Last week, it was revealed that Barack Obama’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned and tortured by the British authorities in Kenya during colonial rule in the late Forties and early Fifties. According to his third wife, whom the President-elect calls “Granny Sarah,” the experience left Hussein Onyango with a lifelong bitterness toward Britain.
And not surprisingly. One of the tortures he was subjected to was to have his testicles squeezed between metal rods. By Sarah Onyango’s account, her husband was also regularly beaten throughout two years of incarceration by both African guards and British soldiers. Many of his fellow inmates were beaten to death.
Obama’s grandfather’s arrest in 1949 came three years before the Mau Mau uprising that was put down with murderous ferocity by the British. In her book “Britain’s Gulag,” American historian Caroline Elkins suggests that up to 100,000 Kenyans died in detention. Most historians put the figure considerably lower, but without doubt many thousands of Kenyans perished in horrendous conditions.
Along with the Bengal famine of 1943, what happened in Kenya in the 1950s is one of the darkest periods in the tawdry history of 20th-century British imperialism. As Barbara Castle wrote in 1955, at the height of the repression: ‘In the heart of the British Empire, there is a police state where the rule of law has broken down, where the murder and torture of Africans by Europeans goes unpunished and where the authorities pledged to enforce justice regularly connive at its violation.’ It’s vital that the scale of the suffering is recognized not simply because it was the fruit of imperialist policies, as important as that acknowledgement is, but because of the suffering itself. The plight of actual people must always take precedence over the abstraction of ideological politics. And one of the reasons it’s essential to take stock of the violence that was committed by the imperialists is that similar atrocities are being committed today in the name of anti-imperialism.
Last week, Ahmad Muhammad Harun, Sudan’s minister of state for humanitarian affairs, a title only rivaled for Orwellian doublespeak by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, gave an interview in which he renounced the International Criminal Court as “another phase of international colonization.” Harun is charged by the ICC with war crimes in Darfur, where, as minister of state for the interior in 2003-2004, he is alleged to have organized the campaign that left some 200,000 Sudanese dead and 2.5 million homeless. “My conscience is clear,” he said. “I have no regrets.” He went on to say that the attempt to bring him and his fellow Sudanese war criminals to justice “reminds us of the 19th century when the white people were dominating here in Africa.” This is the kind of emotive rhetoric that can often find an appreciative audience in Africa, precisely because of the kinds of crimes committed against Hussein Onyango and millions of others. Robert Mugabe has driven Zimbabwe into poverty, ruin and disease, all the time hailing his presidency as a bulwark against imperialism. In such cases, anti-imperialism is little more than an excuse for tyrants to visit misery and terror on their own populations, every bit as bad as — and sometimes worse than — that handed out by the colonial powers.
The notion, for example, that the depraved violence inflicted on Liberia by Charles Taylor up to 2003 is in some way more palatable than that endured by Kenyans is probably not shared by the many thousands murdered, raped and mutilated by Taylor’s armies. Taylor is currently being tried in The Hague by a special court linked to the very ICC that Harun decried as colonialist. He is charged with supporting the civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone, which again killed thousands and turned a generation of children into soldiers and which was finally brought to an end by British military intervention. For some, the fact that the homicidal anarchy was stopped is to be regretted because it was stopped by the “imperialist” British. But again, that is a minority opinion among Sierra Leoneans who now live under a relatively stable and functioning democracy.
None of which amounts to a charter for postcolonial interventions. The occasions on which outside force alleviates more suffering than it causes are rare, though not nonexistent, and it should only be undertaken in the most extreme circumstances (perhaps Rwanda fits the bill). For the truth is, from the slave trade through to the current diamond trade, Africa has been consistently exploited by Europe and North America. This is a history that cannot, and should not, be forgotten.
Which is why the testimony of Granny Sarah Onyango is to be welcomed. Indeed, it’s why the practice and legacy of colonialism, its racism and repression, ought to be studied in schools and known by as many Britons as possible.
Not as some means of generating useless, and mostly inappropriate, guilt, but so that we understand what imperialism really does involve. Apart from anything else, to be anti-imperialist must mean that one is opposed to the sorts of inhumanity suffered by the Hussein Onyangos of this world.
