“...A weak argument, at best.”
Without going back through numerous links, to the best of my recollection, there have been articles that maintained the grandfather was arrested and detained in 1949. In ‘Dreams’ it is contended that he only spent six months in detention. Other sources state two years. None that I have read are backed by any records from the period. The allegations of torture remain ALLEGED.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/11504
Obama’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama worked as a cook for a British army officer when he became involved with the Kenyan independence movement. Grandpa Obama was arrested in 1949 as a supporter of the Kikuyu Central Association, the organization that ultimately spawned the Mau Mau. There is no question that the Kenyan penal system of that era was a violent place; mere imprisonment was not considered sufficiently punitive; torture was ubiquitous. Grandpa Hussein’s wife tells of horrific torture of her husband at the hands of the Brits. Some of her recollections are questionable however: one scene of hell on earth she describes is actually a pretty good description of the process of delousing.
There is also no dispute that if Hussein was arrested for subversive activities, he was up to something more than just community organizing. He certainly would have been subject to some Enhanced Interrogation Techniques using more than a caterpillar or Neti pot.
The left wants to paint the Mau Mau as yet another misunderstood group of oppressed victims. The truth is; the Mau Maus were vicious guerilla fighters. Contrary to popular folklore, the Mau Mau slaughtered far more Kikuyu citizens than the whites they were supposedly rebelling against.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/system/topicRoot/The_Mau-Mau_revolt_/
allegations of torture remain ALLEGED
AND could be a cover for his cooperation or actually spying.
http://thelastcrusade.org/2009/07/20/papa-obama-was-a-down-and-dirty-commie/
Obama Sr. gave full vent to his Marxism in “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” which appeared in the July 1965 edition of East African Journal, pp. 26-33.
snip
The Obama’s family, we now know, shares a common history of rabid anti-white sentiments.
The president’s grandfather Onyango Obama became involved with the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), a radical organization that sought to drive the British settlers from Kenya by violence. Many members of the Association became leaders of the Mau Mau Movement that spread terror throughout Kenya during the 1950s.
Members of the KCA were obliged to take an oath to fight and defend themselves against all white colonists and Western European intruders. The oath included animal sacrifice and the ingestion of blood. The ritual reportedly also included cannibalism, ritual zoophilia with goats and other animals, and sexual orgies.
snip
In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama writes that his grandfather served six months in prison and was later found innocent to the charges of belonging to a terrororist organization and overt sedition.
But Onyango remained incarcerated in a high security prison for over two years.
To arrest a Luo ex-soldier, who must have been a senior figure in the community, is pretty serious,” said Professor David Anderson, director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and an authority on the Mau Mau rebellion. They must have had some damn good evidence.”
The severity of Onyango’s crimes is further evidenced by the fact that he was transported and confined to the Kamiti prison, a national maximum-security facility outside Nairobi.
Fred -- We may be on different pages here. My original post was in response to your post of "The grandfather: Before working as a cook for missionaries in Nairobi..."
I'm not particularly interested in who Hussein Onyonga Obama worked for -- most of his story is concocted hooey by now, I suspect -- but I think the "when" may be important in regard to the late 1950's, as illustrated by the Hagberg narrative that "the young Obama Sr. left for the University of Hawaii before the first formal student airlift" which gains credibility from the fact that the Hagbergs were actively involved in the airlifts, and that the Journal of American History December 2008 entry states, in footnote 25:
[25] Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson appeal letter, Aug. 24, 1959, box 3, Robinson Papers; Smith, “East African Airlifts of 1959, 1960, and 1961,” 25–43. Barack Obama wrote that his father “had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States,” but a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does not contain the name of the elder Obama. Tom Shachtman, working in the African-American Students Foundation (AASF) papers for a book on the airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from the AASF but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his way to the University of Hawaii.