Ruth tried half-heartedly to turn him away. But Obama charmed her with an onslaught of entreaties. He loved her to the core of his being. He adored their son and had yearned for them every day they had been gone. If she would only return with him, he vowed that everything would be different.

He would never pursue another woman again. He would not even look at another woman, he insisted.

What’s more, he had already lined up a new job. Starting in October Obama was to be the senior development officer for the newly created Kenya Tourist Development Corporation (KTDC), a high-profile government corporation charged with overseeing the blossoming industry and directing public investment in a spate of new hotels and parks. As the second highest-ranking employee in the organisation, Obama was to receive a handsome annual salary of 2,275 pounds.

Plum job

It was a plum job that put Obama squarely in the league of the government’s other ranking economists and at the forefront of an industry to which Mzee, the Swahili term of respect for an elder, Kenyatta himself was closely attuned.

It was not a permanent secretary’s post like Philip Ndegwa had landed or even the top job at the KTDC, but it was a good job nonetheless. And it gave him a much-needed chance to rehabilitate himself. Adding to Obama’s bounty, the job came with a lovely home in the exclusive Woodley Estate west of the city’s center, a neighbourhood that the Nairobi City Council developed expressly for Europeans in the late 1940s.

Since independence, however, a handful of prominent Africans, including members of Parliament and government ministers, had trickled into the handsome homes flanked by high green hedges.

Obama’s house was a welcoming stone bungalow with a red tile roof, complete with a separate servants’ quarters that could accommodate the trail of relatives that invariably followed him. Ruth soon abandoned her plan of staying in the United States and agreed to return with him to Nairobi.

But it wasn’t because of Obama’s promises of fidelity or even the goodies he dangled before her. “There was a connection between us, a passion, the type of love that holds a man and a woman together,” said Ruth.

“He loved me in a certain way, as much as he was able. It wasn’t just because I was white because surely that wears off. For myself, he was a man I had a very strong passion for.

I did not have that passion again in my life.” Once they were back in Nairobi, Obama’s promises lasted only as long as it took Ruth to unpack her bags. No sooner had the couple settled into their new home than Obama resumed his carousing ways, leaving Ruth to juggle her secretarial job at Nestlé and caring for his extended family with only the help of a housekeeper.

There were now three of his children living in the house along with a succession of visiting relatives.

Roy, his eldest son, who would later be known as Malik, attended the prestigious Lenana School, once exclusively for whites. Rita, later known as Auma, attended a day school before eventually enrolling in the Kenya High School.

Although Kezia regularly visited her children, bearing sweets and small gifts in the early years after they moved in with their father and his new wife, Kezia’s tearful demeanour annoyed Obama, so he had her visits abruptly stopped. Auma would not see her birth mother for nearly seven years.

There were also the young relatives who lived in the servant quarters out back. Not long after he returned from the United States, Obama had taken his first cousin Ezra under his wing.

Ezra was a clever and amusing boy whose father, one of Hussein Onyango’s brothers, was unable to pay for his son’s schooling. So Ezra moved into the squat servants’ quarters in 1967 and remained there for four years while Obama paid for his education.

He was not alone. When Wilson Obama, another cousin, showed up in similar need, Obama agreed to pay for his education and offered him a place to stay for close to two years. Amir Otieno Orinda, Obama’s half-brother with whom he shared the same mother, was in and out of the house as well.

Zeituni Onyango, Obama’s half-sister, stayed at the house for several weeks in the late 1960s and would later help to take care of Malik and Auma. As those and other Obamas came and went from the busy household, Ruth sometimes found herself passing people in the hallway who, she says, “I hadn’t the slightest idea who they were.”

Obama, meanwhile, had once again become a habitué of the city’s nightspots and would migrate from one elegant hotel barroom to the next.

Buoyed by his new post and the keen interest others took in his command of econometrics, Double-Double now had mingi?Swahili for “many”? drinking companions.

Flush with their new salaries and Harambee Avenue offices, a certain element of the new African elite cultivated a lifestyle richly steeped in alcohol. One of their favorite places was the bar at the newly opened InterContinental, called The Big Five in reference to the five most difficult and dangerous animals to hunt in Africa’s far-flung game parks.

The intimate retreat offered an eclectic mix.

Patrons lounging on the plush leather stools could as likely rub shoulders with a dewy-eyed tourist from New Jersey, a minister who had just strolled out of the nearby Treasury building, or a World Bank project manager making notations on his napkin, all under the glassy-eyed gaze of the lion and gazelle mounted on the walls.

It also drew from the senior ranks of the civil service and the top echelon of the business community. Some of the regulars among the African elite were Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s current president and then Minister of Commerce and Industry, and Francis Masakhalia, Obama’s old Maseno School friend and by then an economist/statistician with the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development headed by Tom Mboya. Members of the nearby Parliament and a host of Treasury officers were often a part of the mix. When Obama tired of his double shots there, he often headed to the Panafric Hotel for a chaser or two of Chivas or Martel cognac.

To wrap up the evening he occasionally stopped at the Starlight Club for a spin around the dance floor before heading home to Woodley in the early hours of the morning.

Barely coherent

By the time he got there Obama was often stumbling and barely coherent. If Ruth or one of the children made the mistake of locking up before they went to bed, Obama would hammer loudly on the door and angrily demand that someone let him in. Gladys Ogolah, the next-door neighbour who knew Obama from their days at Central Bank together, heard every word of it.

“He would shout at Ruth, ‘Open the door, woman. Open the door,‘” Ogolah recalled. “He would say, ‘Why are you sleeping when I am not back at home. Open the door now.’ And then he would beat on the door, boom, boom, boom.”

Ogolah was hardly the only Woodley resident keenly aware of their baritone-voiced neighbour. Even when Obama was sober, his thundering voice wafted over the hedges and shattered the neighbourhood calm.

Sometimes, he was just calling to his children without making any effort to keep his voice down. But on the nights when he and Ruth got into an argument, his domineering voice could be heard the length of the Loddon Grove road and sometimes beyond.

Not long after they moved into the house, the Obamas had become a regular topic of neighborhood talk, little of it good. “Barack would come back from work or wherever he was in the middle of the night and they would fight very loudly,” recalled Ndolo Ayah, who lived nearby. “Everybody knew about it.

I think we all worried a bit about Ruth’s safety. Barack was not a violent person, but he could be very violent in his language.”

Gladys Ogolah and her husband, Boaz, got to know the Obamas well and not just because of the couple’s ongoing fighting. Boaz Ogolah was also an economist who worked in the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, and Obama respected his breadth of knowledge and experience.Sometimes Obama would drop in for a drink, and the two men would critique the other economists in government service whose academic credentials they considered inferior to their own.

Obama would also talk openly of some of the beautiful women to whom he was attracted.

“Barack was a Luo and a polygamist, and so this was no big deal to him,” said Ogolah. “He was very open about it.”

Just a few years younger than her neighbour, Gladys Ogolah grew to like her new American friend.

Ruth clearly enjoyed Kenya and appreciated many of its customs. Unlike some mzungu who tended to stick with their own, Ruth counted African women among her closest friends. She was also devoted to all of Obama’s children and even some of his closer cousins. She was the one who arranged their weekend outings swimming at the Panafric and Safari Park hotels or picnics in the countryside. And she was the one who drove them to their schools and doctors’ appointments and, at times, shielded them from their father.

“Ruth was a very great woman,” said Ezra Obama, sixty-one and a retired manager of market development for Coca-Cola living outside Nairobi. “She treated all of us children the same and I respected her very much.”

But no matter how much Ruth tried to make things run smoothly, Obama seemed always to have a complaint. And when his shouting developed into more aggressive behavior in the passing months, it was to Ogolah that Ruth often turned, running through the darkness to the safe haven of her neighbor’s kitchen. “Sometimes, when he came home late he would order her to cook for him in the middle of the night and if she would not he would hit her about the shoulders and neck,” recalled Gladys Ogolah.

“Ruth would run screaming down the road to our house crying. She was tired of being hit and tired of being called names. She had a very, very rough time and I was always worried about her.”

As a boy, Mark Ndesandjo was fearful of his towering father and tried hard to stay out of his way so he would not inadvertently trigger his rage.

“What I felt from him was coldness. There was fear. That is what I recall,” Ndesandjo said in an interview.

“I was physically afraid of him. He was a large looming man and you did not know what to expect. Is he going to hit you or your mother or other people in your family? He did not smile except when he was drinking or when he was with friends.”

Anxious as to what their father’s condition would be on his return home each night, the children passed the afternoon following school with mounting apprehension.

“Everyone in the house was totally on edge because you never knew when my father would be back,” Ndesandjo said in an interview. “When he got there he would probably be drunk.”

And then the light would go on and you would hear thuds and shouts and my mother’s voice rising and crying and screaming.

You would hear sounds like falling objects and it would go on and on and on and on. I instinctively bonded with my mother because she was afraid and she was also very protective of me. And that made my father even angrier.

He resented me because we were both now competing for my mother’s attention. I was my mother’s firstborn and she had shifted some of her attention away from him to me. Sometimes when she was holding me, he would shout at her, ‘Stop tending to that brat.’”

Nor was Obama’s abuse of Ruth confined to their home. As he became increasingly careless about shielding his attraction to other women, Obama repeatedly humiliated his wife in public.

“He would criticise me and flirt with other women right in front of me. Always, there were other women,” Ruth sighed.

“He took great pleasure in demeaning me because it made him feel better.” Ruth endured for two reasons.

The first was Mark Okoth, and the second would be named David Opiyo.

Within a few months of their return to Nairobi, Ruth learned that she was pregnant again and thus linked ever more inextricably to her husband.

Obama had made it clear to her that if she ever left him, he would prohibit her from seeing their children, and in Kenya’s patriarchal culture she had little doubt that he could do so easily.

Determined to raise her children as best she could while struggling to preserve the marriage that had produced them, Ruth took stock of her situation. Her job at Nestlé continued to provide both a professional outlet and much-needed emotional support.

Best of all, it gave her a source of self esteem that she was not finding at home. She also had an extensive network of friends, some of whom strongly urged her to take the children and flee under cover of night.

But Obama had never struck any of the children.

As long as it was only she upon whom he inflicted his rage, she felt she could manage. But it wasn’t easy.

One night Obama came home drunk as usual, but this time he had a pretty young woman clinging to his arm. It was not the first time he had done so. In the past Ruth had simply turned tearfully away as Obama and his woman friend slipped into one of the bedrooms together.

But on this particular night Obama insisted that Ruth leave their house so that he could use their marriage bed without her interfering. He was, after all, a Luo and had a right to any woman he might desire, he declared, his voice growing steadily louder.

But this time Ruth put her foot down. She refused to move anywhere, and as she screamed out her hurt, the neighbours, as ever, got an earful.

One of those neighbours was Achieng Oneko, one of the Kapenguria Six who were convicted in 1952 of supporting the Mau Mau rebels along with Kenyatta and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Oneko, who had abandoned his old cellmate to join Odinga and the Kenya People’s Union, was a legendary freedom fighter and a pioneering newspaper editor.

He was also a former Maseno student, although he attended many years before Obama.

Upset by the Obamas’ domestic furor, Oneko picked up the telephone and called his friend Ndolo Ayah. “He said, ‘You young people, you better talk to that friend of yours, Barack. He’s making a mess of himself,’” Ayah recounted. “So I got another friend of mine and we headed on over to Obama’s place to see what we could do.”

The situation was chaotic. Ruth was screaming so forcefully that it took her awhile to realise that there were visitors in the house. Obama was drunkenly explaining to her that, according to Luo tradition, “he could bring any woman into the house at any time.” said Ayah.

“I said, well, he comes from a different Luo group than ourselves because we are Luo and you don’t do this kind of thing. We tried to get Barack to come to Oneko’s place so we could talk it out but he just told us to go to hell, you know. And so we left. I suppose at some level we felt it was none of our business.”

Marriage strained

As his marriage with Ruth grew increasingly strained, Obama turned to his first wife, Kezia, for solace?at least that is what she maintains. While working as a waitress in a Mombasa restaurant in the late 1960s, Kezia says that Obama occasionally visited her when he passed through town on business.

As Ruth understood him, Obama’s reckless behaviours stemmed from a couple of sources.

The first were the rich and varied temptations of Nairobi life in the years after independence. Although Obama had managed to curb his more extreme inclinations while under scrutiny in the United States, once he returned to Kenya in the heady days of the mid-1960s, it was another story. On a scholarship in America, she noted, “he was being judged on a daily basis. He had to behave properly. There were parameters. But once he was back in Kenya and all his friends are saying,

‘Let’s go for the drink, let’s go dancing, let’s go find some women, let’s do this and that,’ he couldn’t hold back. All those pressures were too much for him. He just didn’t have the strength of character to resist.

And the more he succumbed, the more he succumbed.”

But Ruth believes the greater source of Obama’s undoing lay deeply embedded in his gnawing lack of faith in himself, exacerbated by the perils of Kenyan politics. Kenyatta’s chokehold on matters of state meant that little could happen without his sanction or that of members of his inner circle.

Obama had already been blackballed for his aggressive critique of Sessional Paper No. 10, and his critical commentary at Central Bank hadn’t helped matters. Much as he yearned to be a Big Man, Obama was far from it.

That his fortunes were dependent on favours from others and the shifting sands of Kenya’s powerful elites made matters only worse. Indeed, since his collision with Harvard administrators, he had found the doors to power closed to him at almost every turn.

Uncertainty, coupled with the Luo habit of self-inflation, drove him to chronic exaggeration intended to compensate for his perceived shortcomings. Although Obama had abundant company in his heavy drinking, he was driven by more than the cultural excesses of the moment. Also contributing to his dark mood was the evolving cast of Kenyatta’s inner circle, ever more authoritarian and intolerant of challenge. By the end of 1967 the mushrooming political schism between Kenyatta and the radicals led by Oginga Odinga had distinctly worsened.

Between 1966 and 1969 Kenyatta moved to stymie the opposition and isolate his Luo challengers.

With Odinga now effectively marginalised, Kenyatta’s Kikuyu coterie began to look increasingly askance at Tom Mboya, who now stood as the likely heir apparent. Mboya was not only immensely popular among a broad swath of trade union members and members of parliament but was also believed to have the critical support of the Western countries, particularly the United States.

As the aging Kenyatta’s health began to deteriorate, many Kikuyus were increasingly alarmed at the possibility of the presidency falling to a non-Kikuyu. Rumours about Mboya’s political intentions were rampant. That he was interested in the presidency was no secret. Some whispered that he was forging a secret alliance with Odinga to assume a spot within the KPU.

Others suspected a more devious agenda.

Either way, the hostility of Kenyatta’s inner circle toward Mboya escalated rapidly.

Unlike many who threw their lot with either one of the two Luo giants, Odinga or Mboya, Obama retained ties with both political camps, as he was drawn to aspects of each of their platforms. As he had expressed so forcefully in his critique of Sessional Paper No. 10, Obama believed that certain socialist principles that Odinga articulated should be a feature of the country’s economic underpinnings.

But he also saw a place for the capitalist principles that the West-leaning Mboya espoused. He was particularly incensed at the factions within KANU that were seeking to undermine Mboya, their own party’s secretary-general.

Mboya’s exalted cyle

Although removed from Mboya’s exalted circle, Obama continued to look to Mboya for guidance. Their relationship had grown more distant over the years as Mboya’s star rose ever higher, but they nonetheless maintained a friendship throughout. Mboya’s increasing political isolation gave Obama one more reason for dismay.

Like others disillusioned with the government’s performance, Obama regarded Kenyatta as a bitter disappointment. In the months after he returned with Ruth, it seemed that much of what he had long dreamed for his country had failed to materialize.

Far from standing as a boldly independent African nation, dependence on foreign capital still hobbled Kenya.

At the same time, its domestic assets were being amassed in the hands of a privileged few.

Obama was an economist who believed that free enterprise played a critical role in a democracy, but he also had a deep respect for African communalism. He felt strongly that the majority should share in the country’s bounty. Instead, he saw unfettered capitalism and, increasingly, a rampant tribalism eroding the promises of uhuru.

Although Obama clearly had difficulty with authority of any kind, he was hardly alone in believing that his own Luo roots were coming to be a distinct liability. As he grew increasingly frustrated with the Kikuyus’ tight grip on the country’s politics, he began to drink ever more heavily.

His frustration with the country’s course coupled with his own personal failure to attain the heights that he believed should have been within easy reach were fast congealing into an acid stew of resentment.

To be continued — Fom Nation Newspaper Online, Kenya

   By: Gwada Ogot
In Kenya, assassinations have been a regular feature of its succession politics. Kenyan scholar, Charles N. Mwaura in a study paper titled – ‘Political Succession and Related Conflicts in Kenya,’ notes that when elite interests broaden, violent conflict does manifest itself through assassinations of leading political figures.

The conflicts, he writes, often relatively restrain and characterize by competition among elites for political power and restrict within the status-quo. Assassinations and murder, he says, become alternative instruments of elite competition against those who threaten the ruling faction and he mentions Pio Pinto, Tom Mboya, Ronald Ngala, J.M. Kariuki, Robert Ouko and Alexander Muge, as key casualties in the first three decades of elite contest.

Tom Mboya was just 39 years old when he was shot dead by a lone gunman in 1969 while Josiah Mwangi Karuiki was barely 42 years old in 1975 when he was murdered by suspected state agents in horrid circumstances.

Public suspicion for their murders was largely directed at heirs-apparent within the Kenyatta government. Mboya and Karuiki emanated from Kenya’s two rival ethnic groups- the Luo and Kikuyu but despite this, both remained popular in each other’s ethnic backyards.

Several factors however eradicate murder as a plausible action today. Above the fact that the nation’s newly promulgated constitution bars any presidential candidate with pending criminal charges from contesting elections, the ongoing actions against senior members of the status quo by the International Criminal Court at The Hague and the unfolding events in the Middle East and North Africa also contribute.

Playlist: Kenya — Political Assassinations [ MORE FROM YOUTUBE ]

   Independent Kenya Leaders(Early sixties) – From Left: Paul Ngei, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Jomo Kenyatta,
   Tom Mboya and Njoroge Mungai

So in the fourth decade, play in the Kibaki succession manifests through Courts of Law, Media and Parliament. The variation is that while the assassinations of the first three decades’ were executed as early pre-emptive actions, the fourth decade is typified by new media character assassination and criminal proceedings. Yet, in spite of this, murder cannot be completely ruled out in the Kibaki succession.

In his study of Conflict in Africa, T. William Zartman, identifies attempts by post-colonial regimes to self-consolidate and to control national political space as a primary cause of conflict including external forces with vested interest in who captures state power.

The chilling assassination of Dr. Robert Ouko in 1982 provides sufficient illustration. Dr. Ouko was found murdered hardly a month after a trip to America, during which he was supposedly identified by American government officials as a possible successor to then president Moi.

Currently, several presidential contenders face serious criminal allegations- most from the status quo, in effect validating Mwaura’s contention of an exclusive contest. The main alter of sacrifice has been the internet including the traditional media, courts and of course parliament.

Hon. Moses Wetangula, the immediate former Minister for Foreign Affairs and new leader of the Ford Kenya Party, was compelled to step down from office after serious corruption accusations were tabled against him in parliament. Regardless of this, formal charges have yet to be instituted against him.

Another contender, Eugene Wamalwa, the 43 year old Member of Parliament for Saboti constituency and younger brother to former vice president, the late Michael Wamalwa also faced mention in parliament on allegations of drug dealing just as he was trying to kick start his presidential bid.

Likewise, secondary aspirants like Jazz player Joseph Hellon and his friend turned foe Quincy Timberlake haven’t been spared internet sleaze and court action either. Roundly shred on the internet, Hellon was in addition humiliated in a much publicized house eviction while Timberlake was locked up for days before being arraigned in court as a suspected illegal alien. Both actions followed their launch of the Placenta Party and declaration to contest the presidency.

However, the matter of William Ruto, 44 and 48 years old Uhuru Kenyatta, son to Kenya’s independence leader, Jomo Kenyatta attracts particular mention. Both face criminal charges at The Hague and therefore stand technically barred from contesting the presidency in 2012 unless acquitted. Besides, there is the historical irony of Uhuru’s case owing to events surrounding his father’s succession and the potential impact of their trials on the Kibaki succession.

Rightly or wrongly, both fault presidential rival and status quo compatriot Prime Minister Odinga for their predicament, in circumstances they directly link to the Kibaki succession.

Messrs. Ruto, Uhuru and Raila share a knotty history since the 1998 cooperation and subsequent merger between the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the National Democratic Party (NDP) in 2002. All could lose out on the presidency in related but nevertheless completely different circumstances courtesy of their present quandary.

Whether by design or default, with the exception of Uhuru Kenyatta, all the Kibaki succession casualties hail from the larger Western Kenya. The issue here is not the guilt or innocence of these individuals- for that is the courts business-but rather the indication of a regional consolidation stratagem when beamed from Kenya’s fractured political and ethno-geographic fabric.

Likewise, frequent accusations from a house of representatives littered with men and women of straw, raises eyebrows, principally in regard to the current Rota of who is tied first and next for guillotine.

As the Kibaki succession date draws closer, the message, especially to young presidential aspirants is clear- Beware!

Yet in practice, admonition hardly counts where political ambitions are concerned and more candidates are expected. As Marcus Garvey once fittingly opined- ‘Men who are in earnest are not afraid of consequences’- and the trillion dollar question is- Who next?

   [ 'Mwalimu' Julius Kambarage Nyerere ]
It takes extraordinary personal strength for a leader to admit in public that he is a failure.

Julius Nyerere is the only one I know who has ever done it.

Some time towards the end, he stood on a podium to announce that he had failed to achieve the social goal that had driven him into leadership.

But if you have genuinely tried, failure is to be respected.

Julius Nyerere is among the extremely few world leaders who have selflessly attempted great things for their national peoples.

Other African leaders — notably Leopold Senghor and Tom Mboya — have spoken of “African socialism” as a means of restoring human dignity to the African person after a protracted era of colonial brutalization and dehumanization. But none has ever offered a plausible definition of “African socialism.”

Mwalimu Nyerere was the first — probably the only — African nationalist leader to cast a serious moral and intellectual eye upon Africa’s “extended family” tradition and weave a practical national development philosophy around it.

Ujamaa had two basic components.

The Ujamaa Village was an attempt to revive traditional rural communalism — bringing groups of villages together, investing collectively in them and running them through modern democratic precepts.

Since the turn of the 21st century, Kenya’s own leaders have divided and sub-divided what used to be called districts into veritable village units, claiming a purpose similar to “Nyerereism” — to bring utilities and social services “closer to the people.”

The second component was much more theoretically shaky — a series of nationalizations intended to bring urban commerce and industry under state control, the state purporting to be the public’s trustee.

But the 1967 Arusha Declaration in which this doctrine of “socialism and self-reliance” was enunciated opened a Pandora’s box of ideology. Ideas ran from the extreme right to others that were so leftist that, in the circular prism of ideas, they actually bordered on the right!

In a single-party system, all these ideas were forced to contend with one another within that party.

It was no wonder, then, that Marxist-Leninists, Bepari (capitalists) and even Kabaila (feudalists) held central positions both in the party and in government.

This, indeed, was where Nyerere began to reveal his greatness.

In other “socialist” situations — such as Sekou Toure‘s Conakry — every thought and activity deemed dangerous would simply have been banned, often on pain of death.

Nyerere encouraged even his bitterest opponents to express themselves freely and without fear.

And he often took them on — not by means of such state machinery as our Nyayo House basement, but intellectually, replying to each critic point by point.

The Nationalist (the party’s own organ) and The Standard Tanzania (the government publication on which Ben Mkapa and I worked — later renamed Daily News) routinely published news, features, columns and letters expressing the most diverse views.

Nyerere demanded only that his detractors produce the facts and figures and weave these into cogent thought.

“Argue, don’t shout!” he once admonished his equivalents of the loudmouthed but empty-headed coalition that rules Kenya.

No, Mwalimu was not a revolutionary in any Marxist sense.

Like all of Africa’s petty bourgeois radicals in power at that time — Ben Bella, Kaunda, Keita, Nasser, Nkrumah, Obote, Ore — he rejected outright all of Marx and Lenin’s theories on class, revolution and party organisation.

His, said he, was a national mass movement in which every Tanzanian must participate.

Such a policy might sound noble, but it was what finally proved Dr Nyerere’s Achilles heel.

You cannot implement any “socialist” program except through a committed vanguard.

For his Ujamaa Village projects, he relied on the peasantry, a property-owning class whose members, as a rule, are interested only in their small individual property.

For his nationalization program, he relied on another property-owning class, what the Kiswahili Academy called vibwanyenye.

This propertied urban class was led by the educated elite who monopolized the civil service, the police, the provincial administration, the army, the classroom, the shrine — a social stratum deeply drilled right from the classroom in liberal Western individualism and self-pursuit.

In 1972, goaded by Idi Amin‘s overthrow of Milton Obote — the ally across the Great Lake — Mwalimu issued a set of ruling-party “Guidelines” called Mwongozo, which, among other things, introduced an elaborate leadership code.

But to no avail. Soon the Ujamaa Village administrative network, as well as the two custodians of nationalized property — the National Development Corporation and the State Trading Corporation — were drowning in a well of corruption deeper than Lake Tanganyika.

Mwalimu reacted by decentralizing the leaderships of both those bodies and the central governance system — succeeding only in spreading bureaucratic ineptitude thinner on the ground, thus making corruption much more difficult to detect.

By replacing the colonial educational structure with what he called Elimu yenye Manufaa (“functional education“), he enabled Tanzania to kill up to five birds with one stone.

Tanzanian is the only African country that has totally banished illiteracy, and the Three Rs are solidly linked to vocational interests.

In the process, Tanzania became the African country with the highest degree of national self-consciousness and — through it and through Kiswahili — has almost annihilated the bane of Kenya that we call tribalism.

But, as a rule, internal policy is what guides a country’s foreign policy.

Any nation that tries to cultivate self-sufficiency, self-efficiency, self-respect and self-pride will find it morally compelling to share these ideals with other nations the world over.

Ujamaa inspired Tanzania into spending much of its meagre resources on liberating the rest of Africa and the world from the colonial yoke.

At a time when Nairobi was drowning in crude elite grabbing, Dar es Salaam was a Mecca of the world’s national liberation movements, and a hotbed of global intellectual thought.

From this perspective, it is justifiable to say that Mwalimu Julius Kambarage, son of Chief Nyerere, is the greatest and most successful leader that Africa has ever produced since the European colonial regime collapsed 50 years ago.

   [ Dr. Julius Nyerere's Mausoleum -- Butiama, Tanzania ][ Enlarge Pic ]

References:

1. Mwalimu Nyerere Videos

2. Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere on The Web

3. Julius Kambarage Nyerere: 10 years after Tanzania poorer for his death, richer for his life

About The Author: Philip Ochieng — is a Kenyan Luo, and an Editor with the Nation Media Group. Like Obama Senior, he too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [ when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities ]. He first met Obama Senior in Tom Mboya’s Nairobi office [ Mboya was then the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour ]. Obama and Ochieng met up again on returning to Nairobi and remained drinking buddies for many years.

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HARARE, Zimbabwe (CNN) — Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was in stable condition and recovering from head injuries Friday night after a car wreck that killed his wife, Susan, medical sources told CNN.

The crash, on a busy two-lane highway between Tsvangirai’s hometown of Buhera and the capital city of Harare, comes just weeks after the start of a power-sharing agreement between Tsvangirai and his political rival, President Robert Mugabe.

Analysts say the crash is bound to raise suspicion of foul play, with one former U.S. diplomat calling for an outside investigation, saying it is not the first time that a political foe of Mugabe has been killed or injured in a car crash.

Members of Tsvangirai’s political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, said Friday that it was too early to tell whether the crash is anything other than an accident.

Tsvangirai’s aide and driver also were injured in the head-on collision with a large truck, according to his spokesman, James Maridadi.

Movement for Democratic Change spokesman Nelson Chamisa said he spoke to Tsvangirai at the hospital, and the party leader was in “relatively stable” condition. [ MORE ]

    Zimbabwean traffic police stand guard over the wreckage of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s
    vehicle, south of the capital Harare, Friday, March 7 2009.

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We have witnessed this mode of political assassination before — in Africa

Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi, both of Kenya, Idi Amin of Uganda and many other African dictators killed their detractors by staging accidents.

Victims of Kenyatta’s assassinations include — Pio Gama da Pinto, Ronald Ngala (a land rights crusader), C. M. G. Argwings Kodhek (MP and human rights lawyer), and the populist MP from Nyandarua Josiah Mwangi (JM) Kariuki, fierce critic of Kenyatta’s land grabbing disease.

Daniel Arap Moi, Kenyatta’s vice president for many years, picked up the killing after Jomo died, when he became president of Kenya — murdering and then burning the body of Dr. Robert Ouko, the then Foreign Minister in his government.

Idi Amin of Uganda, who was perhaps the most brutal military dictator to wield power in post-independence Africa, “staged” numerous accidental deaths too — Anglican Archbishop, Janani Luwum, was killed in a simulated car crash in Kampala — a fate suffered by many other political opponents.

I have a very strong feeling that Mugabe wants Morgan Tsvangirai DEAD!

Therefore his visit to Tsvangirai’s bedside immediately after the “ACCIDENT,” smells every bit as devious as Jomo Kenyatta attending Thomas Joseph Mboya’s memorial in Nairobi, in 1969 — after hiring the assassin who gunned him down.

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Tom Mboya Funeral

Tom Mboya & Dr. Martin L King at a civil rights rally in DC

African Nationalist Thomas Joseph Mboya coordinated an “airlift” in 1959 of 81 Kenyan students to the USA to attend college. With the help of Dr. King, the African American Students Foundation and its sponsors, Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, and Sidney Poitier, Mboya raised sufficient funds to cover the students’ travel expenses. One of the students was a certain Barack Husein Obama snr., the late father of US President Barack Obama. This rally was in Washington DC, 1959

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By PHILIP OCHIENG

On Tuesday, a “Luo” individual will become the most powerful man in the world. A Luo? Of course. Why else would Kenya’s lakeland community which goes by that name be so electrified by Barack Obama’s impending anointment as the commander-in-chief of the world’s only superpower?

Yet the question is stark: Is Obama a Luo? To answer “yes” or “no,” one would first have to define a Luo. There are at least two possibilities. There is, first, what the Luo themselves may imagine as their blood heritage.

There is, secondly, what Paul Mboya called Luo Kitgi Gi Timbegi, a book in Dholuo which describes the character and customs of “Jokowiny.” For the character and customs of a tribal community need not coincide with its blood composition.

Language and culture

We should stress the term “Jokowiny” because, although it is almost forgotten now, that is the correct name of the Luo of Kenya and Tanzania, a people whose language and culture are almost uniform from the Luhya border to Tanzania’s Mara.

The attitude by Jokowiny that we are the Luo alienates many pedigree Luo communities, such as the Padhola, Lang’o, Kumam, Acholi and Karamojong of Uganda, the Alur of Congo, and the Nuer, Anuak Nuer, Dinka and Shilluk of the Sudan.

Indeed, the Sudanese and northern Ugandan Luo are more genuinely Luo than we because they are less removed from the original home of dispersal and, therefore, less influenced by non-Nilotic elements.

But yes, by a certain definition, the 44th President of the United States is JAKOWINY – JAKOWINY (with an “A”) being the singular form of JOKOWINY (with an “O”). It means “descendant of Owiny.”

Owiny was a brother of Adhola, the eponymous ancestor of Charles Onyango Obbo‘s Jopadhola. The PA in “JOPADHOLA” and in other Ugandan and Sudanese Luo languages is their equivalent of KA among Jokowiny (and means “of,” or “offspring of” or “homestead of“).

The celebrated name OKOT P’BITEK is really “Okot PA Bitek” (“Okot of Bitek” or “Okot son of Bitek“). In both pronunciation and writing, the “a” in PA and KA is usually dropped when the next word begins with a vowel. That is why we say JAKOWINY, and not JA-KA-OWINY.

The PA in Padhola means the same thing as the KA in such Kowiny place names as KARACHUONYO (“home of Rachuonyo“), KAMAGAMBO (“land of Magambo“) and KANYIDOTO (“where the daughters of Doto are married“).

The word element KA was common to all Nilotes, including the ancient Egyptians. The word “EGYPT” itself is only a European corruption of HEKAPTAH (“home of the god Ptah“). The KAPTAH part of HEKAPTAH is what has come down to us as “COPT.”

The same word appears in such place-names among the Kalenjin – a Nilotic people – as Kabartonjo (“land of Bartonjo“), Kabianga (“dwelling place of Bianga“) and Kabarnet (“Barnet’s base” – named after a colonial Anglo-Saxon missionary).

For the Luo belong to the culturo-linguistic super-community that anthropologists call Nilotic or Nilo-Saharan – which includes the Maasai, Kalenjin and Teso – and who now spread from Tanzania to Egypt and from Ethiopia and Eritrea to Darfur and Nigeria.

Barack Obama Senior belonged to KOGELO (“homestead of Ogelo“). He was Jakogelo (“offspring of Ogelo’s home“). Jokogelo (“people of Ogelo“) are a clan of the Alego. That is significant.

In his book History of the Southern Luo, B.A. Ogot – the eminent Luo historian – suggests that the Alego (and the professor’s own Gem people) are the quintessence of Jokowiny.

They were the first to arrive in what is now Kenya. Adhola and Owiny were leaders of an advance detachment of the Luo as they drifted along the Nile – fish being their staple. On hitting Lake Victoria, they exchanged words, and Owiny was forced to move ahead.

It was after wandering through what are now Manyala, Samia, Imbo and Sakwa – driving the autochthonous Luhya (a Bantu cluster) from their homes – that Owiny and his followers finally settled in what we now call Alego.

It was from Alego that Jokowiny spread out, northwards to Gem and Ugenya, eastwards to Seme, Kisumu and Winam and southwards to Asembo, Uyoma and across the string of water – Nyanza Gulf ? which intrudes into and divides Kowiny-land into two parts.

   LuoLand – Kenya | Click Here For MAP of KENYA |

Yet it is appropriate that the term “Jokowiny” is now in disuse, except among Adhola’s people. They retain in folk memory the bitter quarrel that forced their brother Owiny eastwards. So they know all the Luo to the east of them as Jokowiny.

Completely swallowed

But since then other Luo and even non-Luo branches have arrived to commingle with Jokowiny. Among these are my own group – Abasuba – who, although completely swallowed by the Luo, were originally not even Nilo-Saharan, but a composite of Bantu refugees, mostly from Buganda.

A culturally imperious community, its ethnic arrogance has been heightened manifold by the colonially created ethnic rivalry that characterises Kenya’s politics. But I repeat that the arrogance cannot be explained by any “ethnic purity.”

The Kenya Luo are so influenced by other communities that they are a mind-boggling heterogeneity of blood, culture and language. One reason is that they adopted exogamy (the taking of wives from other tribes) very early in their Southward Ho.

They shared with the ancient Hellenes the habit of waylaying foreign women and literally pulling them into bed as wives. So for Senior to grab wives from as far away as Hawaii and Massachusetts – and Caucasian ones to boot – was no big deal.

Given time, he might even have grabbed an Afghan, a Cherokee, an Eskimo, a Fijian, an Iraqi, a Lithuanian, a Mongolian, a Pole, a Shona, a Vietnamese, a Wolof, a Yoruba and a Zaramo – not to mention hundreds from Luoland, apart from Kezia.

The Luo would have noted his “he-man-ship” with complete approval. That is what makes them such a “bloody” heterogeneity. But that, too, is why, in their view, Senior’s son, the 44th President of the United States, cannot be anything but a Luo.

They are fiercely patriarchal, thus the offspring belong strictly to the father’s tribe, clan or what the Luo call THUR and DHOOT. THUR refers to the ridge that rises between two streams and is often identified with a clan.

DHOOT (the two “o”s pronounced separately) is the word for “door.” It literally means “mouth of the house” – from DHOK, “mouth,” and OT, “house.” The “mouth” element can be seen also in the term DHOLUO, the name of Jokowiny’s language, literally: “mouth of the Luo.”

Jokowiny assume that people speak with their mouths. But not all Luo communities think so. The Acholi know their language as LEPLUO (“tongue of the Luo“). However, used away from real doors, the word DHOOT refers to the immediate genealogical “house,” namely, the gentile clan.

Person of my house

All Nilotes had the habit of calling a spouse a “house.” In polite society, a Luo speaks of JAODA (“my wife” or “my husband“), a word which translates literally as “person of my house.” When, in Genesis, Joseph says he has found favour in “Pharaoh’s house,” he is resorting to the Nilotic euphemism for “wife,” here the queen.

Barack Obama is 50 per cent Caucasian, but as far as the Luo are concerned, only a Luo is capable of deeds as heroic as Barack’s. In tradition, the Luo divided humanity into three categories ? Joluo (the noblest), Jolang’o and Jomwa. The rest of mankind were Mwa, worse than useless.

But, of course, a shameless Mwa people called Britons punctured gaping holes into this bloated arrogance just by hurling a magical spear known as the gun.

Nevertheless, because he has done those deeds a whole continent away from Luoland, Barack outshines Adhola, Aeneas, Ausonius, Cadmus, Cain, Danaos, Delphos, Hesy, Imhotep, Luanda Magere, Gor Mahia, Tom Mboya, Memnon, Menes, Nyikang’o, Jaramogi Odinga, Owiny and Pelasgus among other Nilotic heroes.

In short, his mother does not enter into the equation, even though she contributed 50 per cent of his biological make-up and almost 100 per cent of his cultural upbringing.

As far as the Luo are concerned, Barack Obama is 200 per cent Luo.

That is the point you miss by dismissing Barack Obama as a mere American who will not give priority to Kenya, Luoland and Nyangoma-Kogelo. A people does not live by bread alone. By pulling off a feat like that and boosting their pride to the utmost, Barack has already delivered.

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About The Author: Philip Ochieng — is a Kenyan Luo, and an Editor with the Nation Media Group. Like Obama Senior, he too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities]. He first met Obama Senior in Tom Mboya’s Nairobi office [Mboya was then the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour]. Obama and Ochieng met up again on returning to Nairobi and remained drinking buddies for many years.

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