Andrew Anthony: Our cruelty to Obama's family is no excuse for fresh tyranny
[Andrew Anthony has been writing for the Observer since 1993 and for the Guardian since 1990.]
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 towards 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 Fifties 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.'
There has been speculation that what happened to Obama's grandfather will negatively affect the 'special relationship' between the US and Britain and Obama-watchers have been scouring his books and speeches for evidence of anti-British sentiments.
But this is not the real issue. Obama wouldn't be much of a global leader if he based his diplomatic policy on the injustices done to his family two generations ago. What matters in the first instance is that a light has been shone on the brutal nature of colonialism - in this case British colonialism - and no one should attempt to conceal or dress up what took place.
It's vital that the scale of the suffering is recognised 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 rivalled 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 colonisation'. Harun is charged by the ICC with war crimes in Darfur, where, as minister of state for the interior in 2003-4, he is alleged to have organised 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...
Read entire article at Observer (UK)
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 towards 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 Fifties 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.'
There has been speculation that what happened to Obama's grandfather will negatively affect the 'special relationship' between the US and Britain and Obama-watchers have been scouring his books and speeches for evidence of anti-British sentiments.
But this is not the real issue. Obama wouldn't be much of a global leader if he based his diplomatic policy on the injustices done to his family two generations ago. What matters in the first instance is that a light has been shone on the brutal nature of colonialism - in this case British colonialism - and no one should attempt to conceal or dress up what took place.
It's vital that the scale of the suffering is recognised 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 rivalled 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 colonisation'. Harun is charged by the ICC with war crimes in Darfur, where, as minister of state for the interior in 2003-4, he is alleged to have organised 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...