(In
the evening of October 18, 2012 at the 67th Alfred E. Smith
Foundation Dinner in New York the President of United States Barrack Hussein
Obama pulled a funny joke on himself. And when I read the following article “In Visit to Myanmar, Obama Will See a Nation That Shaped His Grandfather” by Peter Baker in The New York Times on
November 17, 2012 about Obama’s coming visit to Burma his self-inflicted joke
immediately came into my mind.)
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| President Obama, Archbishop Dolan, and Mitt Romeny. |
The president’s Kenyan
grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, spent part of World War II in what was then called Burma as a
cook for a British Army captain. Although details are sometimes debated, the
elder Mr. Obama’s Asian experience proved formative just as his grandson’s time
growing up in Indonesia did decades later.
“His roots go through Burma,” said Timothy Parsons, an African history professor at Washington University in St. Louis who wrote a book on the colonial East African military. “It is kind of an odd intersection of his life. It’s like the three corners of the triangle come together — America, East Africa and Southeast Asia.”
Thant Myint-U, a Burmese
historian and author, said the president may be able to connect with the
country in a way another American leader might not. “The Burma that the
president will see will look amazingly similar to the Burma his grandfather saw
in the 1940s,” he said.
“But what will not be readily
visible are the effects of more than six decades of armed conflict, half a
century of dictatorship and self-imposed isolation and 20 years of Western
sanctions. It’s a country that lacks the most basic institutions.”
The president’s grandfather, who
went by Onyango, played a key role in the younger Mr. Obama’s life even though
the two never met. He was a central figure in Mr. Obama’s voyage of
self-discovery captured in his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” which
describes the journey of a mixed-race American to Kenya to explore his
roots.
Onyango Obama, believed to be
born in 1895, was a member of the Luo tribe who worked for years as a servant
for white colonialists in Kenya. His son, the first Barack Hussein Obama, was
the future president’s father. Onyango Obama was described as a strong-willed
and stern man, abusive of the multiple women he would marry over his
lifetime.
He took the Arabic name Hussein
when he converted to Islam and married a Muslim woman while living on the
island of Zanzibar. When World War II broke out, according to the stories that
the younger Mr. Obama was told, Onyango Obama traveled to Burma, Ceylon and
Arabia as a cook for a British captain in the King’s African Rifles. The unit
played a crucial role in the Burma campaign, according to scholars.
Some 75,000 Kenyans served in
Burma during the war and many of them were transformed by their exposure to the
outside world, according to scholars. Many met black soldiers and airmen from
the United States, who despite the lingering segregation and discrimination
back home, had far more independence and responsibility than the Kenyans
serving the British.
Onyango Obama returned home with
a picture of a Burmese woman he claimed to have married — “She looked like my
mother,” the future president wrote — and a brewing disillusionment with
colonial rule. Having been part of the fight for freedom against the Japanese
empire, he and other Burma veterans began to rise up for freedom for themselves
in Africa. “Like many others, President Obama’s grandfather emerged from
wartime service a wiser and more politicized person,” said David M. Anderson, a
professor of African politics at the University of Oxford.
Like many of them, Onyango Obama
was sympathetic to the Kenyan African Union movement that would later evolve
into the more radical Mau Mau rebellion.
When his grandson visited Kenya
in the 1980s, he was told that the elder Mr. Obama was arrested by the British
in 1949. His fifth wife, relating stories that she was told from before their
marriage, later told journalists that Onyango Obama was tortured while in custody,
his testicles squeezed with pincers and his nails and buttocks pierced with a
sharp pin. The Mau Mau rebellion broke out in 1952 and was brutally suppressed
by the British, resulting in the deaths of at least 12,000 Africans. Onyango
Obama reportedly died in 1979.
The stories of abuse fueled
speculation when President Obama took office in 2009 that he resented Britain
and would not value the “special relationship” between Washington and London as
his predecessors had. Some in the British news media even interpreted the
return of a Winston Churchill bust that sat in the Oval Office under President
George W. Bush as a reaction to what happened to Mr. Obama’s grandfather, never
mind that another Churchill bust remains in the White House.
But a new book this year
suggested that Onyango Obama was never actually arrested, much less tortured.
In “Barack Obama: The Story,” his biography of the president, the Washington
Post journalist David Maraniss reported that five associates of the elder Mr.
Obama “said they doubted the story or were certain it did not happen.” One of
his daughters said he had once been kidnapped, meaning perhaps that the story
had become twisted over the years.
Either way, Burma was a place of
awakening for Mr. Obama’s grandfather, a place where larger possibilities first
presented themselves. But whatever ambitions he began to harbor then, he could
hardly have imagined that seven decades later, his grandson would return to
Burma aboard a blue-and-white 747 known as Air Force One.