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

African political groups took and was a staunch opponent of the profiteering loyalists. But he had grave doubts that the African could overcome the white man’s armies. As he explained to his eldest son: “The white man alone is like an ant. He can be easily crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together.... He will follow his leaders and not question orders. Black men are not like this. Even the most foolish black man thinks he knows better than the wise man. That is why the black man will always lose.” 16

    Nonetheless, Mama Sarah, Onyango’s fourth wife, says that her husband’s name was put on a list of political activists and that in 1949 he was confined to a detention camp for six months. In Dreams from My Father , Mama Sarah reports that his name had been turned over to British authorities by a man who worked for the district commissioner whom Onyango had admonished for demanding excessive taxes from local people and keeping the money for himself. 17 During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, as a steady stream of reporters journeyed to the Obama family compound, Mama Sarah told a reporter for the Times of London that British guards had brutally tortured her husband in order to gain information about the insurgency.
    â€œThe African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” the Times reported Sarah Hussein Obama as saying. The white soldiers, she continued, visited the prison regularly to carry out “disciplinary action” on the Africans confined there. “[Onyango] said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down.” It was then, she added, “we realized that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies.” 18
    Although Sarah’s recollection echoes several accounts of the torture inflicted on the Kikuyu detainees in the later years of the rebellion, it is problematic. The detention centers that the British used to hold Mau Mau supporters were not established until 1952. While it is possible that Onyango might have been charged with being a subversive and imprisoned, no family member has identified the location where he was held. Several close relatives say they do not believe that he was confined at all. Although Mama Sarah told her grandson Barack Hussein Obama in the 1990s that Onyango had been detained in a camp for six months, she said in the Times interview that he was held for two years. But whatever the exact circumstances of his confinement, that he was confined somewhere is possible. He supposedly returned home from the camp thin, dirty, and greatly changed. As Obama quotes Mama Sarah in Dreams , “He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice. He was so ashamed, he refused to enter his house or tell us what had happened.” 19 Barack Obama Sr. was
at the Maseno School at the time and did not learn of the detention until later.
    While Barack was defying school authorities, government officials in Nairobi were preparing an aggressive crackdown on the insurgents. Less than one week after Waruhiu’s murder, Kenya’s new governor of a matter of days, Sir Evelyn Baring, received approval from London to declare a state of emergency. Under the emergency legislation and subsequent regulations, the government was free to detain suspects, deploy the military in order to maintain civil administration, and impose other laws without checking in with London.
    In the early morning of October 21, 1952, the same day the emergency went into effect, Baring unleashed a surprise police roundup that was code-named Operation Jock Scott, arresting one hundred eighty suspected Mau Mau militants and activists with the Kenya African Union. Nairobi police, assisted by British reinforcements, loaded the offenders into their