Excerpts from an editorial in The Times yesterday:
“O’Leary, O’Reilly, O’Hare and O’Hara; there’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama” sang the Corrigan Brothers. In this country Obama’s election was greeted with enthusiasm bordering on adulation. But has it occurred to us that he may not feel the same way?
In 1949 Obama’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was arrested and tortured by the British to procure information that he was thought to hold about the Mau Mau insurgency against colonial rule. According to his wife, the woman still known to the president-elect as “Granny Sarah”, Obama Sr. suffered brutally in a high-security prison at the hands of the colonial soldiers. The experience left him with a lifelong hatred of the British. It is an inglorious chapter in British history. At least 12,000 rebels were killed in the response to the Mau Mau uprising. From 1952 to 1960 a state of emergency was established, which was maintained with the full panoply of repression: Detention, compulsory registration, livestock seizure, re-education measures, and the capture and execution of the Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi.
Obama has already shown himself magnanimous with rivals. Britain may yet be able to start afresh.
