The Roots of Obama's Rage (16 page)

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Authors: Dinesh D'Souza

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I have left out the part that was most widely reported in the media, the Reverend Wright’s insistence that 9/11 was a case of “America’s chickens coming home to roost.” Forget about that line, which is in any case lifted from Malcolm X. The point is that Wright’s remarks are consistent and well thought out; there is an ideology here. Notice that Wright does exactly what Obama was training himself to do. He took the slavery issue but then incorporated it into a larger pattern that included the whole world: he fits the civil rights issue into the larger anti-colonial issue. This is the core of Wright’s thinking, and it was entirely in line with Obama’s own thinking. And that, I believe, is why Obama felt right at home at Trinity.
But now it is time to leave American shores and join Obama on the most important journey of his life. This was his first trip to Kenya, which he took in 1988, when he was twenty-six years old. Obama’s chapter on Kenya takes up 130 pages of
Dreams from My Father
, and it represents the culmination of his quest for self-identity. As we will see, it was a kind of pilgrimage, complete with its scenes of trial, redemption, temptation, and vindication. Obama emerges from Kenya “born again,” not in the religious sense, but rather ideologically. From that point on Obama is already made, or self-made, and the rest of our study will be devoted to seeking an application of Obama’s ideology to his presidential run as well as to his domestic and foreign policy.
“At the time of his death,” Obama said of his dad, “my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man.” Obama’s half-sister Auma visited him in New York while he attended Columbia. She told him for the first time about how humiliated and degraded their father had become, dropping from one low post to another even lower. Auma vividly described how Barack Sr. would stagger into her room drunk at night and rage about how he had been betrayed by the world. Obama’s reaction shows how hard he took this news. “I felt as if my world had been turned on its head; as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky; or heard animals speaking like men. . . . To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!”
13
Obama intended his African odyssey to find out the truth about his father for himself, and it’s worth following it in some detail. Like Marlow in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
, Obama pushes deeper and deeper into the heart of Africa, seeking in this case not an ivory empire but a different kind of treasure—a truth to guide his life. On the flight to Nairobi, Obama sits next to a young Englishman who is on his way to South Africa. “The rest of Africa’s falling apart now, isn’t it?” he informs Obama. “The blacks in South Africa aren’t starving to death like they do in some of these godforsaken countries.”
14
Obama glares at him while the man drops off to sleep. In this anonymous Englishman, Obama has his first experience of the neocolonial mentality.
At the Nairobi airport, Obama is met by Auma and his aunt Zeituni, and the aunt makes a strange statement to Auma. “You take good care of Barry now. Make sure he doesn’t get lost again.” Auma explains that “lost” in this context doesn’t just mean that someone hasn’t seen you in a while. Rather, it refers to native Africans who have gone abroad and have never been heard from again. They are lost in the sense of being cut off from their own people, their own roots. Later, one of Obama’s half-brothers will explain to him that he has not just returned home; he has returned to “Home Squared.” For people who go abroad, Roy Obama explains, “there’s your ordinary home” and there’s your “true home.” Your true home is your ancestral home, which is home twice over, and therefore Home Squared. Obama finds this whole concept quite profound.
15
Having lunch with Auma at the New Stanley Hotel, Obama takes note of the tourists. “They were everywhere—Germans, Japanese, British, Americans—taking pictures, hailing taxis, fending off street peddlers, many of them dressed in safari suits like extras on a movie set.” In Hawaii, Obama found the tourists amusing “with their sunburns and their pale, skinny legs.” Not so in Kenya. “Here in Africa the tourists didn’t seem so funny. I felt them as an encroachment, somehow; I found their innocence vaguely insulting. It occurred to me that in their utter lack of self-consciousness, they were expressing a freedom that neither Auma nor I could ever experience, a bedrock confidence in their own parochialism, a confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.” Notice that Obama, despite his privileged background, despite Columbia and Harvard, identifies not with the American tourists but with the native people of Africa, and he lumps American tourists into “those born into imperial cultures.”
An American family sits down to eat, and the waiters spring into action. Since Auma and he were there first, Obama is outraged at being passed over for service. The waiters ignore his beckoning gestures. Indignant, Auma and Obama leave, and Auma comments that even in Africa, African women are treated like prostitutes. “The same in any of these big office buildings. If you don’t work there, and you are African, they will stop you until you tell them your business. But if you’re with a German friend, they are all smiles. ‘Good evening, miss,’ they’ll say.” Kenya, Auma concludes, “is the whore of Africa, Barack. It opens its legs to anyone who can pay.”
Obama reflects bitterly that “not all the tourists in Nairobi had come for the wildlife. Some came because Kenya, without shame, offered to re-create an age when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested comfortably on the backs of the darker races.” And he’s not finished. “Did our waiter know that black rule had come? Did it mean anything to him?”
16
Through an act of reflection, Obama converts his poor treatment at a restaurant into a case study in the workings of neocolonialism. If all of this seems like multicultural mind games, we have to realize that Obama does not see it that way at all. To him these episodes are all part of a grand drama.
At one point Obama finds himself turning onto Kimathi Street. He knows the name: Kimathi was one of the leaders of the Mau Mau rebellion. Of course! Obama has read his history. He tells us he read a book about Kimathi back in Chicago and can still recall the man’s dreadlocks. And now he can feel only anger because no one else seems to know who Kimathi is. He was a guerilla fighter. “Kimathi had been captured and executed.... Kenya became the West’s most stalwart pupil in Africa, a model of stability... Kimathi became a name on a street sign, thoroughly tamed for the tourists.”
17
And here, to see what Obama is getting at, we need a little bit of history. We need to plumb into the gory details of the Mau Mau uprising, one which scarred Kenya and also Obama’s family.
Historians wonder why the British were so brutal in suppressing the Mau Mau. The reason is obvious: by the end of the nineteenth century, the small island of England controlled a worldwide empire. It had to maintain this empire through a very small distribution of soldiers and settlers living abroad, outnumbered in every case by the natives. Edward Said points out that in 1879 there were 180,000 British soldiers defending an empire that spanned four continents and one that “was frequently in turmoil throughout India, Afghanistan, and southern and western Africa.”
18
Even through the first half of the twentieth century, the British maintained vast regions of colonial territory with only the tiniest contingents of British military and administrative personnel.
This meant that British settlers living abroad had very little protection provided by British soldiers and policemen. Mostly they had to rely on locals hired by the colonial administration, locals who were regarded as cagey and unreliable. So when trouble started, the settlers typically panicked and began to shriek for protection: the natives are revolting! And in Kenya a faction of the Kikuyu people did spawn a rebellion that was conducted in the name of
ithaka na wiyathi
—land and freedom. They had a point: the British had seized the fertile lands of the Kikuyu and turned them into lavish plantations. The rhythms of Kikuyu life were severely disrupted. So the Kikuyu launched a campaign of murderous assaults not only against English settlers, but also against Africans and fellow Kikuyu who did not side with them. At its peak, this guerilla insurgency had around 20,000 insurgents, and it was led by three men: Waruhiu Itote (also known as General China), Stanley Mathenge, and Dedan Kimathi. Each of these three proved to be a savage and elusive opponent, and one, General China, actually survived the conflict and became a hero in post-independence Kenya.
As the rebellion gathered support, it drew on the system of kinship oaths among the Kikuyu. The Mau Mau oaths, which became notorious for the gruesome rituals that accompanied them, were professed to swear loyalty to each other and to kill all white Europeans they could get their hands on. The preferred method of assassination was to kill entire families with the machete and then to mutilate their bodies. As these massacres were discovered one after another, a massive cry for help and immediate action arose from the settler community. There were shrill calls to the British government to wake up to the threat of the Mau Mau.
Even today the term “mau mau” is used to suggest fear and intimidation, as in Tom Wolfe’s
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
. The Mau Mau revolt in Kenya was portrayed by the international press as a kind of primitive African uprising in which jungle savages were cutting people into pieces simply as an expression of their native barbarism. As white public opinion both in Kenya and Britain hardened against Mau Mau attacks, the British government went into action and brought in the Royal Air Force as well as several thousand crack troops to destroy the rebels and put down the uprising.
The centerpiece of the British strategy was Operation Anvil, in which Nairobi was placed under martial law, and army troops searched the city rooting out Mau Mau guerillas and their protectors. The presumption of the British, according to historian Wunyabari Maloba, was that every Kenyan was a Mau Mau sympathizer unless he could prove himself innocent. Maloba writes that families were separated as husbands who couldn’t demonstrate their innocence were locked up in detention camps, and their wives and children sent to congested reserves.
19
From the perspective of curtailing the Mau Mau, however, Operation Anvil was an unqualified success. It drove the rebels out of the city and into the forests of Mount Kenya and the Aberdare mountain ranges. Then the British expanded Operation Anvil into a broader campaign that targeted the entire Kikuyu community. Historian David Anderson estimates that “at the peak of the emergency the British held more than 70,000 Kikuyu supporters of Mau Mau in detention camps . . . the vast majority were held without trial.” Altogether some 150,000 Kikuyu were confined over the course of the rebellion. Historian Caroline Elkins, in her own controversial book on the subject, notes that while the men were in official camps the women and children were herded into enclosed villages surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by guards. “Once I added all of the Kikuyu detained in these villages to the adjusted camp population, I discovered that the British had actually detained some 1.5 million people, or nearly the entire Kikuyu population.”
20
Elkins terms this system of confinement the “Kenyan gulag.” Anderson doesn’t use this term, but he notes that during the worst years of the Mau Mau suppression, “Kenya became a police state in the very fullest sense of the term.” Some 1,500 Kenyans were sentenced to be hanged for collaboration with the Mau Mau in this period, and more than a thousand were sent to the gallows. “In no other place and at no other time in the history of British imperialism was state execution used on such a scale as this.”
21
And from cases that Elkins studied we find horrible accounts of rape and torture in the detention camps. In some cases Kenyans were subjected to electric shock treatments; in others, people had their private parts severed with a pair of scissors or pliers. Elkins spares us none of the details. And even when the British campaign against the Mau Mau finally ended, its aftermath is heartbreaking. It was not uncommon for men to come home to discover that their wives had been raped and had given birth to other men’s children during their time of confinement.
As for Dedan Kimathi, he was eventually hunted down by the British. The soldiers, many of them recruited from the Kikuyu, surrounded Kimathi’s hiding place, and wounded and captured him. After a brief trial, he was hanged on February 18, 1957, and his body thrown into an unmarked grave. With Kimathi’s death the Mau Mau rebellion was finished. Yet remarkably, although Kenya became independent only a few years later in 1963, few people remember the Mau Mau rebellion today. Jomo Kenyatta wanted no association with Mau Mau, telling the Kenyan people, “We shall not allow hooligans to rule Kenya. Mau Mau was a disease which has been eradicated and must never be remembered again.” Not surprisingly, the British didn’t want to talk about what had happened in the camps. India had become independent in 1947, and when the country’s first prime minister Nehru heard about the British atrocities in Kenya, he complained to the former British governor general in India, Lord Mountbatten. Nehru’s complaint made its way up to the prime minister, Winston Churchill, but Churchill had no interest in opening up an investigation into British abuses in Kenya, and so the book on colonial atrocities against the Mau Mau was officially closed for the moment.
22
At this point we can better understand Obama’s determination to get that Churchill bust out of the White House.
While the literature on the Mau Mau crackdown makes for gruesome reading, in a sense it is not unique, because colonial powers have always used their power to crush such revolts. In India, for example, the British brutally suppressed the so-called Sepoy Rebellion in 1857–1858. But that was 150 years ago, while the Mau Mau suppression ended in 1960, only a year before Obama was born. It is one thing to read about these atrocities, and quite another to experience them. For Obama, these were not academic wars or war crimes for classroom debate. They were real wars and war crimes whose scars were endured by his grandfather and father.

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