Tale of British brutality toward Barack Obama’s grandfather probably untrue, book claims

Mr Onyango’s third wife, Sarah, has claimed that her late husband had his
testicles crushed and his nails and buttocks pierced as jailers at Kamiti
Prison outside Nairobi sought information on the rebels.

Mrs Onyango, who is now 90, said Mr Onyango still bore scars from his
treatment when he died in 1979, and that the story tarnished her
step-grandson’s view of the British.

The President “has never believed the British do anything for a common
good, rather than their selfish interests,” she told an interviewer in
2010. “He said the whole act sounded barbaric. He wondered why the
British never respected African culture.”

Mr Obama denies this, yet the story has over the past four years been cited as
an explanation for his snub of then-prime minister Gordon Brown, his early
reluctance to talk about the “special relationship” and his
decision to return a bust of Churchill that George W. Bush had displayed in
the White House.

However, Maraniss claims that while “incidents of that sort certainly
happened”, it “seems unlikely” that Mr Obama’s grandfather
was one such victim. “Five people who had close connections to Hussein
Onyango said they doubted the story or were certain it did not happen,”
he wrote in Barack Obama – The Making of the Man.

Zablon Okatch, who worked with Mr Onyango as a servant for American diplomats
after his supposed detention, told Maraniss: “Hussein was never jailed.
I know that for a fact. It would have been difficult for him to get a job
with a white family, let alone a diplomat, if he once served in jail”.

Dick Opar, a former senior Kenyan police official, said he “would have
known” if Mr Onyango had been detained. “People make up stories,”
said Mr Opar. “If you get arrested, you say it was the fight for
independence, but they are arrested for another thing”.

Even one of Mr Onyango’s daughters, Auma Magak, told Maraniss: “He was
not detained”, suggesting that he had once been kidnapped by thugs and
the story had been twisted through the generations.

Maraniss also notes that no records exist of the detention and that within a
year of his supposed imprisonment, Mr Onyango’s son, Barack Obama senior,
was accepted into a prestigious boarding school in western Kenya.

The alleged inaccuracy in Mr Obama’s backstory is one of several noted by
Maraniss, who also discloses the true identities of several girlfriends that
the President compressed into one character in his 1995 memoir. A White
House spokesman declined to comment.

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