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FOR THE RECORD

...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.

Mau Mau membership required taking an oath which was not exactly frat boy material. The colonial secretary, Oliver Lyttleton wrote:

“The Mau Mau oath is the most bestial, filthy and nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed. I have never felt the forces of evil to be so near and as strong as in Mau Mau. As I wrote memoranda or instruction, I would suddenly see a shadow fall across the page-the horned shadow of the Devil himself.”

Little information is available as to the specific language of individual oaths, but we know that the process was taken seriously and had more elements of magic than politics. Kikuyu were under tremendous pressure to take the oath and join the movement.

Counter insurgency expert, Major Frank Kitson describes a Mau Mau body snatching raid:

“The gang, frenzied by the thought of blood, slashed around with their simis (a Kikuyu sword) and fired their guns. One old man, slower than the rest, was caught and hamstrung. He fell at the feet of his pursuers, covering his face with his arms to protect it from the slicing swords, but a mouse in a mechanical mincing machine would have had a better chance of survival. One terrorist hacked off a foot, and another sliced off his testicles to use later in an Oathing ceremony. A third gouged out his eyes with a staple and put them in his pocket for the same purpose. When they had finished, most of the gang came by to cut and stab the twitching corpse. They then licked the blood off their simis and moved off into the night; having first set fire to all the huts they could see.”

Other writers claim the oath was far more innocuous. However, a 322 page report by Career Colonial Administrator, Frank D. Cornfield supports the seamier version:

“By compelling Mau Mau members to violate not only Christian ethics but every tribal one as well, Mau Mau leaders deliberately reduced their victims to a state where a man who took the Mau Mau oath was cut off ‘from all hope, outside Mau Mau, in this world or the next. Cornfield found that to achieve this absolute loyalty to the movement, ‘ . . . leadership forced its recruits, voluntary or involuntary, to seal their oaths by digging up corpses and eating their putrefied flesh, copulating with sheep, dogs or adolescent girls, and by drinking the famed ‘Kaberichia cocktail’-a mixture of semen and menstrual blood.”

They sound like earnest freedom fighters, right? Again substantiating that Barack Obama has never known a normal person, his grandfather’s support for the Mau Mau was manifest enough to get Hussein arrested. The struggle for independence from the Brits may have been a noble one, but not justification for the kind of depravity indulged by the Mau Mau. Longtime nationalist leader and Mau Mau manager Jomo Kenyatta studied economics in Moscow in 1932. We are not supposed to make too much of that.