The Other Barack

The Other Barack by Sally Jacobs Read Free Book Online

Book: The Other Barack by Sally Jacobs Read Free Book Online
Authors: Sally Jacobs
several students who recall the incident.
    Bowers terse words were damning. Without the school’s endorsement, Obama, then sixteen, could not take the next step in his education or obtain the Cambridge School Certificate that he urgently needed to apply for college. That fact would sabotage his fervent efforts to seek higher education in the years ahead. On hearing that his son had left Maseno in disgrace, Hussein Onyango was beside himself. And when Obama appeared at his compound a week later, Onyango beat him so hard with a stick that the boy’s back bled. A furious Onyango ordered him to go to Mombasa, where he would live with a cousin and earn his own living. “You will learn the value of education now,” Onyango called after him. “I will see how you enjoy yourself, earning your own meals.” 13
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    DURING THE YEARS OBAMA had spent on Maseno’s serene campus, a single name had come to dominate the Kenyan colony. It struck fear in the hearts of British administrators as well as their compatriots back in
London, who read about it in the tabloids. Few shuddered more at its mention than the tribal chiefs who worked at their behest. But to many of the Kikuyu, the ethnic group that had historically farmed the southern part of the fertile highlands at the colony’s heart for generations before the European settlers arrived, the name was a declaration of defiance, a sounding of hope in the long and grueling ordeal of British occupation.
    The name was Mau Mau.
    Although historians dispute the origins of the term, the Mau Mau movement of the late 1940s came to be associated with a violent uprising of Kikuyu rebels dedicated to expelling the Europeans from the country and reclaiming what they regarded as their stolen lands. The movement began with the administration of the traditional Kikuyu oath, a ritual that was invoked in the face of war or grave difficulty. But as the colonists’ land seizures pushed the Kikuyu to the brink of desperation, mass oathing evolved into a secretive and violent campaign of murder and destruction that engendered an equally brutal response from the British.
    By 1952, when Obama was completing his third year at Maseno, the conflict had mushroomed into an internal war that would ultimately recast the balance of power within the colony. The British tried hard to dismiss Mau Mau as an aberrant movement led by a troublesome few, but in the end the conflict would clear the way for the next stage of the battle for independence. Although the British soldiers crushed the movement militarily within a few years, they were forced to concede that the status quo in Kenya was no longer tenable. The Africans, they realized, had to be given greater representation in the country’s political and economic structures, if only to establish a moderate alternative to the rebel route.
    That path of protest had been first laid open many years earlier. The seeds of Kenyan nationalism were rooted in the experience of the African soldiers who served in World War I, for their far-flung travels had given them a greater understanding of their subservient role in the colonial hierarchy. It also exposed their British rulers as imperfect humans and not the omnipotent icons they had considered them to be. But it was not until the closing days of World War II that their mounting grievances against the colonial government’s labor policies and restrictive agricultural practices reached a boiling point.

    Part of the complaint stemmed from the successive humiliations of everyday life under colonial rule. Throughout the country Africans were routinely excluded from a host of locations and services available to Europeans. Many of Nairobi’s finest hotels and restaurants exhibited signs declaring, “No Africans or Dogs Allowed.” Nor could most Africans even consider living in the city’s better neighborhoods such as Muthaiga or Lavington, which were reserved largely for whites and

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