Justin Elliott takes a look at Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion in the context of Mike Huckabee's insistence that Obama must be sympathetic to them because his father was Kenyan:
To portray the Obama family as being part of Mau Mau is stir-fry crazy. Let me explain why: The Obama family come from western Kenya, which is about as different from Nairobi and the Kikuyu area as Utah is from New York City. And it's almost as far way. They come from an area where there was no rebellion, there was no Mau Mau. So while his father and his grandmother may well have been nationalists -- I'm sure they were -- they weren't directly involved in the Mau Mau rebellion.
If you actually read Obama's book, he states that his father fell into depression and drinking because he was passed over for promotions and recognition while working in the government of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta, a downward spiral from which he never recovered until his death from a car crash. If you were going to trying to deploy some dime story psychoanalysis of how the president internalized Kenyan political struggles, Kenyatta would be the subject of his ire, rather than Winston Churchill.
But of course Kenyatta was Kenya's first post-colonial leader, so Obama hating him wouldn't be "Kenyan anti-colonialism." That wouldn't actually provide conservatives with what they want from the whole Kenya thing, which is a comic-book supervillain origin story about how Obama learned to hate white people.
