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domestic politics were quickly riven along “tribal” lines, as within a decade the authoritarianism of colonialism was superseded by a single-party state dominated by Kenyatta’s Kenya African National Union (KANU) party at the expense of any political opposition.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, political and social accounts of Central Kenya dominate depictions of the country as a whole. In contrast, by focusing on Luo people, places, and things—including the heritage of the first African American president of the United States and representations of his background—we challenge the dominant nationalist narrative of Kenya’s sociopolitical history, popular myths of the country’s past, and depictions of its political present. Using the history of the Obama family as a lens, the coming chapters offer a critical inquiry into the representations of and work done by ethnicity and by related notions of “belonging” from the early twentieth century forward.
3
The Obama Family
Ethnicity and the Politics of Belonging in Kenya
There’s your ordinary house in Nairobi. And then there’s your house in the country, where your people come from. Your ancestral home. Even the biggest minister or businessman thinks this way. He may have a mansion in Nairobi and build only a small hut on his land in the country. He may go there only once or twice a year. But if you ask him where he is from, he will tell you that that hut is his true home. So, when we were at school and wanted to tell somebody we were going to Alego, it was home twice over, you see. Home Squared. . . . For you, Barack, we can call it “Home Cubed.”
—Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father1
Barack Obama’s visits to his extended family at their rural homesteads in Western Kenya during his first trip to Kenya in 1988 offer an important avenue into the history of ethnicity and the related politics of belonging in Kenya. Traveling via the railway line laid down by the British at the opening of the colonial era that we learned about in the last chapter, Obama shared this important overnight journey with Kenyans returning “home” from Nairobi to their hereditary “homelands.”2 The sojourn from a “house” in an urban, ethnically mixed milieu to a “home” in a more ethnically uniform province, undertaken regularly by millions of Kenyans across the country, speaks to the historical forces at work around the malleable categories of “tribe” and “ethnicity.”3 A Luo at the end of such a journey exchanges the nyumba, or “house,” in the lingua franca of Swahili, which he inhabits in the city, for the dala, or homestead, where he belongs in Western Kenya—“home squared.” Such was the journey Obama’s family understood him as taking, simply with a twice-removed point of origin in the United States.
Training a lens on the Obama family, this chapter examines how the idea of a Luo identity, of “Luoness,” came to be and traces the social and political work that Luoness has done from the colonial era into the present day. We further challenge the notion that “tribe” was either an uncomplicated primordial artifact or a wholly colonial construction. Rather, we will show how Africans—whether recognized intellectuals like Barack Obama Sr. or more ordinary wananchi (citizens) like Hussein Onyanga Obama—have shaped the meanings and uses of Luoness over time in dialogue with a preserved past and contemporary politics. An array of historical sources shows that Luoness has been constituted through origin myths and oral traditions, through histories written by Luo members of the academy and amateur scholars of the “tin trunk history” guild, and through the political projects and partisan maneuverings of Luo political actors.4 This chapter points to how ethnicity has become the narrative fulcrum on which representations of postcolonial Kenyan politics turn.
Luoland: Dala and Diaspora
Tera adhi aba Kisumu
Dala gi mama yooo
Dala gi baba yooo
Take me on a tour of Kisumu
The home of my mother
The home of my father.5
Having arrived in Kisumu, Obama made his way to the bus depot, “crowded with buses and matatus honking and jockeying for space in the dusty open-air lot,” and crowded onto public transport for the next leg of the journey to his family’s home in Kogelo.6 Kisumu, which has grown from a sleepy market into Kenya’s third-largest city, has been the center of Luo sociopolitical life from the colonial era forward.7 Memorialized as the diasporic hometown
