Kenyan Gulag

The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, now 87.

“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said. The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained. "

Mr Onyango served with the British Army in Burma during the Second World War and, like many army veterans, he returned to Africa hoping to win greater freedoms from colonial rule. Although a member of the Luo tribe from western Kenya, he sympathised with the Kikuyu Central Association, the organisation leading an independence movement that would evolve into the bloody uprising known as the Mau Mau rebellion.

“To arrest a Luo ex-soldier, who must have been a senior figure in the community, is pretty serious. They must have had some damn good evidence,” said Professor David Anderson, director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and an authority on the Mau Mau rebellion.

The British responded to the Mau Mau uprising with draconian violence: at least 12,000 rebels were killed, most of them Kikuyu, but some historians believe that the overall death toll may have been more than 50,000. In total, just 32 European settlers were killed.

“This was like a death camp because some detainees died while being tortured,” Mrs Onyango said. “We were not allowed to see him, not even taking him food.” She said her husband was told that he would be killed or maimed if he refused to reveal what he knew of the insurgency, and was beaten repeatedly until he promised “never to rejoin any groupings opposed to the white man’s rule”. Even after he had confessed, and renounced the insurgency, the physical abuse allegedly continued.

Some of Mr Onyango’s fellow inmates were beaten to death with clubs, according to Mrs Onyango. “In fact, my late husband was lucky to have left the prison alive without any serious bodily harm, save for the permanent scars from beatings and torture, which remained on his body till he died.”

At the height of the rebellion, an estimated 71,000 Kenyans were held in prison camps. The vast majority were never convicted. Letters smuggled out of the camps complained of systematic brutality by warders and guards. According to the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her exposé of British atrocities during the Mau Mau uprising, there were reports of sexual violence and mutilation using “castration pliers”. “This was an instrument devised to crush the men’s testicles,” she writes in Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005). “Other detainees also described castration pliers, along with other methods of beating and mutilating men’s testicles.”

Mr Onyango’s son 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 said unlike her husband, her step son had been held only for a short time in the white man’s prison: “Because he was not a leader in Kanu, he was released after a few days.”

Mr Onyango was a victim of the fight for Kenyan independence, but his son later became a direct beneficiary of that movement. In 1960, he 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.

Mrs Onyango said that the combative spirit shown by her husband during Kenya’s bloody independence struggle has passed down through the generations to the future president. “This family lineage has all along been made up of fighters,” she said. “Senator Barack Obama is fighting using his brain, like his father, while his grandfather fought physically with the white man.”

Mrs. Onyango is the woman President Barak Obama refers to as "Granny Sarah." Mr. Onyango was the paternal grandfather of our president. He was the father of his father, Barak Obama Senior, who was briefly arrested and traveled to Hawaii on scholarship. You can read the full article (much longer then these excerpts, with a history of the uprising) here: London Times.

Let me ask you guys something. You know how we were dumbfounded that as his first act the newly elected president would return, not put in the Smithsonian, not in storage, but return to the UK the bust of Winston Churchill? Well guess who the Prime Minister was whom dispatched the troops to Kenya to crush the insurgency? The Empire's colonial integrity was being threatened in all sectors. Stating, "I will not preside over a dismemberment" (of the Empire) it was Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, during his comeback term as PM from 1951-55, whom presided over the rebellion's suppression.

The bust's return make a little more sense now?

Look ... I think it's not only normal for the President to harbor ill feelings towards the British and Churchill in specific, but perfectly understandable. It's human. It'd be abnormal if he didn't. Problem is, he's in a super human job. I ask this sincerely - how can he be expected to treat as a traditional ally, or for that matter even be impartial towards, Great Britain?

And here's an additonal disturbing aspect of this entire story. Why have we NEVER heard this before? Do you know the dateline on the story when you click on the link I provided? 3 December, 2008. Before he was even inaugurated. Think about this - with all the flap of his sending the bust back, which was all over the news, NO ONE put this forward? And what this reminds me of is just how little we know of our Commander-in-Chief. He never released his collegiate essays, papers, etc. He "doesn't remember" his 20 years sitting in the pews at Reverend Wright's Church, and won't discuss them (don't know if Wright baptized his children, if Michelle "remembers" any of those years, etc). There are huge gaps in his childhood, years with no account for how or even where he lived. He won't discuss the years within the Chicago political machine, Tony Rescoe, his relationship with Ayers, nor if he conferred with Farrakhan. And what I find almost frightening is the press, by and large, NEVER ASKED. Never probed, never dug, never applied the same "investigative journalism" tenacity they did to say, Haliburton.

What we do know of him is gleaned by the caliber of his friends, his past associations, his one book and the source of almost all "Obama history", The Audacity of Hope in which he speaks of "a world where white man's greed runs a world in need", quoting a Wright sermon he did remember. And ALL of it seems to point to an individual raised in, immersed in, weened on and now part and parcel of radical left wing ideology.

It is my opinion that the US press machine has utterly failed in vetting a candidate for our most important job. And to this day they continue to look the other way on any "untidy" parts of his life.

Good Lord, can you imagine the thesis statement in any number of college term papers written by a young Barak Obama?

One thing's for sure - BP had no idea what they were up against.