3
The Obama Family
Ethnicity and the Politics of Belonging in Kenya
There’s your ordinary house in Nairobi. And then there’s your house in the country, where your people come from. Your ancestral home. Even the biggest minister or businessman thinks this way. He may have a mansion in Nairobi and build only a small hut on his land in the country. He may go there only once or twice a year. But if you ask him where he is from, he will tell you that that hut is his true home. So, when we were at school and wanted to tell somebody we were going to Alego, it was home twice over, you see. Home Squared. . . . For you, Barack, we can call it “Home Cubed.”
—Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father1
Barack Obama’s visits to his extended family at their rural homesteads in Western Kenya during his first trip to Kenya in 1988 offer an important avenue into the history of ethnicity and the related politics of belonging in Kenya. Traveling via the railway line laid down by the British at the opening of the colonial era that we learned about in the last chapter, Obama shared this important overnight journey with Kenyans returning “home” from Nairobi to their hereditary “homelands.”2 The sojourn from a “house” in an urban, ethnically mixed milieu to a “home” in a more ethnically uniform province, undertaken regularly by millions of Kenyans across the country, speaks to the historical forces at work around the malleable categories of “tribe” and “ethnicity.”3 A Luo at the end of such a journey exchanges the nyumba, or “house,” in the lingua franca of Swahili, which he inhabits in the city, for the dala, or homestead, where he belongs in Western Kenya—“home squared.” Such was the journey Obama’s family understood him as taking, simply with a twice-removed point of origin in the United States.
Training a lens on the Obama family, this chapter examines how the idea of a Luo identity, of “Luoness,” came to be and traces the social and political work that Luoness has done from the colonial era into the present day. We further challenge the notion that “tribe” was either an uncomplicated primordial artifact or a wholly colonial construction. Rather, we will show how Africans—whether recognized intellectuals like Barack Obama Sr. or more ordinary wananchi (citizens) like Hussein Onyanga Obama—have shaped the meanings and uses of Luoness over time in dialogue with a preserved past and contemporary politics. An array of historical sources shows that Luoness has been constituted through origin myths and oral traditions, through histories written by Luo members of the academy and amateur scholars of the “tin trunk history” guild, and through the political projects and partisan maneuverings of Luo political actors.4 This chapter points to how ethnicity has become the narrative fulcrum on which representations of postcolonial Kenyan politics turn.
Luoland: Dala and Diaspora
Tera adhi aba Kisumu
Dala gi mama yooo
Dala gi baba yooo
Take me on a tour of Kisumu
The home of my mother
The home of my father.5
Having arrived in Kisumu, Obama made his way to the bus depot, “crowded with buses and matatus honking and jockeying for space in the dusty open-air lot,” and crowded onto public transport for the next leg of the journey to his family’s home in Kogelo.6 Kisumu, which has grown from a sleepy market into Kenya’s third-largest city, has been the center of Luo sociopolitical life from the colonial era forward.7 Memorialized as the diasporic hometown of Luos worldwide by the popular Suzanna Owiyo song quoted above, the city has long been the locus of Luo political activity. 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