Obama and Kenya. Matthew Carotenuto

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СКАЧАТЬ Beginning in the colonial era, groups such as the Luo Union promoted cultural-political platforms built around the notion of a discrete Luo identity, and politicians such as Oginga Odinga launched themselves into the anticolonial movement in the 1950s.

      The city’s crumbling infrastructure and defunct lakeshore port point back to the 1960s, the decade that saw both a Luo, Oginga Odinga, as vice president in Kenya’s first independent government, and the beginning of thirty years of Luo exile in the “political wilderness” as Jomo Kenyatta’s Kikuyu cohort and Daniel arap Moi’s Kalenjin contingent took center stage.⁸ This experience of rapid ascent and steady marginalization over more than thirty years helps us to understand why by 2004 Luo people reached beyond the shores of Lake Victoria and into the diaspora in search of a powerful political patron whom they regarded as “belonging” to them—Barack Obama Jr. Analyses of how Luoness has been historically constituted through the experience of diaspora helps to illuminate how Obama, who first set foot in Kenya at the age of twenty-six, could be claimed by Luo as a “son of the soil” of Western Kenya.

      Kisumu, while important from the late nineteenth century forward, was not the place where notions of “Luoness” first emerged. Present-day Luo speakers offer an array of responses about what constitutes “Luoness” and where Luo people originated. Their accounts, which weave together historical memory and myth, formal and local historical knowledge, contemporary political problems, and even biblical narratives, all emphasize migration and then subsequent material and emotional “belonging” to a particular landscape as key elements of what it means to be Luo. Over a decade of asking Luo people, from elders in Western Kenya to migrants in East Africa’s major cities, what it means to be Luo, we were informed by nearly all our respondents that the Luo did not originate in Kenya, but rather that a founding ancestor, Ramogi, led a group of settlers from what is today South Sudan to an area on the present border of Kenya and Uganda sometime in the later fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Slowly and continuously until they were checked by the establishment of British and German colonial rule, waves of Luo-speaking migrants followed on Ramogi’s heels.⁹ Indeed, the British administrator and amateur ethnographer Charles W. Hobley recorded a version of the Ramogi story in the early 1900s, noting that “his [Ramogi’s] offspring founded the Ja-luo race.”¹⁰

      Discussions of Ramogi’s role retained their purchase in political discourse throughout the colonial period and into the present. For example, the Luo-language newspaper called Ramogi, founded in the 1940s, was a key site for debates about Luo politics and culture. During the 1950s Oginga Odinga, the foremost Luo politician, was also vested with the politico-cultural honorific Jaramogi, or “person of Ramogi.” More recently, discussing the presidential campaigns and his preferred candidate in Nairobi in 2007, James Okoth, a Luo resident of Nairobi, quipped, “Just as Ramogi guided the Luo to Kenya, I know Raila (Odinga) can guide them to the statehouse.”¹¹

      The Ramogi story does not just occupy a space in Luo historical imagination, but rather is a material (and commercial) site of memory as well. The popular radio station Ramogi FM promotes Luo vernacular music on the Kenyan airwaves, and “Ramogi Night” has become a regular Luo cultural event at the popular Nairobi nightclub Carnivore. Many of our informants even directed us to visit Ramogi Hill, where community-based tourism efforts are under way to commemorate the place believed to be the homestead of this mythical founding ancestor.

      Weaving together linguistic, archaeological, oral, and documentary sources, most scholarship agrees that Kenya’s Luo population, speakers of the Dholuo language who call themselves Jaluo, belongs to a wider, diasporic group of Nilotic-Lwo speakers across East Africa, which includes, for example, Acholi-, Lango-, and Padhola-speakers in Uganda and which is even related distantly to Dinka and Nuer populations in South Sudan.¹² The Luo of Kenya arrived in the latter of two waves of Lwo-speaking migrants, who had left South Sudan due to mounting environmental changes and competition over resources, beginning in the fifteenth century. Pastoralists and mixed farmers, the Luo found the verdant shores of Lake Victoria well suited to their needs and reminiscent of the lush Nile valley.¹³ Overall, as migrating Lwo-speakers traversed East Africa, they blended with the various groups they encountered, taking on distinct practices that would distinguish Lwo-speaking groups from a cultural as well as a linguistic standpoint.¹⁴

      Oral traditions do not reflect a conceptualization of a shared Luo identity across Lwo-speaking groups, nor do they evidence political organization beyond the local level in the precolonial era. Rather, populations were organized in terms of family or kin: dala (one’s immediate homestead); keyo (one’s extended patrilineage); gweng’ (a collection of lineages bound by marriage or defensive alliances); and piny or oganda (multiclan, territorial conglomerates).¹⁵ By the mid-nineteenth century, there were approximately thirteen oganda or piny representing localities that would become important population centers in the colonial and postcolonial eras: Kisumu, Siaya, and Homa Bay Counties. Luo people identified primarily with their home locations; for instance, a Luo from Alego, the Obamas’ home location, would have likely called himself a Ja-Alego, or “Alego person,” while a person from Gem would have called himself a Ja-Gem, and so on.¹⁶ Nonetheless, as David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo explain, “These small ethnic units were eighteenth and nineteenth century rehearsals for the broadly inclusive ethnic unit of the Luo recognized in the colonial and post-colonial periods.”¹⁷

       Creating the Luo Community in Colonial Kenya

      Our elders had good ethics and moral codes, which helped them to guide their communities. These were good customs that aided the Luo during their migrations, in the course of their daily work and discussion. No nation can prosper by adopting foreign cultures and ignoring its customs and practices.¹⁸

      The implementation of indirect rule, as we learned in the previous chapter, was central to the colonial imagining of clearly defined “tribes” and the hardening of boundaries around preexisting ethnic affinities. At the same time, colonial land and economic policies both restricted black Kenyans to “tribal” reserves and drove them to work in the mixed-ethnic milieus of the colony’s developing cities and settler plantations. From the early twentieth century, these developments steadily transformed the areas around Lake Victoria in Western Kenya to a labor reserve supplying both the colonial state and white settlers. A diaspora of Luo speakers from Western Kenya fanned out across the region and to the colonial cities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Barack Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, who left Luoland to work as a domestic in a white household in Nairobi and served in the King’s African Rifles (KAR) in both World Wars, was typical of Luo migrants who worked as domestic servants in settler households; agricultural laborers on Kenya’s tea, coffee, and sisal plantations; as dockhands in Mombasa and Dar es Salaam; and in various capacities for the railway.¹⁹

      For Luo people, steeped in oral traditions about a history born out of migration, relocation was not necessarily an utter rupture. Conditions of labor and life, particularly in urban areas, were particularly trying, however. For example, one Nairobi official noted with dismay in the 1940s that with explosive population growth in the city, “it was common” to see “Africans sleeping under the verandahs on River Road, in noisome shacks in the swamps, in buses parked by the road and fourteen to a room in Pumwani, two to a bed and the rest on the floor.”²⁰ Labor migrants, particularly in urban areas, were also forced to endure the coercive tactics and generalized contempt of colonial authorities who regarded them as “delinquents” or “vagrants” operating dangerously outside the control of rural “tribal” discipline.²¹

      Indeed, the problem posed by the “detribalized native” was a primary trope in colonial and anthropological discourse from the 1930s onward.²² In much the same way that colonial authorities in the late 1950s focused on “tribal atavism” instead of valid economic and political concerns as the driving force behind Mau Mau, their predecessors and contemporaries argued that labor migrants engaged in “undesirable” СКАЧАТЬ