Obama’s Grandfather Was Tortured By the British
This came out a little while ago, but there hasn’t been a ton of writing about something that is not only very intersting, but also illuminates a lot of historical and policy debates. Basically, Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was a British Army veteran who returned to Kenya after World War II and “became involved in the Mau Mau independence movement and was arrested as early as 1949.” After his arrest, Obama was “imprisoned and brutally tortured.. subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency…whip[ped] every morning and evening till he confessed.” It gets even worse “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.”
The most horrific part of this story is that it functions as a reminder of the one of the worst imperial atrocities committed in the 20th century. Obama’s treatment was hardly unique. Instead, some 320,000 Kikiyu were interned and tortured by the British, one million were held in “enclosed villages,” 100,000 deaths in the camps and thousands of summary executions. The historical signifigance of these events is self-evident. We clearly should remember horrible Western, imperial crimes committed against colonized populations. But the political and current interest of this historical artifact is that the putting down of the Mau Mau rebellion and the whole host of British crimes committed during decolonialization are not only routinely ignored, but are celebrated by historians who have become favorites of neoconservatives.
I’m thinking particularly of Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, who have both written books celebrating the British Empire and encouraging the United States to more explictily take up the imperial mantle. As Johann Hari has exhaustively documented, these two authors have a huge collective blindspot when it comes to the atrocities necessary for the British to “peacefully” rule the world. What’s worse is how much these two’s historical accounts have informed the last eight years of policy and punditry from conservative hawks. Andrew Roberts was famously feted by the President, and has done a whole lot of water carrying for Bush by explicitly comparing his policies to British imperial ones. Ferguson has done much the same, by arguing that the reason the war in Iraq was failing circa 2004-2005, or as Ben Wallace Wells put it in a great profile of Ferguson: “problems in Iraq proved that America ought to be more of an empire, not less of one.”
The putting down of the Mau Mau rebellion, in a way, repersents the dark id of conservative hawkish thinking. John Podhoretz once famously asked “What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them. . . ? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?” Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire are two other right wingers who can’t get enough of British imperialism.
My hope is that the discussion – if any – of Obama’s personal history doesn’t focus on the rather narrow question of torturing hundreds of thousands of people to maintain an empire is wrong (it obviously is), but on the wisdom of empire in the first place.
