The Other Barack by Sally Jacobs Read Free Book Online Page A

far removed from most Africans’ modest ability to pay. Instead, the natives were ushered to the crowded slums to the east, which were plagued by unsanitary conditions and intermittent police raids. And should an African happen to vex his mzungu employer in some way, he could only hope that the employer would not rip up his kipande, making it impossible to get other work.
    No issue was more passionately contested than that of land. In the years after the war ended, the Kikuyu found that the reserves onto which they were squeezed were approaching a state of ecological exhaustion after decades of heavy farming. A postwar surge in the settlers’ agricultural production that further limited the Kikuyu’s ability to grow and market their own crops further worsened their situation. The arrival of mechanization struck another blow at the Kikuyu heart, as the more efficient farming techniques forced many who had toiled as “squatters” on the verdant highlands off their farms. Some returned to the already overcrowded reserves, while thousands fled to Nairobi, where unemployment and inflation had generated flammable discontent. When the Mau Mau militants offered them a way to fight for ithaka na wiyathi , or land and freedom, many did not hesitate.
    The violence began in the countryside, where settlers’ cattle were sporadically found maimed and unexplained fires erupted on their property. Local chiefs, called “loyalists” who sided with the British and had long been reviled for their brutal and corrupt ways, were discovered mysteriously dead. Widespread discontent gave rise to a form of mass oathing, in which the participants committed to the rebels’ cause. One common oath was, “If I know of any enemy of our organization and fail to kill him, may this oath kill me.” Another pledge was, “If I reveal this oath to any European, may this oath kill me.” 14 Although the British government banned Mau Mau in 1950, the movement continued to gain widespread support in
both the crowded urban centers and the Kikuyu reserves. In the meantime, the militants’ path of destruction expanded.
    By 1952 the tide of violence reached crisis proportions. As the frantic settler community insisted that the government take aggressive action, the papers were chock-full of reports of crop burnings, murder attempts, and robberies. And then it got worse. In October Senior Chief Waruhiu wa Kungu, one of the highest-ranking officials under the colonial administration and a fierce critic of the Mau Mau movement, was shot dead in the backseat of his dark brown Hudson sedan. Supporters of Mau Mau, who had arranged the assassination, celebrated Waruhiu’s death with songs and festivities. The killing sent waves of terror through the settler community and caused British administrators to abruptly escalate their response.
    The Mau Mau war was waged largely by the Kikuyu and supporting factions of the Embu and Meru tribes against the British colonists in the highlands and the greater Nairobi area. But some of the deep-seated resentments that had given rise to it were also felt among the other ethnic groups, including the Luo. In the aftermath of World War II, many soldiers returned home to mounting frustrations just as their predecessors had in the previous war. The ex-servicemen opposed the African chiefs, as the historian William R. Ochieng wrote, “whom they considered as nothing but the mzungu ’s stooges. These returned soldiers began a campaign to ‘liberate’ the masses of their fear of the white man.” 15
    Organizations such as the Kenya African Union and the Nyanza Ex-Soldiers Association were formed to express the Africans’ discontent with the soaring cost of living and mounting taxation. And as the conflagration of the late 1940s spread across the country, it came to have a direct impact on the Obama family. Hussein Onyango agreed with many of the positions that the early