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Representations of Kenya

Myth and Reality

Figure 2.1. Theodore Roosevelt, Three-Quarter Length Portrait, Standing Next to Dead Elephant, Holding Gun, Probably in Africa. Photo by Edward Van Altena, 1909, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002709191/.

Barack Obama was not the first president of the United States whose connections to Kenya shined an international spotlight on the country. A century before the inauguration of the first African American president, one of Obama’s predecessors was busy making plans for an extended tour of East Africa. Just three weeks after leaving office in 1909, Teddy Roosevelt set sail for an expedition in British East Africa cosponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.¹ An avid hunter and naturalist who as president had established five national parks, Roosevelt, together with his son Kermit, felled game to be mounted for exhibitions at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Natural History in New York. The expedition carried home hundreds of hunting trophies (including nine lions, thirteen rhinoceroses, and twenty zebras) and romantic tales of a rugged yet opulent life on safari, introducing American households to people, places, and things with which they were almost wholly unfamiliar.²

Arriving in the ancient port city of Mombasa on Kenya’s Swahili Coast in late April after almost a month at sea, Roosevelt’s extravagantly outfitted party—their entourage included 250 porters, and Roosevelt’s tent had a bathtub—set off on an extensive safari, making a circuit through Kenya, Uganda, Congo, and into Sudan that took nearly a year to complete. The expedition was widely covered in the press, and Roosevelt had been commissioned by Scribner’s magazine beforehand to document his travels for the princely sum of $50,000 (an amount equivalent to roughly 1.3 million in 2014 US dollars).³ His serialized accounts of the expedition were later compiled and published as African Game Trails. A best seller by all standards, the book provides an important window into how Kenya was popularly marketed to American and international audiences more than a century ago.

Most directly, Roosevelt’s expedition stimulated interest in big game hunting and helped to designate Kenya as the premier site for a safari. As Edward Steinhart writes, “Even after the construction of the Uganda railroad, travel to and within East Africa remained both arduous and expensive. Only the wealthiest European and American aristocrats could make the excursion for the purpose of shooting big game.”⁴ Such travelers, he points out, “laid the basis for the growth of Kenya’s modern tourist industry.”⁵ We would add that the safari experiences recounted in print by travelers like Roosevelt, complete with luxurious trappings and outdoor adventure, have contributed strongly to the elite character of tourism in Kenya that continues to center on the recreation of the interpenetrated worlds of the white hunter and the colonial settler.⁶

More abstractly, set against backdrops of dramatic natural beauty, Roosevelt’s descriptions of the flora, fauna, and people that he encountered on safari offer insights into the roots of enduring, exoticized stereotypes about Africa and the lasting effects of such representations on Kenya. The foreword to African Game Trails reflects the triumphant zeal of an explorer, the scientific curiosity of a naturalist, and the latent racism of the early twentieth-century American. Focusing on what he saw as the untamed nature of both African landscapes and Africans, Roosevelt recounts:

In these greatest of the world’s great hunting-grounds there are mountain peaks whose snows are dazzling under the equatorial sun; swamps where the slime oozes and bubbles and festers in the steaming heat; lakes like seas; skies that burn above deserts where the iron desolation is shrouded from view by the wavering mockery of the mirage; vast grassy plains where palms and thorn-trees fringe the dwindling streams; mighty rivers rushing out of the heart of the continent through the sadness of endless marshes; forests of gorgeous beauty, where death broods in the dark and silent depths. . . . The dark-skinned races that live in the land vary widely. Some are warlike, cattle-owning nomads; some till the soil and live in thatched huts shaped like beehives; some are fisher-folk; some are ape-like naked savages, who dwell in the woods and prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves.⁷

Coming a quarter century after the “Scramble for Africa,” during which the European powers carved up Africa following the Berlin Conference, Roosevelt’s expedition took place as the mysterious “dark continent” was becoming increasingly knowable through the processes of colonization and when discourses about the imperial nations’ “civilizing mission” in Africa were in full flower. Accordingly, Roosevelt’s prose, bolstered by his authority as a former president, helped cement images of Kenya as an exotic locale inhabited first by spectacular flora and fauna and populated second by “dark skinned races” whose “primitive” lifestyles rendered them stuck in almost primeval time.

Roosevelt was not alone in depictions of the landscapes and lifestyle he found in Kenya as both exotic and static. Rather, African Game Trails was typical of its genre; travelers’ accounts of the period rarely acknowledge the sweeping political, social, and economic changes wrought by colonialism (and African engagement with them) or the violence (and African resistance to it) that accompanied the imposition of British rule. Such incomplete representations of Kenyan culture and history invite the following questions: What might have Kenyans thought of the ways in which their experiences were described in works like African Game Trails? How has outsiders’ “ownership” of history and control over representations affected Kenya’s social, economic, and political trajectories from the early twentieth century forward? In what ways and in what contexts have Kenyans narrated their own stories and represented themselves? What have these competing histories accomplished?

With these questions in mind, this chapter focuses on the complexities of the colonial experience, the myths surrounding it, and the work that competing discourses about Kenya’s colonial past continue to perform into the present day—not simply in Kenya, but globally as well. Indeed, writing about his long discussions with a local historian in Western Kenya during his 1988 visit, Obama recalls being admonished, “The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”⁸ Accordingly, a primary goal of this chapter is to sharpen understandings of Kenya’s colonial past and its relationship to the present. We turn next to one of the most enduring and powerful tropes, or common themes, about Kenya—Kenya as a “white man’s country.”⁹

Creating the Colonial Landscape: The (Un)Happy Valley of the “White Man’s Country”

By the time Roosevelt made his journey, the colonization of Kenya¹⁰ figured as the domain not just of the “white hunter” but of the white settler. In the swath of fertile land that extended from the slopes of Mount Kenya to escarpments hugging the Great Rift, with its volcanic lakes, to the plains of Laikipia that composed the White Highlands (so called because they were lands alienated, or officially given over to white settlement and ownership), Africans were progressively turned off the lands they had inhabited and worked for generations. They were expelled to “native reserves,” islands of agriculturally poor lands demarcated along tribal lines, or they were allowed for a time to “squat” on white farms, exchanging their labor for the right to reside on settler lands and to retain a small fraction of the crops they produced.

This realization of Kenya as a “white man’s country” had its deep roots in an African adventure undertaken a little more than a decade before Roosevelt’s epic safari by another young man of prominent family and considerable means, Hugh Cholmondeley, Lord Delamere.¹¹ In 1896, accompanied by an entourage that included teams of Somali bearers, a professional photographer, and two hundred camels, Delamere, who reputedly coined the term “white hunter,” embarked on a far-ranging safari that led him more than one thousand miles throughout Somaliland and concluded ultimately in Central Kenya.¹² The lush landscape captured Delamere’s imagination, and a few years later, shortly before British East Africa became the Kenya Colony and Protectorate in 1905, he returned as a settler, taking up a ninety-nine-year lease on one hundred thousand acres near the Mau Plateau that he pledged to spend £5,000 developing over a period of five years.¹³

Working from his vast Equator Ranch and as a chief figure in the settler lobby in Nairobi, Delamere threw his energy into the development of Kenya as a “white man’s country.” Chairing an official land commission in 1905, Delamere advocated that the initial development of the highlands be undertaken by wealthy, elite émigrés with large land grants. He was able to entice an array of his aristocratic contemporaries to emigrate from Britain, and in what became known as the “Happy Valley”¹⁴ of the White Highlands, they created a microcosmic world of privilege and decadence that has endured in romanticized, popular imagination as being “authentically Kenyan.” This was a world seemingly composed of “sundowner” cocktails, usually gin and tonic, taken outdoors every evening as the equatorial sun dropped out of the sky; of vast farmhouses dripping with bougainvillea and staffed by black servants in white kanzu (long robes); of months spent on safari and of regular black-tie balls at the tony Muthaiga Club or Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. Yet, the reality of the Happy Valley included seedier elements of widespread substance abuse—the visiting Prince of Wales was notoriously offered cocaine at a dinner party—and scandalous adultery: “Are you married or do you live in Kenya?” was a popular joke in interwar Britain.¹⁵

The world of the Happy Valley endured in popular imagination not only after many of its denizens succumbed to dissolution, bankruptcy, and scandal, but even after the end of British rule in 1963. The area was chronicled at the time by white settlers, most notably Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. Known by the nom de plume Isak Dinesen, her famous memoir, Out of Africa, begins with the lilting line, “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”¹⁶ Nostalgia for the dramatic and glamorous aspects of this colonial milieu was reinvigorated in the mid-1980s with the release of the film version of Out of Africa, based on Blixen’s memoir and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which in turn stimulated a spate of books and media productions romanticizing the settler lifestyle.¹⁷ This nostalgia for a romanticized British colonial past and its vast marketability even inspired a new Ralph Lauren fragrance, Safari, its print campaign mirroring the aesthetics of Out of Africa and making India Hicks, granddaughter of the last viceroy of India, its primary face.¹⁸ Yet, notably absent from these scenes set in Kenya’s upcountry “islands of white” are black Kenyans and their experiences of British colonialism. Missing, too, are any indications of conflict between the colonizers and the colonized or of the inherent violence of the colonial project overall.¹⁹ It is to these topics that the remaining sections of this chapter turn.

Colonial Rule: Conquest, Bureaucracy, and “Tribal” Imaginaries

Popular representations of the White Highlands would seem to suggest that the British arrived in Kenya and immediately took control of the country and its people without incident. But the reality of the coming of colonialism and the imposition of British rule was much more complicated—and violent. The first British boots on the ground in Kenya were not those of “great white hunters” or settlers like Delamere, but rather those of explorers and missionaries who traversed East Africa in the Victorian era.²⁰ They were followed by members of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC). As we noted above, the British had come into possession of Kenya through the “Scramble for Africa.” Indeed, a popular anecdote of the late Victorian era highlighting the arbitrary nature of the scramble held that Queen Victoria ceded Mount Kilimanjaro, thereby shifting the border between British East Africa and German East Africa, to her grandson, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, because she had two mountains—Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro—and he had none.²¹

At the Berlin Conference of the mid-1880s, the imperial powers agreed that in order for one country’s claim to an African territory to be recognized by the others, the claiming country had to show that it had “effectively occupied” the territory, that is, set up some form of rudimentary administration that would facilitate free trade and free transit in the territory. By the late 1880s, the British government had set up the IBEAC, the concessionary company “chartered to occupy Britain’s sphere of influence,” that is, to see to economic and administrative development of the British East African territories.²² By the late 1880s, the IBEAC was sending ivory caravans from the Swahili Coast through Kenya to Uganda, and by the 1890s had begun the violence-ridden process of conquering and subduing the area’s African populations. British officials often referred to this process as “pacification,” which resulted in “punitive” expeditions against any active resistance. For instance, in the Nandi-speaking regions of Western Kenya, British “pacification” from 1890 to 1906 resulted in the deaths of thousands of Nandi warriors as well as cattle seizures that decimated the pastoralist community’s herds.²³ However, at the same moment the IBEAC was cementing itself militarily with such punitive missions, its economic power was waning. The Foreign Office took over direct control of Kenya, establishing the East Africa Protectorate in 1895 and taking charge of building a railway from the coast to Lake Victoria, while many of the “company men” stayed on as the first British administrators.²⁴

In ruling Kenya, the British were confronted with two central, interrelated problems: their numerical inferiority vis-à-vis African populations and the incredible diversity of African communities, or “tribes” as they called them. The system of governance known as “indirect rule” addressed both of these problems. Developed by Lord Frederick Lugard, chief British administrator in Nigeria, indirect rule was a co-optive model of administration based on African institutions and managed by African leaders under the oversight and authority of British administrators.²⁵ Outsourcing day-to-day administration to specially designated African functionaries dealt with the inability of the slim ranks of British officials to be everywhere at once in the districts under their authority, and indirect rule had the added advantage of being cheap. To borrow Sara Berry’s famous phrase, indirect rule was meant to enable “hegemony on a shoestring” and institutionalize a political, racial, and social hierarchy.²⁶

Implementing indirect rule required the work of imagination and invention. British authorities had a “mental map” in which Kenya’s diverse and numerous ethnic groups were neatly divided into easily discernible “tribes,” with particular expectations attached to them. “Tribes,” as Brett Shadle points out, “were in the colonial imagination discrete collections of people attached to unique cultural, political, and societal norms, ruled by strong chiefs.”²⁷ Even if African communities did not assert “tribal” identities, Shadle’s statement brings us to the second layer of invention—the creation of African institutions and offices where none had existed before or had been present in significantly different forms. In many instances, the British introduced hierarchical political organization into ethnic groups that were acephalous, or “without a head,” or which located and exercised authority through councils typically composed of elders. As one 1909 administrative report neatly summed up, “The prestige of the chiefs is in the process of being created in most cases.”²⁸ The introduction of indirect rule and the tribal imaginings that accompanied it had far-reaching consequences in East Africa. Images of the British administrator in a pith helmet and the loyal, submissive African chief in “tribal dress” emerged, like those of the white hunter and the settler baron, as avatars of colonial rule.²⁹ Indirect rule was also part of the politics of “divide and conquer,” as British policy and practice hardened flexible webs of ethnic affiliation and affinity into distinct, cemented “tribal” categories, and subsequently parceled out power and privilege to favored “tribes” whom they deemed more “advanced” or “evolved.” This (re)imagining of fluid ethnicities into fixed tribes mobilized Victorian views of European history and contemporary notions of scientific racism. As John Iliffe explains, British officials believed that “every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation. The idea doubtless owed much to the Old Testament, to Tacitus and Caesar, to academic distinction between tribal societies based on status and modern societies based on contract, and to postwar anthropologists who preferred ‘tribal’ to the more pejorative word ‘savage.’”³⁰

This view of the African as inherently “tribal” not only shaped colonial policy and practice, but also transformed the ways in which Africans reckoned their own identities and conceived of “self” and “other,” “us” and “them.” While the ethnic boundaries of many communities were ossified through this process of “inventing” tribes out of ethnicities, entirely new “umbrella” groups, such as Kalenjin, Abaluhya, and Mijikenda, were also formed out of amalgamations of smaller groups and imagined as discrete cultural communities for the first time.³¹ Overall, from the top down, British policies “invented tribes,” but Africans worked to shape and manage these identities throughout the colonial period.

Local politics, upended by a model of colonial rule that introduced new offices and often filled them with young men who would have been on the outside of conventional precolonial power structures, came to be deeply inflected by “tribal” identifications and interests. As amply illustrated by the Luo embrace of Obama that forms the core of this book, ethnic affinities continue to drive Kenyan politics, while “tribalism” has remained the central trope used in characterizing politics in Kenya from the colonial era into the present day.³² The effects of indirect rule and “tribal imaginaries” were not confined to the social and political arenas, but also profoundly reshaped economic life in Kenya. The next section turns to living and laboring and law in colonial Kenya and the myth of the “dutiful native.”

Creating Markets and Compelling Labor: Settler Violence and the Myth of the “Dutiful Native”

The alienation of African lands to white settlement was carried out through a series of laws that created two side-by-side systems of landholding in Kenya. The Crown Lands Ordinance of 1902 solved the problem of who “owned” land in Kenya, rendering all land not “physically occupied by local people” free for white settlement. The 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance further alienated land for whites only. Acquiring massive estates, settlers were quick to enhance their prestige as landed colonial aristocrats, with Africans realizing that many settlers had little desire to increase productivity. By 1920, more than three million acres of Central and Western Kenya’s best farmland was owned by European settlers, with just 5.6 percent of this land under cultivation.³³ As settler and author Elspeth Huxley summed up in her biography of Lord Delamere, “The government had a certain obligation to the European farmer. They had deliberately invited him into the country to sink his capital and make his home there. . . . They had, therefore, an obligation to help him obtain native workers.”³⁴ Further, an important element of the colonial project was the integration of commodities produced on settler farms—especially precious arabica coffee—into world markets, and the wide-scale plantation agriculture necessarily demanded vast numbers of laborers.

The introduction of a colonial cash economy, together with the implementation of a colonial tax system and land alienation, compelled Africans to enter wage labor markets. For example, the Native Hut and Poll Tax Ordinance (No. 2) of 1910 taxed individuals and their dwellings, putting an unfair tax burden on polygynous African families. Each wife was required to have her own home, which the British pejoratively labled a “hut.” Africans’ efforts to resist this tax resulted in lifestyle changes that forced societies to break long-standing cultural taboos in order to avoid the punitive tax system. An administrative report from the early twentieth century noted a decline in tax revenues “owing to the fact that people have broken up their huts and placed more than one wife in a hut.”³⁵ Such heavy annual tax demands payable only in cash drove black Kenyans to the colonial labor market, forcing them off the reserves and onto settler farms and into emerging urban centers to labor for wages. In turn, pass laws regulating the registration of African males were introduced in 1920. The kipande, or pass, permitted black Kenyan men to leave the reserves for employment and served to regulate the quality, quantity, and flow of the African workforce.³⁶ Following the model of another settler colony—South Africa—Kenya was spatially segregated along racial lines, particularly in urban areas. White settlers and officials regarded Africans at best as temporary instruments of labor that could be removed from white areas when they were no longer needed, and as sources of dangerous dissolution at worst. For example, a 1926 report produced by Kenya’s Native Affairs Department quoted the 1921 South African Native Affairs Commission: “A town is a European area in which there is no place for the redundant native who neither works nor serves his people but forms the class from which professional agitators, slum landlords, liquor sellers, prostitutes and other undesirable classes spring. The exclusion of these redundant natives is in the interests of Europeans and natives alike.”³⁷

Once African laborers were employed at low wages and in generally poor conditions on settler farms or in urban centers, their employers were free to treat them as they saw fit. Settlers saw transforming Kenyans, whom they regarded as shiftless and work-shy, into “dutiful natives” as both economically necessary and central to their “civilizing mission.” “Evidence given to the Native Labor Commission of 1912–1913,” Shadle writes, “revealed that many settlers believed violence to be integral to labor relations,” and noted that white settlers could mete out corporal punishment to their laborers with virtual impunity.³⁸ Propagandist British discourse, in contrast, portrayed African servants and laborers as simple, obedient, and docile subjects; grateful for the benevolent paternalistic embrace of their colonial masters.³⁹

Coercion was not confined to settler enterprises. While taxation created much-needed revenue for the colonial state, programs of forced labor—presented under the guise of “communal” labor—compelled Kenyans to work without wages on light infrastructure-development projects. These programs had a secondary objective of drawing Kenyans out of the reserves and into the greater colonial labor pool. In some instances, colonial officials went so far as to coercively procure “communal” labor to serve the needs of individual settlers.⁴⁰

Settler violence and colonial coercion were in many cases met by African resistance. Kenyans used “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance,” the well-known “weapons of the weak,” to counter burdensome and violent compulsions to colonial labor.⁴¹ They also countered the violent discipline of colonial economic order through supernatural and spiritual means. For example, the colonial administration was forced to acknowledge that the consistent brutality of a white settler toward his Kenyan workers had been a factor in the outbreak of a prophetic possession movement that had severely impeded the collection of tax and the procurement of labor in the region southeast of Nairobi. A King’s African Rifles (KAR) patrol dispatched from the capital was eventually able to exert a “quieting effect” over the area.⁴² By the 1920s such politically inflected outbreaks of prophetic or spiritualist activity were hardly unusual. Relatedly, decades of missionary activity had led to the establishment of various African churches that interpreted and translated the Christian message in accordance with local belief structures, often clashing with European conceptions of morality and of scriptural and doctrinal interpretations. The leaders of these new African churches mobilized the “politics of the pulpit” to contest colonial rule. Colonial administrators were quick to interpret (and dismiss) supernaturally based forms of political expression in racist and ethnocentric ways. For instance, in 1929, a district commissioner (DC) reporting on the Nomiya Luo Mission, and independent Africans churches more generally, explained:

This class of thing is met with throughout Africa, where mission influence has been at work for some time. To my mind it is but a clear indication that the natives are unable to embrace the Christian religion as presented to them. As long as they are under the immediate influence of the European Missionary they are stimulated but as soon as they became so numerous or scattered that the influence can be but a shadow they search about and work out for themselves some of the Bastard Christianity more suited to their mental and social development. . . . My experience in South Africa taught me that it is a mistake to think these movements will die out. I am inclined to think this one is no exception and is on the increase.⁴³

The DC’s comments both reflected the discriminatory character of white minority rule and foreshadowed the rise of African resistance. As Kenyans increasingly mobilized not only supernatural but also political strategies to contest the power of the colonial state in the 1930s and 1940s, religion and ethnicity provided key spaces in which black Kenyans debated sociopolitical life under colonial rule as African resistance began to segue into desires and demands for independence. The next section of this chapter turns to Kenya political movements, the anticolonial Mau Mau rebellion, and the (ethnic) dilemmas of rule in independent Kenya.

Politics and Revolution in Colonial Kenya: From Migration to Mau Mau to Nationhood

The reshaping of identities and economies that accompanied colonial rule simultaneously brought about significant social and political transformations in the lives of many Kenyans. In Central Kenya, for example, land alienation did not simply displace Kikuyu people but severely disrupted a complex system of tenancy called githaka, which allocated land and organized landholding along clan and generational lines as well as importantly providing for the integration of outsiders into Kikuyu communities.⁴⁴ In Western Kenya, Luo people, far from the settler farms of the White Highlands, were compelled to migrate in search of wage labor. As in Kikuyu areas, this economically driven displacement challenged notions of property and belonging that revolved around the dala, or Luo homestead.⁴⁵ These ruptures around land and labor, and the social transformations that accompanied them, together with the emergence of coteries of mission-educated Kenyans, drove African politicization that was skewed along regional and “tribal” lines. By the 1920s, Kikuyu- and Luo-speaking communities had established political organizations—the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) and the Young Kavirondo Association (YKA)—concerned with the promotion of their respective material interests and the articulation of what it meant to be “Kikuyu” or “Luo” in rapidly shifting colonial landscapes.⁴⁶

Yet, even as African politicization continued to expand and accelerate over the next two decades, whites settlers and many colonial administrators still clung to the idea that they were enacting a “civilizing mission” for the benefit of Africans mired in “tribal” primitivity and that governance should remain exclusively the domain of whites. These racist and paternalistic ideologies were well entrenched by the 1940s, and many colonialists in Kenya and in Britain believed that diverse “tribes” would never be capable of uniting under any banner of Kenyan nationalism. For example, a 1943 Colonial Office memorandum on political affairs in Kenya reiterated the dominant view:

These tribes speak different languages and have entirely different social customs. Many of them are in a very primitive state and it is not possible to envisage the time when they will become sufficiently united as a whole, speaking a common language and having trust in elected leaders from their own tribe or still less of another tribe. It would be very much easier to make a united Europe under the domination of Germany than to make a united Kenya under the domination of the Maasai. The conception of a central self-government elected by these primitive tribes is simply not within practical politics.⁴⁷

Five years later, marginalized Kikuyu had begun a campaign of violent rural action—including labor strikes, arson, and maiming of farm animals. By the early 1950s, such violence was steadily rising and increasingly politicized, organized through a network of oathing. This movement emerged into a full-scale rebellion known as Mau Mau, which gave rise to an enduring representation of Kenya as a space in which tribal atavism and savage violence always simmered below the surface of social and political life.⁴⁸ Colonial political propaganda and the Western media portrayed the rebellion as a race war that pitted families of peaceful white farmers against African “terrorists,” as a contest of primitive African “savagery” versus white, modern “civilization,” and overlooked the brutality of the colonial and complex violence of decolonization in settler colonies like Kenya.

The rebellion took the shape of an insurgency carried out by the Land and Freedom Army, a disparate guerrilla force of landless Kikuyu supported in varying degrees by Kikuyu who pledged (on pain of death and not always voluntarily) to simply keep silent or to actively assist the fighters with intelligence and supplies. As Mau Mau action escalated and violence intensified, the colonial governor declared Kenya in 1952 to be under a state of emergency, which lasted nearly a decade. While it retained its anticolonial character and targets, Mau Mau further developed into a civil war between supporters of the guerrillas and those Kikuyu who had benefited from indirect rule—namely Kikuyu chiefs and headmen—and other Kikuyu loyalists or “home guards.”⁴⁹ In the protracted course of the rebellion, the British effectively dehumanized individual Kikuyu, interning a substantial proportion of the adult male Kikuyu population (and thousands of women) in interrogation camps that were often established on settler lands and run with wide-ranging brutality, sometimes by settlers deputized by the colonial state. In the end, as David Anderson notes, only thirty white settlers died during Mau Mau, while at least 20,000 Kikuyu were killed, with an additional 150,000 imprisioned in internment camps.⁵⁰

While political leaders of various “tribes”—most notably the Kikuyu politician Jomo Kenyatta—were accused of organizing the rebellion, convicted in kangaroo courts, and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, Kenya, outside of Nairobi and the White Highlands, was largely untouched by the violence of the rebellion.⁵¹ In Kikuyu areas, however, the British threw their military might at the insurgency, bombarding the forests around Mount Kenya with fighter planes, calling in regiments from Britain, and importing counterinsurgency experts from other parts of their empire. They also set in motion a potent propaganda machine that militarized the “civilizing mission,” portraying the colonial forces as defenders of law and order and the Kikuyu as “terrorists” who had lost their collective sensibility and veneer of civilization.⁵² This characterization and image was picked up by international press organizations, 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.