colonial Office memorandum on political affairs in Kenya reiterated the dominant view:

      These tribes speak different languages and have entirely different social customs. Many of them are in a very primitive state and it is not possible to envisage the time when they will become sufficiently united as a whole, speaking a common language and having trust in elected leaders from their own tribe or still less of another tribe. It would be very much easier to make a united Europe under the domination of Germany than to make a united Kenya under the domination of the Maasai. The conception of a central self-government elected by these primitive tribes is simply not within practical politics.⁴⁷

      Five years later, marginalized Kikuyu had begun a campaign of violent rural action—including labor strikes, arson, and maiming of farm animals. By the early 1950s, such violence was steadily rising and increasingly politicized, organized through a network of oathing. This movement emerged into a full-scale rebellion known as Mau Mau, which gave rise to an enduring representation of Kenya as a space in which tribal atavism and savage violence always simmered below the surface of social and political life.⁴⁸ Colonial political propaganda and the Western media portrayed the rebellion as a race war that pitted families of peaceful white farmers against African “terrorists,” as a contest of primitive African “savagery” versus white, modern “civilization,” and overlooked the brutality of the colonial and complex violence of decolonization in settler colonies like Kenya.

      The rebellion took the shape of an insurgency carried out by the Land and Freedom Army, a disparate guerrilla force of landless Kikuyu supported in varying degrees by Kikuyu who pledged (on pain of death and not always voluntarily) to simply keep silent or to actively assist the fighters with intelligence and supplies. As Mau Mau action escalated and violence intensified, the colonial governor declared Kenya in 1952 to be under a state of emergency, which lasted nearly a decade. While it retained its anticolonial character and targets, Mau Mau further developed into a civil war between supporters of the guerrillas and those Kikuyu who had benefited from indirect rule—namely Kikuyu chiefs and headmen—and other Kikuyu loyalists or “home guards.”⁴⁹ In the protracted course of the rebellion, the British effectively dehumanized individual Kikuyu, interning a substantial proportion of the adult male Kikuyu population (and thousands of women) in interrogation camps that were often established on settler lands and run with wide-ranging brutality, sometimes by settlers deputized by the colonial state. In the end, as David Anderson notes, only thirty white settlers died during Mau Mau, while at least 20,000 Kikuyu were killed, with an additional 150,000 imprisioned in internment camps.⁵⁰

      While political leaders of various “tribes”—most notably the Kikuyu politician Jomo Kenyatta—were accused of organizing the rebellion, convicted in kangaroo courts, and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, Kenya, outside of Nairobi and the White Highlands, was largely untouched by the violence of the rebellion.⁵¹ In Kikuyu areas, however, the British threw their military might at the insurgency, bombarding the forests around Mount Kenya with fighter planes, calling in regiments from Britain, and importing counterinsurgency experts from other parts of their empire. They also set in motion a potent propaganda machine that militarized the “civilizing mission,” portraying the colonial forces as defenders of law and order and the Kikuyu as “terrorists” who had lost their collective sensibility and veneer of civilization.⁵² This characterization and image was picked up by international press organizations, including the New York Times, and quickly imported into Western popular culture through Mau Mau–era films such as Simba, which opens with a white settler being hacked to death by a Kikuyu with a panga (machete); and Safari, which follows the exploits of a great white hunter as he tracks a Mau Mau “terrorist.”⁵³ Ultimately the British were able to put down the rebellion, but the protracted and bloody nature of Mau Mau showed them that Kenya had become ungovernable. Kenya’s independence was negotiated at a series of talks in London, and Kenya became independent in 1963, with Jomo Kenyatta as president and Oginga Odinga, the foremost Luo cultural and political leader, as vice president.⁵⁴

      The experience of Kenya in the years immediately following independence was that in some ways, rule can be harder than revolution. In the new world order of the Cold War, Kenya positioned itself as the solid capitalist bulwark in Eastern Africa and Kenyatta as the foil to its socialist counterpart, President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. Its domestic politics were quickly riven along “tribal” lines, as within a decade the authoritarianism of colonialism was superseded by a single-party state dominated by Kenyatta’s Kenya African National Union (KANU) party at the expense of any political opposition. As Tom Mboya, a leading Luo politician, lamented explicitly of Kenya and implicitly of the Luo experience a few months before his assassination in 1969, “In less than a decade of independence our enemies have too often been given the opportunity to point a finger at our tragedies; our friends have sadly drawn attention to our shortcomings and we ourselves must feel frustrated at the non-realisation of our dreams and aspirations. We have found ourselves in a critical and hostile world which insists on perfection where Africa is concerned—despite the fact that none of the older nations have themselves achieved such perfection.”⁵⁵

      Using the history of the Obama family as a lens, the following chapters of this book attend to Mboya’s lament, showing how the complex realities of nationhood and the complicated work of representation have shaped Kenya’s trajectory over the last fifty years. The vestiges of settler society and the racial and class hierarchies of colonial rule are still visible in contemporary Kenya. Indeed, many wananchi (Kenyan citizens) wondered to what extent settler impunity had actually dissipated after Tom Cholmondeley, the great-grandson of Lord Delamere, was not prosecuted for shooting an undercover black game ranger on the Delamere ranch in 2005 and found guilty only of manslaughter for shooting an alleged poacher on his property the next year.⁵⁶

      The colonial legacy of Mau Mau, settler society, and violence has loomed large over both popular and scholarly representations of Kenya. For instance, the scope and scale of the torture and abuse carried out against suspected Mau Mau supporters has become clear only as archival documents have been released and scholars have interviewed survivors.⁵⁷ Claims that Obama’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, had been interned and tortured as a Mau Mau rebel spiked American and British interest in the rebellion.⁵⁸ Most pointedly, however, in the summer of 2013, the British foreign secretary acknowledged and apologized for the torture of Kikuyu during the Mau Mau and announced that elderly Kikuyu survivors who brought suit against the British government for abuses committed against them during the rebellion would receive several million pounds in reparations.⁵⁹

      The presidency of Jomo Kenyatta from 1963 to 1978, and the 2013 election of his son, Uhuru Kenyatta, to Kenya’s highest office, has continued to fuel a long-standing attention to the histories of Central Kenya and the Kikuyu community. Shaped in many cases by popular accounts of the glamour of the White Highlands and the savagery of Mau Mau,

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