The Daily Clarity

Obama’s Kenyan history and the impact on his foreign policy positions

  Many philosophers speculate that a person’s view of the world is controlled by a heady mixture of genetics, intellect, education and experience. Obama’s Kenyan heritage may well have an impact on the future of US Foreign Policy. Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was one of the 75,000 Kenyans who fought in Burma during World War II. This generation returning to Kenya found little opportunity for meaningful employment and limited freedom under British colonial rule on their return home. Hussein Obama, like many of this experience, turned to political activism and subsequently  may have been one of the many that took up arms against the British eventually resulting in Kenyan independence. Hussein Obama was eventually captured and imprisoned by the British, some in his family mumble that he was tortured too.

In his bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama does not conceal his disdain for British imperialism and his anger at what he sees as the brutality of colonial rule in Kenya. Almost every reference to Britain or the British is negative. He briefly describes Hussein Onyango Obama’s detention by the British, but in a way that suggests he either did not know, or did not wish to reveal, the extent of his grandfather’s suffering at British hands.  Hussein Obama died in 1979, nearly a decade before the President-elect made his first visit to Kenya, but his subsequent account of that trip is deeply coloured by what he learnt of his grandfather’s life under colonial rule. Looking over Hussein Obama’s domestic servant record papers, for example, he notes wryly that one white employer declared that his grandfather was “found to be unsuitable and certainly not worth60 shillings a month”.

The irony of the Bush era colonial like foreign policy will not be lost on Obama. He has bridled at Bush’s unilateral pursuit of US international interests often at the cost of large numbers of indigenous civilian deaths. He has stated that he will will usher in a new governance based around openness, diplomacy and a co-operative balance of interests. It is interesting to speculate whether this rejection of an imperialist policy set is influenced by Obama’s family history. Obama in Dreams from My Father, is also annoyed by the casual racism endemic in many parts of the world.  In the book he describes how on a  train to western Kenya to visit the ancestral village, he observes that the building of the Mombasa-Lake Victoria railway cost “the lives of several hundred imported Indian workers”. Obama has nothing good to say of the colonial era, which he summarises as “the manipulation of colonial boundaries, the displacements, the detentions, the indignities large and small”. Even the British man who sits next to him on the plane to Nairobi is depicted as casually racist, referring to the “Godforsaken countries” of Africa.  “I was just angry,” writes Obama, “because of his easy familiarity with me, his assumption that I, as an American, even a black American, might naturally share in his dim view of Africa.”  Obama is particularly scathing of white tourists reliving the myth of Happy Valley in Kenya. “Kenya, without shame, offered to recreate an age when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested comfortably on the backs of the darker races,” he writes.  Here a white man “could be served by a black man without fear or guilt . . . and if he felt a touch of indigestion at the sight of leprous beggars outside the hotel, he could always administer a ready tonic. Black rule has come, after all. This is their country. We are only visitors.”

Obama’s view of the history of Kenya and its struggle for Kenya is deeply personal. As always with history, it depends on which side one stands to determine the interpretation of the facts. My own family, were moving to Kenya in 1951 but due to the serious illness of my mother were forced to delay plans, and we sold our farm to a German immigrant family. This family were shortly thereafter murdered at the farm by Mau Mau insurgents. My view of Kenyan history therefore, may differ somewhat to that of Obama, but we are in agreement that colonialism and imperialism were the catalysts that caused the violence. Obama appears to be a keen scholar of history, unlike the current President. Obama seems also calm, analytical almost judicious in his decision making process. This is a trait that the world hopes will mark his Presidency. The wide life experience of Obama and his international exposure can only benefit US Foreign Policy, and again it contrasts sharply with the cloistered, Texas ranch upbringing of President Bush. Hopefully, the Obama family experience under a unilateral foreign policy implementation will make him adverse to a continuance of such. Only time will tell if he adheres to his current positions.