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The Obama Family

Ethnicity and the Politics of Belonging in Kenya

There’s your ordinary house in Nairobi. And then there’s your house in the country, where your people come from. Your ancestral home. Even the biggest minister or businessman thinks this way. He may have a mansion in Nairobi and build only a small hut on his land in the country. He may go there only once or twice a year. But if you ask him where he is from, he will tell you that that hut is his true home. So, when we were at school and wanted to tell somebody we were going to Alego, it was home twice over, you see. Home Squared. . . . For you, Barack, we can call it “Home Cubed.”

—Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father¹

Barack Obama’s visits to his extended family at their rural homesteads in Western Kenya during his first trip to Kenya in 1988 offer an important avenue into the history of ethnicity and the related politics of belonging in Kenya. Traveling via the railway line laid down by the British at the opening of the colonial era that we learned about in the last chapter, Obama shared this important overnight journey with Kenyans returning “home” from Nairobi to their hereditary “homelands.”² The sojourn from a “house” in an urban, ethnically mixed milieu to a “home” in a more ethnically uniform province, undertaken regularly by millions of Kenyans across the country, speaks to the historical forces at work around the malleable categories of “tribe” and “ethnicity.”³ A Luo at the end of such a journey exchanges the nyumba, or “house,” in the lingua franca of Swahili, which he inhabits in the city, for the dala, or homestead, where he belongs in Western Kenya—“home squared.” Such was the journey Obama’s family understood him as taking, simply with a twice-removed point of origin in the United States.

Training a lens on the Obama family, this chapter examines how the idea of a Luo identity, of “Luoness,” came to be and traces the social and political work that Luoness has done from the colonial era into the present day. We further challenge the notion that “tribe” was either an uncomplicated primordial artifact or a wholly colonial construction. Rather, we will show how Africans—whether recognized intellectuals like Barack Obama Sr. or more ordinary wananchi (citizens) like Hussein Onyanga Obama—have shaped the meanings and uses of Luoness over time in dialogue with a preserved past and contemporary politics. An array of historical sources shows that Luoness has been constituted through origin myths and oral traditions, through histories written by Luo members of the academy and amateur scholars of the “tin trunk history” guild, and through the political projects and partisan maneuverings of Luo political actors.⁴ This chapter points to how ethnicity has become the narrative fulcrum on which representations of postcolonial Kenyan politics turn.

Luoland: Dala and Diaspora

Tera adhi aba Kisumu

Dala gi mama yooo

Dala gi baba yooo

Take me on a tour of Kisumu

The home of my mother

The home of my father.⁵

Having arrived in Kisumu, Obama made his way to the bus depot, “crowded with buses and matatus honking and jockeying for space in the dusty open-air lot,” and crowded onto public transport for the next leg of the journey to his family’s home in Kogelo.⁶ Kisumu, which has grown from a sleepy market into Kenya’s third-largest city, has been the center of Luo sociopolitical life from the colonial era forward.⁷ Memorialized as the diasporic hometown of Luos worldwide by the popular Suzanna Owiyo song quoted above, the city has long been the locus of Luo political activity. Beginning in the colonial era, groups such as the Luo Union promoted cultural-political platforms built around the notion of a discrete Luo identity, and politicians such as Oginga Odinga launched themselves into the anticolonial movement in the 1950s.

The city’s crumbling infrastructure and defunct lakeshore port point back to the 1960s, the decade that saw both a Luo, Oginga Odinga, as vice president in Kenya’s first independent government, and the beginning of thirty years of Luo exile in the “political wilderness” as Jomo Kenyatta’s Kikuyu cohort and Daniel arap Moi’s Kalenjin contingent took center stage.⁸ This experience of rapid ascent and steady marginalization over more than thirty years helps us to understand why by 2004 Luo people reached beyond the shores of Lake Victoria and into the diaspora in search of a powerful political patron whom they regarded as “belonging” to them—Barack Obama Jr. Analyses of how Luoness has been historically constituted through the experience of diaspora helps to illuminate how Obama, who first set foot in Kenya at the age of twenty-six, could be claimed by Luo as a “son of the soil” of Western Kenya.

Kisumu, while important from the late nineteenth century forward, was not the place where notions of “Luoness” first emerged. Present-day Luo speakers offer an array of responses about what constitutes “Luoness” and where Luo people originated. Their accounts, which weave together historical memory and myth, formal and local historical knowledge, contemporary political problems, and even biblical narratives, all emphasize migration and then subsequent material and emotional “belonging” to a particular landscape as key elements of what it means to be Luo. Over a decade of asking Luo people, from elders in Western Kenya to migrants in East Africa’s major cities, what it means to be Luo, we were informed by nearly all our respondents that the Luo did not originate in Kenya, but rather that a founding ancestor, Ramogi, led a group of settlers from what is today South Sudan to an area on the present border of Kenya and Uganda sometime in the later fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Slowly and continuously until they were checked by the establishment of British and German colonial rule, waves of Luo-speaking migrants followed on Ramogi’s heels.⁹ Indeed, the British administrator and amateur ethnographer Charles W. Hobley recorded a version of the Ramogi story in the early 1900s, noting that “his [Ramogi’s] offspring founded the Ja-luo race.”¹⁰

Discussions of Ramogi’s role retained their purchase in political discourse throughout the colonial period and into the present. For example, the Luo-language newspaper called Ramogi, founded in the 1940s, was a key site for debates about Luo politics and culture. During the 1950s Oginga Odinga, the foremost Luo politician, was also vested with the politico-cultural honorific Jaramogi, or “person of Ramogi.” More recently, discussing the presidential campaigns and his preferred candidate in Nairobi in 2007, James Okoth, a Luo resident of Nairobi, quipped, “Just as Ramogi guided the Luo to Kenya, I know Raila (Odinga) can guide them to the statehouse.”¹¹

The Ramogi story does not just occupy a space in Luo historical imagination, but rather is a material (and commercial) site of memory as well. The popular radio station Ramogi FM promotes Luo vernacular music on the Kenyan airwaves, and “Ramogi Night” has become a regular Luo cultural event at the popular Nairobi nightclub Carnivore. Many of our informants even directed us to visit Ramogi Hill, where community-based tourism efforts are under way to commemorate the place believed to be the homestead of this mythical founding ancestor.

Weaving together linguistic, archaeological, oral, and documentary sources, most scholarship agrees that Kenya’s Luo population, speakers of the Dholuo language who call themselves Jaluo, belongs to a wider, diasporic group of Nilotic-Lwo speakers across East Africa, which includes, for example, Acholi-, Lango-, and Padhola-speakers in Uganda and which is even related distantly to Dinka and Nuer populations in South Sudan.¹² The Luo of Kenya arrived in the latter of two waves of Lwo-speaking migrants, who had left South Sudan due to mounting environmental changes and competition over resources, beginning in the fifteenth century. Pastoralists and mixed farmers, the Luo found the verdant shores of Lake Victoria well suited to their needs and reminiscent of the lush Nile valley.¹³ Overall, as migrating Lwo-speakers traversed East Africa, they blended with the various groups they encountered, taking on distinct practices that would distinguish Lwo-speaking groups from a cultural as well as a linguistic standpoint.¹⁴

Oral traditions do not reflect a conceptualization of a shared Luo identity across Lwo-speaking groups, nor do they evidence political organization beyond the local level in the precolonial era. Rather, populations were organized in terms of family or kin: dala (one’s immediate homestead); keyo (one’s extended patrilineage); gweng’ (a collection of lineages bound by marriage or defensive alliances); and piny or oganda (multiclan, territorial conglomerates).¹⁵ By the mid-nineteenth century, there were approximately thirteen oganda or piny representing localities that would become important population centers in the colonial and postcolonial eras: Kisumu, Siaya, and Homa Bay Counties. Luo people identified primarily with their home locations; for instance, a Luo from Alego, the Obamas’ home location, would have likely called himself a Ja-Alego, or “Alego person,” while a person from Gem would have called himself a Ja-Gem, and so on.¹⁶ Nonetheless, as David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo explain, “These small ethnic units were eighteenth and nineteenth century rehearsals for the broadly inclusive ethnic unit of the Luo recognized in the colonial and post-colonial periods.”¹⁷

Creating the Luo Community in Colonial Kenya

Our elders had good ethics and moral codes, which helped them to guide their communities. These were good customs that aided the Luo during their migrations, in the course of their daily work and discussion. No nation can prosper by adopting foreign cultures and ignoring its customs and practices.¹⁸

The implementation of indirect rule, as we learned in the previous chapter, was central to the colonial imagining of clearly defined “tribes” and the hardening of boundaries around preexisting ethnic affinities. At the same time, colonial land and economic policies both restricted black Kenyans to “tribal” reserves and drove them to work in the mixed-ethnic milieus of the colony’s developing cities and settler plantations. From the early twentieth century, these developments steadily transformed the areas around Lake Victoria in Western Kenya to a labor reserve supplying both the colonial state and white settlers. A diaspora of Luo speakers from Western Kenya fanned out across the region and to the colonial cities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Barack Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, who left Luoland to work as a domestic in a white household in Nairobi and served in the King’s African Rifles (KAR) in both World Wars, was typical of Luo migrants who worked as domestic servants in settler households; agricultural laborers on Kenya’s tea, coffee, and sisal plantations; as dockhands in Mombasa and Dar es Salaam; and in various capacities for the railway.¹⁹

For Luo people, steeped in oral traditions about a history born out of migration, relocation was not necessarily an utter rupture. Conditions of labor and life, particularly in urban areas, were particularly trying, however. For example, one Nairobi official noted with dismay in the 1940s that with explosive population growth in the city, “it was common” to see “Africans sleeping under the verandahs on River Road, in noisome shacks in the swamps, in buses parked by the road and fourteen to a room in Pumwani, two to a bed and the rest on the floor.”²⁰ Labor migrants, particularly in urban areas, were also forced to endure the coercive tactics and generalized contempt of colonial authorities who regarded them as “delinquents” or “vagrants” operating dangerously outside the control of rural “tribal” discipline.²¹

Indeed, the problem posed by the “detribalized native” was a primary trope in colonial and anthropological discourse from the 1930s onward.²² In much the same way that colonial authorities in the late 1950s focused on “tribal atavism” instead of valid economic and political concerns as the driving force behind Mau Mau, their predecessors and contemporaries argued that labor migrants engaged in “undesirable” activities like theft and prostitution because they were “detribalized.” This ideology rendered ethnicity as a romanticized and rural variety of patriarchal control and argued that Africans who were separated “from family, clan and tribal authority as well as from social codes of behavior, discipline, custom and perhaps religion[,] which originally guided their thoughts and actions,” were operating dangerously outside of customary and colonial legal systems.²³ Providing an easy alternative to dealing with the real structural problems of racial inequality, “detribalization” discourse helped squelch concerns about the squalid, precarious conditions of life and work that characterized urban African environments.

Luo people were deeply troubled not merely by the material hardships of migrant life, but also by the upending of sociocultural life and the absence of community. The twinned questions of how to survive in an urban setting and what it meant to be Luo outside of Western Kenya were answered through intellectual projects and politico-cultural organizations. These intellectual works and political labors built on shared linguistic capacities, cultural affinities, geographic origins, and economic needs that were much deeper and more complex than the blunt colonial category “tribe.”

Intellectual projects undertaken by Luo from the mid-1930s onward were shaped by a confluence of internal forces and external influences. Luo identity—taking in concerns ranging from religious conversion to gendered social morality to civic virtue—was contested by a number of historical actors throughout East Africa’s urban centers. In the cities, under the disciplinary gaze of colonial authorities and in the comparative view of black Kenyans from other ethnic groups, “Luo men knew themselves to be under examination,” Derek Peterson writes. “They conceived of East Africa’s urban environment as a competitive theatre in which men and women alike were obliged to behave with credible decorum.”²⁴ Exclusive of these external influences, Luo struggled with how to reconcile notions of cultural comportment rooted in Nyanza with the demands of life in an environment that was constantly in flux. Luo intellectuals developed historical projects that addressed where the Luo had come from and where they were going; what had made “Luoness” over time.²⁵

The text cited at the beginning of this section, Paul Mboya’s Luo: Kitgi gi tembegi (Luo: Customs and traditions), effectively constituted a vernacular textbook for Luo identity and provided the foundation for future intellectual projects. Through a series of topical chapters—for example, “Law about War,” “Matters on Marriage,” “A Polygamous Man and His Home”—the text charts the cultural responsibilities and acceptable limits of “Luoness” with encyclopedic authority. Written at the apex of the colonial era, the book endeavors to answer many of the pressing sociocultural questions of the day through reflections on the preservation of the Luo past and to offer a set of principles by which every proper Luo speaker should abide.

Luo-language newspapers, most notably Ramogi, were another discursive space in which the intellectual project came to terms with urban life and its implicit demands to define and perform proper cultural comportment in circumstances that were very different from those of “home.” The newspaper’s editors, writers, and readers engaged in debates that aimed to define the responsibilities and limits attached to “Luoness.” Some articles and letters called for Luo to invest in Western Kenya. Others debated the “immoral” lifestyle and habits of those living outside of Western Kenya. Articles often spoke of the need for greater social restraint and discipline in order to maintain Luo respectability in gendered ways. For example, a 1948 editorial labeled independent Luo women in towns as “prostitutes” and argued, “They should be watched by the Luo Union and any relative found allowing these girls to be prostitutes should be punished.”²⁶

While Ramogi often reinforced patriarchal notions of Luo identity, African women occasionally wrote forceful critiques of male attitudes. Connecting debates about the immorality of town life with the social responsibilities of rural familial ties, one woman admonished Luo migrant laborers, who, she explained, “cannot do without women and begin keeping prostitutes with the results that all the money they earn is spent on them and perpetual drinking, where as their wives and children are suffering in the reserves without any help or information through correspondence.”²⁷ Overall, the newspaper provided a central arena in which migrant Luo connected and communicated with one another. As a Luo-speaking writer living in Ethiopia poignantly declared in a 1947 editorial, “Ramogi is the only connection I have with my people.”²⁸ It served also to stimulate “belonging” to a shared Luo lineage. Indeed, authors frequently signed their articles with an emphatic phrase: “An Nyakwar Ramogi,” or “I am a descendant of Ramogi.”²⁹

More materially, urban ethnic associations, in the Luo case the Luo Union, were formed in the 1930s to counter the alienating effects of urban life and to foster social and economic ties between the city and “home.”³⁰ These associations, which would ultimately give rise to political organizations built around ethnic lines, were endorsed by the colonial authorities, who saw them as “the best answer to the detribalizing influences of town life,” perhaps because they relieved colonial authorities of having to improve the conditions of urban life for their African subjects.³¹

The Luo Union had its roots in earlier clan societies that provided social welfare benefits for Luo-speaking migrants from particular locations in Western Kenya. As many Luo speakers believed that a person’s soul could not rest until his or her body was buried at “home” (dala), that is, the place in Western Kenya where the person was born and where his or her placenta (biero) was subsequently buried, these early organizations functioned in part as burial cooperatives.³² As one elderly Luo man recalled, clan associations often raised large amounts of money to ship the bodies of Luo-speaking workers from as far as Ethiopia, Uganda, and coastal Tanganyika to Western Kenya.³³ Further, these associations were instrumental in raising funds for development projects in the rural areas, especially in the realm of education.

Acting as a parent organization to the multiple clan societies, from the moment of its inception the Luo Union fostered educational opportunities for Luo-speaking youth, promoted economic and cultural investment in Western Kenya, and set about creating a new history written in the vernacular that codified the mythical shared past of the Luo-speaking community.³⁴ As colonial officials correctly understood, a central part of the Luo Union’s work was “to examine and to choose the new customs which should be followed and bad ones which should be suppressed.”³⁵ The organization’s own 1945 constitution had the more expansive goals of promoting “mutual understanding and unity” among all Luo speakers while also shaping the cultural obligations of a growing ethnic constituency.³⁶ The promotion of “unity” was the principal aim of various constitutions, mission statements, and other documents produced by the Luo Union in the 1940s and 1950s, signifying both the organization’s sociopolitical impetus and the fact that “Luo” was a contested and disparate identity. Under the banner “Riwruok e teko” (Unity is strength), Luo Union officials attempted to corral a diverse and increasingly diasporic linguistic community under a single ethnic banner.

The leadership of the Luo Union—mission-educated elites like Paul Mboya, Walter Odede, Oginga Odinga, and Achieng Oneko—also served in important intermediary positions. For instance, Mboya was a colonial chief in South Nyanza, Odinga taught at the illustrious Church Missionary Society (CMS) school at Maseno, and Oneko was a municipal councillor in Nairobi.³⁷ These positions imbued them with status, savvy, and experience in negotiating the colonial bureaucracy and earned them respect from colonial authorities and Africans alike. As the colonial era wore on, they were able to use their knowledge and influence to grow the scope and scale of the organization. For instance, in the mid-1940s, Odinga started the Luo Thrift and Trading Company (LUTATCO), a highly successful sister organization that promoted migrants’ reinvestment in Nyanza and aimed to promote, in Odinga’s words, “unity, common purpose and achievement” among the Luo-speaking community throughout Eastern Africa.³⁸ Ultimately, the union leadership mobilized its political capital to become significant players in anticolonial politics and in the first independent government.

By the early 1950s, the Luo Union had thousands of paid members in its sixty-plus branches throughout Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and offered members of the Luo-speaking diaspora significant avenues for sociability and education organized along ethnolinguistic lines. The relational opportunities that union meetings provided—to speak Luo, to swap news of “home,” to forge friendships in the dance hall or on the football pitch—transcended clan ties as Dholuo-speaking labor migrants from across East Africa developed a shared sense of “belonging” as fellow “Luos.”³⁹ By the early 1950s, the intertwined intellectual and politico-cultural projects of negotiating labor environments far from Luoland and fostering Luoness outside Western Kenya were well under way. By the end of the decade, Mau Mau, the central event of Kenya’s colonial history, demanded new answers to the question of what it meant to be Luo and propelled Luo politico-cultural leaders of political prominence onto the nationalist stage.

The Forest Conflict: Luo Loyalty and Subversive Politics

1. Generally speaking, within the Province itself, Mau Mau infiltration into Nyanza tribes has been negligible since May 1954. There is however evidence to show that some Nyanza tribesmen have been contaminated through contact with Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru tribesmen while outside the Province.

2. During 1953 and 1954 at least 1,000 Nyanza tribesmen were believed to have taken a Mau Mau oath in Nairobi City.⁴⁰