Obama and Kenya. Matthew Carotenuto
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” activities like theft and prostitution because they were “detribalized.” This ideology rendered ethnicity as a romanticized and rural variety of patriarchal control and argued that Africans who were separated “from family, clan and tribal authority as well as from social codes of behavior, discipline, custom and perhaps religion[,] which originally guided their thoughts and actions,” were operating dangerously outside of customary and colonial legal systems.23 Providing an easy alternative to dealing with the real structural problems of racial inequality, “detribalization” discourse helped squelch concerns about the squalid, precarious conditions of life and work that characterized urban African environments.
Luo people were deeply troubled not merely by the material hardships of migrant life, but also by the upending of sociocultural life and the absence of community. The twinned questions of how to survive in an urban setting and what it meant to be Luo outside of Western Kenya were answered through intellectual projects and politico-cultural organizations. These intellectual works and political labors built on shared linguistic capacities, cultural affinities, geographic origins, and economic needs that were much deeper and more complex than the blunt colonial category “tribe.”
Intellectual projects undertaken by Luo from the mid-1930s onward were shaped by a confluence of internal forces and external influences. Luo identity—taking in concerns ranging from religious conversion to gendered social morality to civic virtue—was contested by a number of historical actors throughout East Africa’s urban centers. In the cities, under the disciplinary gaze of colonial authorities and in the comparative view of black Kenyans from other ethnic groups, “Luo men knew themselves to be under examination,” Derek Peterson writes. “They conceived of East Africa’s urban environment as a competitive theatre in which men and women alike were obliged to behave with credible decorum.”24 Exclusive of these external influences, Luo struggled with how to reconcile notions of cultural comportment rooted in Nyanza with the demands of life in an environment that was constantly in flux. Luo intellectuals developed historical projects that addressed where the Luo had come from and where they were going; what had made “Luoness” over time.25
The text cited at the beginning of this section, Paul Mboya’s Luo: Kitgi gi tembegi (Luo: Customs and traditions), effectively constituted a vernacular textbook for Luo identity and provided the foundation for future intellectual projects. Through a series of topical chapters—for example, “Law about War,” “Matters on Marriage,” “A Polygamous Man and His Home”—the text charts the cultural responsibilities and acceptable limits of “Luoness” with encyclopedic authority. Written at the apex of the colonial era, the book endeavors to answer many of the pressing sociocultural questions of the day through reflections on the preservation of the Luo past and to offer a set of principles by which every proper Luo speaker should abide.
Luo-language newspapers, most notably Ramogi, were another discursive space in which the intellectual project came to terms with urban life and its implicit demands to define and perform proper cultural comportment in circumstances that were very different from those of “home.” The newspaper’s editors, writers, and readers engaged in debates that aimed to define the responsibilities and limits attached to “Luoness.” Some articles and letters called for Luo to invest in Western Kenya. Others debated the “immoral” lifestyle and habits of those living outside of Western Kenya. Articles often spoke of the need for greater social restraint and discipline in order to maintain Luo respectability in gendered ways. For example, a 1948 editorial labeled independent Luo women in towns as “prostitutes” and argued, “They should be watched by the Luo Union and any relative found allowing these girls to be prostitutes should be punished.”26
While Ramogi often reinforced patriarchal notions of Luo identity, African women occasionally wrote forceful critiques of male attitudes. Connecting debates about the immorality of town life with the social responsibilities of rural familial ties, one woman admonished Luo migrant laborers, who, she explained, “cannot do without women and begin keeping prostitutes with the results that all the money they earn is spent on them and perpetual drinking, where as their wives and children are suffering in the reserves without any help or information through correspondence.”27 Overall, the newspaper provided a central arena