The Obamas

Seen though the eyes of the Obama family this is the story of an African family over four hundred years, culminating in the inauguration of one of their sons, Barack Obama, as president of the most powerful nation on earth. Peter Firstbrook establishes the early ancestry of the Obama family and generation by generation follows them through colonial rule and the fight for Kenyan independence, including the Mau Mau and the role of Barack Obama’s father with President Kenyatta.

It is a true testament to the belief that any person can make their mark in the world no matter how humble their origins.

Peter Firstbrook worked for the BBC for twenty-five years before developing a successful freelance writing and film-making career in 2002, specialising in making history and international documentaries. He has published three bestselling books. During 2008–9 Peter spent several months in Kenya, crisscrossing the country to trace Barack Obama’s African roots. By combining the Luo tribe’s remarkable oral tradition with more academic research, he has traced President Obama’s lineage from the present day, back more than twenty generations and tells a remarkable story of love and war, life and death, and of families lost and found. In June 2009 he convened a committee made up of members of the Obama family in Kisumu, Kenya, which approved his Obama family tree.

Based on: Weere, Melik Ogutta, Mel Dhoudi moko mag Luo loosely translated as ‘Other Sub-Tribes of the Luo Community’, Edition, Earstar, 2007, Ogot (1967 & 2009), Cohen (1968), original research, personal communication with Professor Ogutu and oral history from Obama elders.

1. Provinces, major towns and main tribal areas in Kenya

2. Migration of the Luo ancestors from southern Sudan from c.1300 to 1750

3. Nyanza Province (Luoland) and the region into which the Luo ancestors migrated between 1530 and 1830

1. Kenya – 2008 US Presidential Election – Support of Obama © epa / Corbis

2. US presidential inauguration – Obama is sworn in © Brooks Kraft / Corbis

3. Luo man © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford PRM 1998.209.43.1

4. Got Ramogi © Peter Firstbrook

5. Luo father and son © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford PRM 1998.206.4.4

6. Joseph Otieno © Peter Firstbrook

7. Rock outcrop © Peter Firstbrook

8. Sir Henry Morton Stanley, 1871 © Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis

9. Young African slaves © From the Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University

10. The world’s plunderers © The Granger Collection / Topfoto

11. Berlin Conference © Mary Evans Picture Library

12. SS Nyanza cargo boat © From the Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University

13. A KAR soldier © From the Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University

14. After the Rains © From the Winterton Collection of East African Photographs, Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies, Northwestern University

15. Coffin on a bike © Peter Firstbrook

16. Hawa Auma © Peter Firstbrook

17. Sarah Obama © David Firstbrook

18. Barack Obama and his father © Obama of America / Handout / Reuters / Corbis

19. Premier Jomo Kenyatta waves to the crowd © Bettman / Corbis

20. Akumu by Obama Senior’s coffin © Hawa Auma

21. Graves in Sarah Obama’s compound © Peter Firstbrook

22. Kisumu riots © Ben Curtis / AP / Press Association Images

Over the course of several months from November 2008 and throughout 2009, I criss-crossed Kenya as part of my research for this book. It is impossible to spend this amount of time in a foreign country without relying on the wisdom and support of many people. First, my gratitude has to go to the many members of the Obama family who opened their doors and welcomed me into their homes. In K’ogelo, I watched ‘Mama’ Sarah, step-grandmother to President Obama, greet literally coachloads of people who came to pay their respects to her; I would wait my turn to see her, and she always greeted me with kindness, patience and good humour. In Ouygis, Hawa Auma, President Obama’s aunt, was always ready to stop her work to spend time with me – and she was always ready to kill a chicken and cook me a meal. Kendu Bay is home to most of the Obama family, and Charles Olouch, Elly Yonga Adhiambo, John Ndalo Aguk and Laban Opiyo were all very generous with both their time and their insight into the history of the Obamas; my thanks also go to Imam Saidi Aghmani, who introduced me to the Islamic community in Kendu Bay. In Kisumu, Wilson Obama and his wife Karen were always generous with their support, as were Aloyce Achayo and Leo Omolo Odera. Sam Dhillon from Nairobi was also very helpful and supportive during my early research. This list cannot do justice to the many other Kenyans I interviewed for the book, but their contribution is recognised within the body of the text.

In the USA my old friend Thom Beers was very supportive at a crucial early stage of my research, and in Oxford Professor David Anderson gave me valuable counsel about the early history of Kenyan independence. In London I have special thanks for my agent, Sheila Ableman, who encouraged me to write a book rather than make a film. At Preface my editor Trevor Dolby has offered his constant encouragement and support during both gestation and delivery, and has gently nudged me at the right times to tease the most from my material.

In Kenya Roy Samo acted as my researcher and translator; he was always on hand, and without his unceasing help it would not have been possible to write this book. At home my wife Paula has balanced being both my fiercest critic and at the same time my strongest supporter.

When the American people elect a president, they choose, de facto, a new leader of the free world. Overnight this individual becomes the single most powerful person in the world. The election of a young senator from Illinois in November 2008 caused more of a stir around the world than usual. It was not primarily because of his lack of experience in executive decision-making, but because he was black – or to be strictly correct, half-black. Although Barack Obama was brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia by a single mother for most of his early years, his absent father was African, from a tribe called the Luo who live around the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya. President Obama never really knew his father, and he recalls meeting him only once during a brief visit that he made to Hawaii just before Christmas 1971, when the young Barack was just ten years old. The president never saw his father again, because Barack Obama Snr died eleven years later, when he crashed his car into a tree one night in Nairobi.

It is clear from his two books, Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, that President Obama is very conscious of his mixed heritage, unsure of where he belonged as a young man, in a multi-cultural world. In his self-deprecatory style, he referred to himself as a ‘mutt’ in his first speech after his election, when he spoke about getting a dog for his children: ‘Our preference is to get a shelter dog, but most shelter dogs are mutts like me.’

In Dreams, he talks about his struggle as a young man to come to terms with his mixed racial heritage; later, he recalls his first visit to Kenya in 1987 to meet his father’s family, and to learn more about his African birthright. It is clear from Dreams that his African ‘roots’ became important to him; his relatives asked him: ‘Barry, what made you finally come home?’ He felt welcomed in Kenya, and he came to understand the importance that Africans place on family. Obama was taken to see his step-grandmother, Sarah Obama, who still lives in her husband’s compound which the family call ‘Home Squared’. It is here that Barack Obama Snr is buried, and he wrote movingly about the father he never knew:

I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried … When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago – all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of name or the colour of my skin.¹

Even the title of this first book hints at his lost opportunity in life – of never really knowing his father: ‘I had been forced to look inside myself,’ he wrote in Dreams from My Father, ‘and had found only a great emptiness there.’² In his second book, The Audacity of Hope, he again hints at the influence his multi-racial background has on his character. When talking about growing older, he notes that ‘each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all your flaws – the blind spots, recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip.’³

When talking of his political beliefs in Audacity, Barack Obama acknowledges that he is a prisoner of his own biography: ‘I can’t help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives.’⁴

Perhaps the most telling part of Obama’s prologue to Audacity is where he makes a direct reference to his own father. He wrote: ‘Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.’⁵

It was because of what he called ‘a chronic restlessness’ that had pursued him throughout his adult life that Obama decided to run for the US Senate in 2000. That year he was unsuccessful, but he tried again in November 2004 and won with 70 per cent of the vote. Obama then made headlines around the world when he announced, in February 2007, his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was locked in a tight battle with the former first lady, and later the New York senator, Hillary Clinton, until he became the presumptive nominee on 3 June 2008. Five months later, on 4 November 2008, Barack Obama defeated the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, to become the 44th president of the United States and the first African-American to hold the office.

Like many Americans, President Obama can trace the ancestral background on his mother’s side to a broad mix of European blood; he is, apparently, about 37 per cent English, with additional contributions from German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and even Swiss forebears. In many ways, this is a mixture which is not uncommon among white Americans descended from European stock. On his father’s side, however, the mix is much simpler; he is 50 per cent African, descended from a long line of Luo tribal warriors who originally lived in the Sudan; over the centuries they migrated across 1,000km of desert, swamp and jungle before eventually settling around the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya.

This book has grown out of my long interest in Africa as a documentary filmmaker. Over the years I have made dozens of visits to Africa, but I had not actually worked in Kenya since 1987. Within just a couple of weeks of Obama’s election as the new president, I was out again in Kenya with the intention of researching a film about the village where his family originated. I met many members of the Obama family; some had been in the media spotlight in the run-up to the election, but there were many more whose voices had never been heard. Even though I only scratched the surface of the history of the Obamas and the annals of the Luo people on this first visit, I realised that there was a fascinating story to be told. So the documentary was put on hold, and I decided that the story of Obama’s family – and the extraordinary history of the Luo people – needed to be told in a different way.

This book, then, is the fruit of several more visits to the shores of Lake Victoria, to that part of western Kenya that is called Luoland. Barack Obama’s upbringing and education in America, and then in Indonesia, has been well covered elsewhere, both by the President himself and by other writers. I hope, therefore, that this book will offer some insight into the little-known half of President Barack Obama – that half of him which is Luo and which has its genetic roots in a long line of formidable African warriors. It is a family lineage of which the President himself is only vaguely aware. In 2006 he made his third visit to Kenya, but this time it was in an official capacity as an African-American member of the US Senate. He upset many senior Kenyan politicians on that trip with his outspokenness, but the ordinary people loved him. His visit was brief and he had only a short time to visit the village where his father grew up. His relatives told me that he had less than forty-five minutes to meet his extended family, who lined up in the hot equatorial sun in their dozens outside Mama Sarah’s hut, waiting for their brief few seconds with their most favoured son. Barack Obama’s aunt and closest living relative showed me, with obvious pride, the set of drinking glasses which she had been given on that visit; sadly, in the few seconds that she spent with her nephew, Hawa Auma did not have time to tell him the extraordinary story of how his grandfather fell in love with his grandmother, nor the tragic circumstances of their separation; Charles Olouch did not tell the Senator about his suspicions as to how Barack Obama Snr really died in 1982; nor have his father’s friends ever had the chance to tell Barack Obama about the parties they had together at Harvard as students in the mid-sixties.

Despite his American upbringing, President Obama has reached the position of a near demi-god in Kenya. Like all African tribes, the Luo have a rich chronicle of proverbs and sayings, and there is one which strikes me as particularly poignant: Wat en wat – ‘Kinship is kinship’, which loosely translated means ‘blood is thicker than water’. The Luo will never consider Obama to be a white man. Regardless of where he was raised, or what he might say or do, they will always see him as an African – a true Luo with an ancestry that can be traced back two dozen generations.

Writing The Obamas has really been a process of assembling a large pile of jigsaw pieces. Without the patient support, help and generosity of dozens of local people – eminent historians, members of the Obama family and Luo elders alike – this book would not have been possible. These people unstintingly supplied me with all the individual pieces to the jigsaw; all I have tried to do is to arrange them into a coherent picture of the past.

The elections of Barack Obama of the USA, and of Mwai Kibaki of Kenya; the cultural, social and political issues in Kenya today

THE EVENING WAS drawing in, dark clouds rolled overhead and ominous specks of rain were making themselves felt in the hot, sticky, tropical twilight. It was not the ideal start to the evening; five hundred relatives and friends had gathered in the Obama ancestral home to watch on television the presidential inauguration of their most famous son. We were all sitting outside in the family compound in a remote village in western Kenya, just a stone’s throw from Lake Victoria, and the heavens looked as if they were about to open. Some of the people had already walked several miles to get here, and many of them were related to the president-elect either through birth or by marriage. We had less than two hours to go before Barack Obama took his historic oath of office, but the inclement weather and encroaching darkness were not the worst of our problems. We still had no television available, the only generator to be found had no fuel or oil, and there was no aerial set up to receive the broadcast.

It had seemed so simple and straightforward the previous day, when I sat down with the village committee to discuss their preparations for the celebrations – the Kenyans love their committees. Yes, there would be three televisions for people to watch, and three generators to power them. The trees around the compound would be strung with electric bulbs, and all of them 100 watts, so that we would have plenty of light. They would slaughter a cow and several goats, and they welcomed my offer to bring a dozen crates of soft drinks, but definitely no beer as they were all Seventh Day Adventists.

I was in K’obama, a small village just outside of Kendu Bay, itself a small township on the shores of Lake Victoria. K’obama is home to dozens of families, all of them related in one way or another to the recently elected president. Like many small villages in this part of Kenya, the ancestral name takes the prefix ‘K’ to denote the family homestead. I had found that K’obama had been largely ignored by the international press since the election of Barack Obama. Journalists and television crews had all headed to K’ogelo, a small village on the northern side of Winam Gulf and home to ‘Mama Sarah’, step-grandmother to the president-elect. Yet when I visited K’ogelo a couple of months previously just after the election, I found a sleepy, quiet village, and the only ‘Obama’ living there permanently was Sarah herself. K’obama, however, was very different and a hive of activity, with literally hundreds of Obama relatives in residence. Yet here I was, on the eve of the presidential inauguration and not a journalist in sight, or even another mzungu (a white man in Swahili). I had my suspicions why K’ogelo had attracted all the attention of the world’s press, but I did not get confirmation of the real reason until sometime later.

Meanwhile, although the party in K’obama was in full swing, there was still no sign of a television set. I had tracked down a couple of empty fuel cans and I sent our van off to buy some petrol for the generator, but that had not materialised either. It had been a few years since I had last worked in Africa. It is one of my favourite places to visit, but it is not without its challenges. I knew that the Luo, Obama’s African tribe, were known for being easy-going and generous, and I had received nothing but help and support from them. But they also had a reputation for, among other things, talking big and doing very little.

With little more than an hour to go before darkness fell over K’obama, my luck began to change; not one, but two televisions suddenly arrived. The first made its entrance balanced precariously on a wheelbarrow. Then the second turned up – this was one that I had previously negotiated to hire for the evening from a neighbour. The van came back with fuel for the generators, and within minutes I breathed a sigh of relief as the little Honda spluttered into life and the televisions lit up into a grainy image. Perhaps we would, at least, be able to watch the historic inauguration after all. It was, however, not all going my way; we could not get both televisions to tune to the same station at first, and a TV aerial had to be lashed to a long wooden pole and hoisted high above rooftop level in order to get reasonable reception.

Meanwhile the Obama family members began to drag their cheap plastic garden chairs in front of the two screens. Darkness falls quickly in the tropics, and soon everybody was settling down for the evening, apparently oblivious to the gathering storm clouds. It was a wonderfully diverse mix of people, from six-year-old school children to great-grandmothers in their eighties. Dozens of people came and thanked me for helping to get the TVs working, some of them smelling as if they had been drinking more than fizzy soda. I had not actually seen any beer around, but illicit alcohol is commonly available in Kenya, and I suspect that some of the revellers were not conforming to the strict lifestyle expected of Seventh Day Adventists.

Local brew has always been fermented in Kenya, but traditionally it was only as strong as beer. However, stronger and more potent brews have become more popular in recent years, encouraged no doubt by the high taxes imposed on alcohol by the government. The police often turn a blind eye to the brewing in return for a cut of the profits. Sometimes these drinks are ‘fortified’ with methanol, a toxic wood alcohol, which can have disastrous consequences. They call the drink chang’aa, but it is also given other popular names such as ‘Power Drink’, which gives a hint to the strength of the industrial additive, and ‘Kill-Me-Quick’, which frankly is a more honest description. It has been known for people in illegal drinking dens to complain that the lights had been switched off in the bar, when in practice the lethal concoction they were drinking had turned them blind in an instant. One of the most severe drinking accidents happened in 2000, when 130 people died and over 400 were hospitalised after drinking a toxic batch of the brew.

As darkness began to fall, we managed to tune the televisions to gain a reasonable reception on the same channel, and the audience became transfixed by the events unfolding before their eyes, 12,000km away in Washington DC. Unknown to us at the time, some of the Obamas who had travelled to the USA had arrived at the White House late for the inauguration, only to be turned away because they could not take their seats in time before the president-elect arrived on stage. Apparently there had been a mix-up with the arrangements, and they were picked up late from their hotel; despite producing their Kenyan passports and their official invitations which showed the most famous surname in the world on that day, their pleas went unheeded, and they returned to their hotel where they watched the very same CNN coverage that we were watching in K’obama.

There was little interest in much of the early proceedings of the inauguration ceremony and people chatted among themselves. After all, these people lived in huts with tin roofs, with neither running water nor electricity. What interest did they have in the finer details of the president’s new limousine, with its eight-inch armour plating and tear-gas cannons? Most of these people do not even own a bicycle, and they would have no idea whether Obama’s new Cadillac, which gets eight miles to the gallon, was a good thing or not. The long list of guests arriving on the podium meant nothing to the five hundred-strong Obama family. As the assembled dignitaries shivered in the bitter Washington winter, where the air temperature had fallen several degrees below freezing, the Kenyans were glancing nervously upward and wondering if the tropical rainstorm was going to stay away.

One by one, past presidents assembled in front of the podium: Jimmy Carter, George Bush Snr, Bill Clinton, and finally the outgoing George W. Bush. Then the president-elect appeared, and the imminent downpour over Kendu Bay was instantly forgotten as the crowd roared his name, and stood up to applaud ‘their’ man. As the proceedings moved at a glacial speed in Washington, the raindrops over Kendu Bay dried up in the tropical heat, only to be replaced by mosquitoes and flying ants. Personally, I preferred the rain – at least it didn’t bite.

Finally, the big moment arrived. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts moved to the podium to be joined by the president-elect. (Cue more exuberant cheering from the Kenyans.) Obama was about to make history by becoming the first African-American US president in history. Before him, over a million people were gathered in the National Mall, with the vast crowd stretching as far back as the Washington Monument in the distance. Justice Roberts led with the oath, ‘I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear [pause] that I will execute the Office of the President faithfully.’ Like the majority of television viewers around the world, nobody in Kendu Bay was aware at the time that Justice Roberts had made an error in the order of the words. No doubt the two men had practised this moment several times, and a faint smile seemed to cross Obama’s face as he realised that Roberts, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, had misplaced the word ‘faithfully’ during the oath. Barack Obama continued, ‘…and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’

With the President now secure in the highest office in the world, the Kendu Bay Obamas went wild, chanting ‘Obama! Obama! Obama!’, echoing the exuberant crowd in front of the White House. It was a night that united Kenya. At no other time since Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa has the continent been filled with such hope for the future and, not surprisingly, it took several minutes before everybody in K’obama settled down to listen to Obama’s inauguration speech.

Rarely has an American president taken office with so many profound challenges facing him, both at home and abroad: ‘My fellow citizens; I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.’

In Washington, as in Kendu Bay, the crowds were transfixed by both the mesmerising rhythm of his elegant delivery and the content. Obama continued: ‘Yet every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms … On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.’

Obama was laying out his priorities for the next four years: ‘We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.’

As I looked around at the people watching his speech, their faces beaming with pride, it struck me that Kendu Bay could do with a few roads, bridges and electric grids. Obama continued to lay out his manifesto for the world: ‘And so, to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born …’

This was too much for the Obamas in Kendu Bay, who were sitting less than a hundred metres from that very spot. The party dissolved into a riotous cheer, which surely must have been heard 12,000km away in Washington.

Three months earlier, in November 2008, I had sat up in London into the early hours of the morning to watch the drama of the US election unfold around the world, live on global television. This presidential election, perhaps more so than any other in recent memory, had galvanised the whole world. As Barack Obama walked out onto the stage in Grant Park, Chicago, on the evening of 4 November 2008, he made his acceptance speech to a devoted audience, some of whom had been standing for over four hours in the chill Illinois evening. ‘It’s been a long time coming,’ announced the president-elect, ‘but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.’ It was a momentous occasion: the first ‘person of colour’ had been elected to be president of the United States of America. It had been a remarkable road for a nation to follow and came just forty-five years after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment.

When Barack Obama was born in August 1961, much of the American South remained segregated, and black and white American citizens were separated from cradle to grave. Black Americans were born in segregated hospitals, they were educated in segregated schools and they were buried in segregated graveyards. In 1961, the year that Obama’s father married Ann Dunham in Honolulu, a racially mixed marriage was not even legal in seventeen states of the Union. Forty-seven years on, their son stood in front of an international television audience measured in billions, to accept the mantle of leader of the free world.

As Barack Obama noted in his acceptance speech that evening: ‘The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America – I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you – we, as a people, will get there.’

It was rousing oration and it appealed to what is arguably the greatest single historic achievement of the USA as a society – the ability over a period of three centuries to absorb a disparate group of immigrants and bind them into a single nation, a people with a common purpose and with a strong sense of national identity. In 2004 Obama spoke about this accomplishment at the Democratic National Convention in what was then the FleetCenter in Boston, Massachusetts: ‘There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America.’

It is a very different scenario in the homeland of the president’s father, Barack Obama Snr. Even today, if you stop any Kenyan at random, even in Nairobi where traditional customs are weakest, and ask them where their main allegiance lies, they will almost certainly reply that their tribe is much more important to them than their country. This is certainly the case with the Luo, the tribe of the president’s African family. Even though Kenya has been an independent nation since 1963, ethnic groups in the country go back for centuries, and there is still much to keep tribal identity strong. This is especially true in the rural areas, and particularly among the biggest five tribes in Kenya. This has, inevitably, led to a fractious history, both before British colonial rule and after Kenyan independence. The problem with tribal conflict is particularly acute between the Kikuyu (the largest and most dominant tribe in Kenya) and the Luo (the tribe of the Obamas).

I first worked in Kenya in 1987, five years after Barack Obama’s father died in a car accident in Nairobi and the same year Barack Obama Jnr first visited his African relatives. Inevitably, Kenya was a very different country back then, but in some ways, I also found very little had changed. Back in 1987, Daniel arap Moi had been president for nearly ten years, and he would remain so for another fifteen. He came to power promising an end to corruption, smuggling, tribalism and the detention of political opponents, and he enjoyed popular support throughout the country. By the time I made my first visit to Kenya, his good intentions had not stood the test of time, and his government increasingly relied on the use of secret police, torture, human rights abuses and political assassination to stay in power.¹ He changed the nation’s Constitution to make Kenya a single-party state, suppressed political opponents, and cleverly manipulated Kenya’s mix of ethnic and tribal tensions to weaken and divide the opposition.

In 1999 Amnesty International and the United Nations compiled reports which accused Moi of serious human rights abuses.² Moi was barred for running for another presidential term in 2002, and the following year news of even more human rights abuses began to surface, including the use of torture. Throughout his time in power, corruption was rife in Kenya, and in October 2006 Moi was found guilty of taking a US$2 million bribe from a Pakistani businessman in return for a monopoly of duty-free shops in the country’s international airports.³ Although people told me that in many ways life was better in 2009 than it was back in 1987, I was soon to find out that political assassination, corruption and tribalism were still a routine part of political life in Kenya.

As soon as I stepped off the aircraft at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in November 2008, it was obvious that other big changes had happened since my first visit. Nairobi is no longer the gentle colonial city that it had been in 1987; traffic now clogs the streets and air pollution has become a serious problem. The number of vehicles on the road has doubled in ten years and Kenya now has one of the worst road safety records in the world. Yet despite the large numbers of Mercedes and Land Cruisers on the streets, the majority of people still earn less than $2 (£1.20) a day. When I first came to Kenya in 1987, the population was 22.4 million; today, it is 39 million people (2009 estimate).⁴ In Nairobi, 60 per cent of the population live in shanty towns and the city’s largest, Kibera, is said to be Africa’s biggest slum, and home to over one million people.

Kenya has always been a nation with strong tribal divisions, and this had not changed in twenty years. There are over forty separate tribal groups in the country, with the Kikuyu the biggest group by far with 22 per cent of the population, followed by the Luhya with 14 per cent, the Luo with 13, the Kalenjin with 12 and the Kamba 11 per cent; other smaller tribes make up a further 27 per cent of the population, and non-African (Asian, European and Arab) just 1 per cent. Religious beliefs are equally divided: 45 per cent of Kenyans are Protestant, 33 per cent are Roman Catholic, with Muslims and traditional religions making up about 10 per cent each.

As the most populous tribe, the Kikuyu have dominated Kenyan politics ever since the country gained its independence from Britain in 1963. In that year Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, became the country’s first president. (The similarity of his name to his country’s is coincidental.) The Kikuyu also have a reputation for being very successful in trade and commerce. The traditional Kikuyu lands are in central Kenya, in the fertile highlands to the south and west of Mount Kenya. It was this region which attracted the white colonists in the early part of the twentieth century. As a consequence, the Kikuyu (along with the Kalenjin and the Maasai), suffered extensive displacement as the whites took over their traditional lands and turned their farms into large plantations growing coffee, tea and cotton.

The Luhya are the second largest tribe with a population of over 5 million, but they are widely spread around the country and much more diverse than any other ethnic group in Kenya, with around sixteen or eighteen sub-groups. Many of these sub-groups speak their own Luhya dialect, and several are so different from one another that some linguists consider them to be separate languages altogether. Because of their diversification, the Luhya have a much smaller political voice in the country than might be expected from their numbers.

The Luo, Kenya’s third largest tribe, has a population of just under 5 million (2008 estimate). This is the tribe of Barack Obama’s ancestors. They traditionally place much emphasis on education, and have produced many scholars in Kenya, some of whom have graduated from prestigious colleges around the world (including Barack Obama Snr, who graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1962, and later took a master’s degree in economics at Harvard). As a result, Luo professionals dominate almost every part of Kenyan society, and frequently serve as university professors, doctors, engineers and lawyers.

One such Luo professional is Leo Odera Omolo, a respected journalist based in Kisumu. Leo has spent all of his life reporting from around Africa, and was on first-name terms with practically every African president who has ruled since their country became independent. He once told me that Idi Amin of Uganda challenged him to a wrestling match – not once, but three times. He was very proud to have beaten him on each occasion; I told him that I thought accepting a match with Amin was a very brave thing to do, but actually beating him was probably reckless. (During Amin’s brutal regime in Uganda, between 100,000 and 500,000 people are thought to have died.)

I asked Leo to explain to me what made the Luo different from other Kenyans. He pulled down his lower lip to reveal six missing front teeth. Most African tribes traditionally circumcise boys to mark the onset of manhood. But the Luo (and some other Nilotic tribes whose ancestors migrated south from Sudan), mark the end of childhood of both sexes in a different, but still painful way, by removing the six bottom front teeth. ‘I am a Luo,’ he said with a cheeky grin and a twinkle in his eyes, which belied his seventy-three years:

‘I have twenty-three children by five wives, and another three children by women who were not quite my wives. We are tall, very black and very intelligent because we eat lots of protein, lots of fish. We like to party, and we are generous with our friends.

‘The Luo are fair and they are democratic people. They want to discuss issues. They don’t want secrecy. They don’t have “night meetings”. If they call a meeting, they will reveal it outside when they’ve done.

‘They also squabble and fight, but the fight can be resolved very quickly. The next day, if nobody is killed, you are friends again. That is a trait of the Luo. Some of them are hot-tempered – they come up and down quickly – but they don’t hold a grudge after a disagreement.

‘There are also so many parties with the Luo. At a funeral – a lot of it; marriage – a lot of it. Everything in Luo society is a party. They spend a lot of their energy and resources in parties. A funeral will deplete a family and leave them poor, like the one we went to yesterday. They will clear everything in the home and leave them poor, because they slaughter all the cows they have, goats, everything. They will even clear their grain store.’

When Kenya became independent in 1963, it was the Kikuyu and the Luo who primarily inherited political power. This has led to inevitable tension between the two tribal groups, which most recently led to vicious and barbaric inter-tribal conflict in January 2008, when the fighting degenerated into riots against President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu. The opposition leader, Raila Odinga, a Luo, accused Kibaki of vote rigging. Kibaki went ahead and unilaterally declared that he had won the election, but local and foreign observers claimed it had been ‘fixed’. It was this manipulation of power which led to the eruption of violence. However, the simple fact is that inter-tribal tension lies perpetually just below the surface of Kenyan politics, and this has been the case for many decades.

Although the worst atrocities during the post-election violence took place in the Rift Valley, there was also carnage in Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city and the centre of the Luo homeland. Roy Samo is a local councillor in Kisumu, and he experienced the post-election violence at close quarters:

‘I saw everything because I was a political leader. They were counting the figures and Raila Odinga [the Luo political leader] was leading the president by more than a million votes. Then there was [an electrical] blackout and the next minute, [President] Kibaki was leading Raila by one million votes. Nobody could believe it! All these were disputed figures. We have a town with an 80,000 maximum electorate, so how can the President get 150,000 out of a possible 80,000 votes?

‘So when people were watching all this on their TVs, and they announced that Kibaki had won, then violence erupted. I remember when they announced it – I was here in my house watching the result. People from all their houses and in the bars, they started screaming and shouting and a cloud of death could be seen hanging around Kisumu. It was a big voice all over Kisumu. It was around 6 p.m. I was there, and I was seeing this. People were watching their TVs and they started seeing how people in Nairobi were reacting. Like in Kibera [Nairobi’s biggest slum], they started burning tyres, uprooting the railway. So that is what sparked off the violence in Kisumu, ’cos they saw that their cousins, their brothers and other Luos in Nairobi were doing this. And not only Luos – they were hearing what was happening in the Rift Valley, where they all started burning houses.

‘Around 8 p.m., Kisumu also started going up in flames. In Kisumu it was about looting and the burning of property. The Luo never killed, because they are afraid of blood. In Kisumu, I can confidently say this, they never killed anybody. [But] so many people rushed into supermarkets to loot. In that place, sixteen people were burned [to death] and fifteen people were shot dead. In my area, ten people were shot dead, because by now the police were shooting people. The violence in Kisumu was between the Luos and any Kikuyu or anyone with Kikuyu interests. They burned properties and looted. For example, if you’re a Luo but married to a Kikuyu, then they’ll burn your house. They started on the 29th of December 2007, up to February the 28th when Raila [Odinga] and Kibaki signed an agreement.

‘The government figures say that 1,500 were killed, which we dispute. It’s ten times more than that, and 500,000 people were displaced. But now, as we are talking [in May 2009], 220,000 people are still living in tented camps. We call them IDPs – internally displaced persons. Fifteen hundred [Kenyan] people are still living in Uganda.’

Tribalism remains strong in Kenya for several reasons. Primary school children usually learn their tribal language first, before moving on to Swahili and then English. Even today, young people usually marry within their own tribe, especially if they stay living within their tribal area. Religion and traditional customs also strengthen the tribal bond of Kenyans. Teeth extraction is now mostly a thing of the past, and circumcision is encouraged for all Kenyan males as a way of reducing HIV/AIDS, which has reached epidemic proportions of 1 in 5 of young Luo males. (Recent research has shown that circumcised men are 60 per cent less likely to contract the disease).⁵

Not surprisingly, many of the younger, sexually active men support the idea of circumcision, but it has caused a storm of protest from the more traditional Luos. I went down to Dunga beach, a small fishing village on the shores of Lake Victoria near Kisumu, and talked to some of the fishermen there. Dunga is the only working fishing village left in the Kisumu area, and women walk up to 15km every morning to buy fish to carry back and sell in their village. The women earn less than 100 Kenyan shillings (80 pence) a day, but the fishermen are traditionally some of the best paid workers in the region, often earning Ksh500–1000 (£4–8) a day or more. With a steady daily income, the fishermen have money to burn. I spoke to Charles Otieno, a local fisherman and a community leader in the Dunga cooperative:

‘HIV is a very big problem along the beaches. For example this beach. If I told you most of these women here are widows and most of their husbands have died of HIV. So they come and interact with the fishermen. The men have many girlfriends, they never have one girlfriend. For example, I’m a fisherman. I can fish at Dunga beach one week, another week I go to another beach and I fish there, and then I go to another beach and I have to obtain another girlfriend there. So every time I do that, most of the fishermen do that.’

I asked Charles if many of his friends had been circumcised to help prevent catching the HIV virus: ‘According to our customs and beliefs – it started from earliest times – our people were not being circumcised. So most of the people don’t believe in that. Some of the people have gone for circumcision, but most of the people, they are not going.’

‘The kind of money they are making makes them lead these careless lives,’ claims Pamela Akinyi, a clinical administrator in a Centre for Disease Control nearby: ‘We did some mobile HIV testing and we went down to the beach, and we found about six out of ten were HIV positive. We refer them to the patient’s support centre for more [medical] intervention and more information. We refer them and tell them, “Please go to this place!” But most of them don’t go to the patients’ support centre.’

About 80km west of the main city of Kisumu is the tiny village of Nyang’oma K’ogelo, where President Obama’s father, Barack Obama Snr, and his grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama, are buried. Even during the primary elections in the USA, media attention on the Obama family in K’ogelo was intense, and it became positively frenzied once Obama won the election. Within a couple of weeks of the election, I found myself driving along a newly repaired red-dirt road into K’ogelo, where President Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah Obama still lives. The road was in much better condition than I expected, and I mentioned this to Roy Samo, my researcher and translator: ‘Ber telo en telo – the benefit of power is power,’ he chuckled as he recalled a Luo proverb. The road had obviously been upgraded very recently, and workers were still putting in culverts to deal with the flooding during the rainy season. Alongside the dirt track, more workers were installing wooden electricity poles. For the first time in their history, some of the residents of K’ogelo would have light after dark, at the flick of a switch, but only if they could afford it. The first person to benefit from the electricity was ‘Mama Sarah’ as she is universally known, step-grandmother to the new president and the youngest wife of Hussein Onyango Obama, the president’s grandfather.

K’ogelo is in Nyanza province in western Kenya, virtually on the equator and about 25km from the shores of Lake Victoria and 40km from the Kenya/Uganda border. The area is almost as far west as you can go in Kenya without ending up in Uganda, or getting your feet wet in Lake Victoria. The village is part of the Siaya district, one of a dozen sub-divisions of Nyanza. (Nyanza is the Bantu word for a large body of water.) Nyanza is one of seven regional administrative provinces in the country, with Kenya’s third largest city, Kisumu, the provincial capital.

K’ogelo turned out to be a very ordinary, very sleepy Kenyan community, with no running water and a population of just 3,648.⁶ Most of the huts are spread across the rolling hillsides, separated by fields of maize. The village centre has a handful of shops scattered round an area of hard-baked earth, which serves as the market place on Tuesdays and Fridays. In the local shops you can buy a leg of goat from the butcher, a bottle of local beer from the bar, or a simple meal in one of several small ‘hotels’ – tiny drinking and eating establishments with not a bed in sight. There are even two barber shops, which are usually good places to hang out to get the latest gossip. But in all the time that I spent in K’ogelo, I never actually saw anybody having their hair cut, and the two barbers seemed to earn their living from renting out their battery-powered disco equipment for parties. The busiest workers in the village were the two old men who repair punctures; they both seemed to have a never-ending row of bicycles lined up against the trees, all in need of some tender loving care. However, the real action in K’ogelo seems to take place under the shade of a large Acacia tree. Here, the young men of the village spend most of the day sitting around smoking and putting the world to rights.