Replies

Was obama’s grandfather really a victim of the British? The Mau Mau uprising dates from 1952. Barack Obama's grandfather was arrested in 1949. What are the connections between Malcolm X, Obama and Odinga?

TIMES ARTICLE DEC 2008

“Beatings and abuse made Barack Obama’s grandfather loathe the British The President-elect’s relatives have told how the family was a victim of the Mau Mau revolt”

To the best of my knowledge, the victims of the Mau Mau revolt were the white farmers and the natives who worked on the farms, a la Zimbabwe.

From Timesonline 1952 articles:

The growth of Mau Mau The aims of the Mau Mau are clear enough. While the Kenya African Union conducts a campaign above ground for political power, the purpose of the Mau Mau is to step up the pace by menacing the authority of the Government and fostering trouble at all levels and by all means...

THE ROOT OF THE MAU MAU REVOLT

The Times, Mau Mau 1952 Politics and Terrorism in Kenya.

One contradiction after another:

Times December 2008 Article:

“...Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency...

SNIP

“...Mr Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, but states that his grandfather was “found innocent” and held only for “more than six months”...

SNIP

“...Barack Obama Sr, Mr Onyango’s son and the President-elect’s father, seems to have inherited his father’s attitudes towards the colonial power. He was also arrested, for attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), the organisation spearheading the independence movement. Mrs Onyango told Mr Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a short time in the white man’s prison: “Because he was not a leader in Kanu, Barack was released after a few days.”

“...Mr Onyango was a victim of the fight for Kenyan independence, but his son became a direct beneficiary of that movement. In 1960, Barack Obama Sr travelled on a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, as part of a programme (sponsored by John F. Kennedy) to train young Kenyans to rule their own country...”

No he wasn’t, he arrived some time in 1959 long before Kennedy had anything to do with the airlift - AND HE WAS NOT on board the first contingent of students that landed at Idlewild in September 1959.

JOURNAL OF AMERCIAN HISTORY

SEE FOOTNOTE:[25] Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson appeal letter, Aug. 24, 1959, box 3, Robinson Papers; Smith, “East African Airlifts of 1959, 1960, and 1961,” 25–43. Barack Obama wrote that his father “had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States,” but a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does not contain the name of the elder Obama. Tom Shachtman, working in the African-American Students Foundation (aasf) papers for a book on the airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from the aasf but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his way to the University of Hawaii.

Curiously, look who was in Africa in 1959...

MALCOLM X TIMELINE

Malcolm X travels to United Arab Republic, Sudan and Nigeria

Announced at New York NOI meeting that Malcolm X has left for Holland. Travels from there to Egypt, Mecca, Iran, Syria, and Ghana as Elijah Muhammad's ambassador.

MALCOLM X BARACK OBAMA (sr)and OGINGA ODINGA

Odinga had an impact on human rights groups in the United States. While he was in the U.S., the State Department took him on a tour of America. The last stop was Atlanta, self-described as “The City Too Busy to Hate.” Odinga was housed at one of Atlanta’s two non-segregated hotels.

When Malcolm visited Africa in 1964, he visited Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It was during that trip that he met with Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, Ugandan President Dr. Milton Obote, and President Julius K. Nyerere and Muhammad Babu of Tanzania. Babu, Malcolm and Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka) held a meeting during this period in New York City. Malcolm talked about meeting President Kenyatta. Malcolm, however, was also aware of Kenya’s Oginga Odinga.

The original caption for this photo, taken June 1, 1963, reads: “Nairobi, Kenya – Waving his ‘wisk’ the newly-elected Premier of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta (R, foreground), greeted throngs of cheering citizens as he rode through the streets of Nairobi. Accompanying Kenyatta are Tom Mboya (L), Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs; A. Oginga Odinga, Minister for Home Affairs; and James S. Gichuru, Minister for Finance. The motorcade was part of the National Holiday celebrations which marked the start of internal self-government for the African nation.” Photo: © Bettmann/CORBIS

MALCOLM X IN AFRICA.

On a visit to Kenya in August of 2006, Barack Obama was hosted by Raila Odinga, son of Oginga Odinga, and is said to have spoken in praise of him at rallies in Nairobi, for which Obama is roundly condemned in the right-wing blogosphere.

I don't know if this has been posted before, but it confirms that BO, Sr. wasn't on the celebrated airlift, although it fails to explain why or how. (There's a photo of the Hagsbergs, Mboya and some of the airlift students at the link.)

Source

Cold warrior for racial equality
By Dana Seidenberg
Posted Saturday, February 7 2009 at 11:13

Whether it is for expanding people’s democratic space, press freedom, better pay for workers or the preservation of the environment, the choice of whether to participate in the political passions of the day is open to all of us. Despite her origins as an outsider, American-born Gloria Hagberg, a long-time Nairobi resident, has played her part.

A large canvas spanning nearly a century — with most of those years spent in Nairobi — is a colourful portrait of a life well spent — creating groundbreaking institutions, teaching, performing the roles of devoted wife and mother and, as a detail, by coincidence, a bit of personal involvement with the Obama family.

Hagberg did her bit for bringing about a more inclusive, non-racial society through her decades of involvement with the United Kenya Club and her work as a teacher at the Hospital Hill School, Nairobi’s first racially integrated school.

In the process, she became involved with some of the stellar personalities of Kenya’s Independence movement. After Independence, she continued to participate in the struggle for a just society.

Born in 1913 in New York, the daughter of an Irish policeman, Gloria Hagberg was one of only two women in her class at Brooklyn College to graduate with a degree in physics.

In 1935, she married Cornell University graduate Gordon Hagberg, a newspaperman born in India of missionary parents.

With the intensification of the Cold War, America began expanding cultural programmes in many of the world’s emerging nations.

Having always wanted to return to India, in 1950 Gordon got a job in the United States Information Service (USIS) and the couple spent two years in Madras.

It seemed almost fated that their next overseas assignment with USIS would bring them to East Africa, as Gordon’s parents had met in Lamu and married in Zanzibar.

In 1956, when the Hagbergs arrived in Nairobi, the Emergency was in its last two years.

Though restrictive colonial ways still prevailed, those in power were beginning to face the inevitability of Kenya becoming independent rather sooner than they had foreseen.

The following year, Ghana became free, paving the way for Kenya and other states still under colonial occupation to move into the community of free nations.

With Independence concretised into hopeful probability, these were exhilarating times in Kenya as well.

The couple found themselves caught up in the swirl of progressive political events in Nairobi.

The Hagbergs didn’t restrict themselves to the starchy, closed-off British colonial social circuit. Rather, they reached out to up-and-coming Kenyans involved in the movement towards self-government.

This was partly because it was their job, but it was mostly because the Hagbergs were the kind of people they were.

The establishment of a racially mixed society that was also an integral aspect of the Independence struggle had an early home in the United Kenya Club.

Established in 1947 by Thomas Askwith, a Briton, and others as a pioneering, integrated social club to provide a place where Africans, Asians and Europeans could, in Askwith’s words, “appreciate how little there was dividing them,” members met every Wednesday at a building near the Railway Terminal.

By the late 1950s, when Gloria and her husband joined, it had grown to include many of the leading lights of the Independence movement and become well established, with a club building at the foot of State House Road (where it continues to thrive).

Lawrence Sagini, who in 1962 would become minister of education, Dr Julius Kiano and his then African-American wife Ernestine, Sir Ernest Vasey, minister for finance (1952-59), and his wife Hannah, and Sir Derek and Lady Erskine, John and Joan Karmali, who were also involved in integrated education, as well as budding industrialists such as the Manjis and Manu Chandaria were all involved with the club in one way or another. Later pioneering editor Hilary and his wife Fleur Ng’weno would also become members.

The Club provided an early public forum for guest speakers when racial restrictions in the city continued to limit free expression elsewhere.

Speakers at the traditional Wednesday lunch and discussion would include “anyone who had any influence” — among them Sir Ernest Vasey and in 1956, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, in 1959 and 1961, Tom Mboya and in November 1961, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta himself, recently released from detention.

Another institution the Hagbergs supported was Hospital Hill School, the first experimental, racially integrated primary school in Nairobi, begun in 1949 by the Karmalis.

When in 1956, Gloria’s daughter, Paula, attended as a 10-year-old, it was a three-room schoolhouse on Arboretum Road with 70 pupils, equally divided among the three racial groups.

Paula remembers it as her favourite school experience.

The children, including Marsden Madoka and so many others who would figure large in Kenya’s future political arena, easily formed friendships across the racial divide in its supportive environment. Tom Mboya and Charles Njonjo were just two of the personalities involved in the success of the school.

Not walking [sic] to leave Kenya after his stint in the USIS had ended, Gordon Hagberg left government service in 1959 to begin work in the Washington-based African-American Institute and then became Director of the East African office of the Institute of International Education.

It was through these positions that he helped organise the influential student airlifts of 1959, 1960 and 1962.

It was at this time he and Gloria came to know freedom fighter, trade unionist and student airlift organiser Tom Mboya and many others.

While Gordon worked with Tom Mboya and others to secure scholarships for Kenyan students to pursue degrees at American universities as well as to raise funds for chartered flights to the United States, Gloria helped run the orientation classes for students as they were going overseas for the first time.

She had the satisfaction of seeing many of these young Kenyans return to pursue successful careers in their new country. Lasting friendships developed, including with Pamela Mboya and Lawrence Sagini.

Gloria managed to pursue teaching wherever she was and worked as a full-time teacher at Hospital Hill School, eventually becoming its deputy headmistress.

She taught students with special needs as well as English.

Hospital Hill became the primary school attended by many of the children of the country’s administrators and political leaders. By 1973, the school had moved to larger premises in Parklands and was finally handed over to the City Council.

With Gloria fully employed by the school, and having like so many other expatriates become enamoured of the young country and its people, the Hagbergs decided to make Kenya their home.

After Independence, they bought a 750-acre dairy farm at Naro Moru, the same farm where Born Free, the famous film about George and Joy Adamson and their lioness, Elsa, was shot.

In 1973, in the midst of planning all sorts of innovative projects for the farm including raising trout and developing methane-powered electricity, tragedy befell the family. Gordon was diagnosed with untreatable cancer and had three months to live.

The family all went back to the United States to seek a second opinion, but unfortunately the prognosis had been true. Gloria returned to Kenya alone and took a flat on Riverside Drive, selling the farm after five years.

In the 1980s and well into her 70s and retired, Glora was approached by the well-known educator and former MP Eddah Gachukia to run her Riara Kindergarten.

Today, she credits Gloria for giving her the start she needed to develop that one small school into the many Riara Schools, including Riara Springs Girls’ Secondary School.

During the same years, as a lifelong member of the United Kenya Club, Gloria moved into its newly built residential premises.

An excellent place to live if one can afford the rent, it combines the privacy of one’s own flat, a library with daily newspapers from around the world and social support.

When in need of company and conversation, a resident can always find any number of like-minded people downstairs on the terrace. Paula Hagberg Schramm recently returned to keep her mother company.

At 95, Gloria has just begun winding down, dropping her many social engagements.

Yet she continues to support social welfare organisations and still attends meetings of the East African Women’s League (another group she refused to join until it was racially integrated after Independence) and the American Women’s Association.

And the detail? The detail is about Gloria’s personal relationship with the family of President-elect Barack Obama.

The USIS had provided a house and staff for the family in Muthaiga near the US ambassador’s residence.

Their cook was Hussein Onyango Obama, none other than the paternal grandfather of President Obama. Gloria recalls the times Hussein’s son, the youthful student Barack Obama Sr, would visit their house, announcing: “I’ve come to see the old man!”

Although the young Obama Sr. left for the University of Hawaii before the first formal student airlift, he did maintain his friendship with the Hagbergs when he returned to Kenya. Paula has memories of Hussein cutting an intimidating figure, “tall, dignified and stern-faced, yet kind.”

Having adapted to British ways from a stint serving the British Army in Burma, Hussein Obama held everyone to a high standard of excellence — in school and in life.

Seeing the advantages of modern life before many others did in his home area near Lake Victoria, he had his children attending school, wearing Western clothes and provided his home with Western furnishings including a table where the family would sit and eat with cutlery. Second, as a Muslim, he wore a fez as well as a kanzu and vest.

Also unusual for the times, he had learned to read and write.

Gloria remembers Hussein reading his Koran and other books at night by the light of an oil lamp, as well as her shock and frustration that the landlord had refused to provide electricity to the staff houses.

Many of these points have been corroborated in Barack Obama’s journey of discovery of his Kenyan roots Dreams From My Father.

Through having known Hussein Onyango Obama and his son Barack Obama Sr., Gloria has felt that same immediacy and connection that so many Kenyans feel for America’s new leaders.

The threads that run through Gloria Hagberg’s life of hard work, open-mindedness and friendship have been woven together with the lives of many others who strive to leave the world a better place than they found it.