The Audacity of Uhuru
My grandfather and Obama’s father helped to establish democracy in Kenya — then it turned on them
I n his final years, Inderjeet Singh Bhoi’s viewing habits puzzled even his closest family members. At any given moment, the TV in his living room in suburban Ottawa would show one of two programs: a cricket match or American political news. The older he got, the more conservative his news became. Eventually, it was Fox News.
When he was sixty-five, alongside his son-in-law, Bhoi watched a little-known senator from Illinois address his war-weary nation. It was the evening of July 24, 2004.
“Do we participate in a politics of hope, or do we participate in a politics of cynicism?” Barack Obama Jr. asked his audience at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Vivek Nijhawan, Bhoi’s son-in-law and my father, was also introduced to this political maverick at the same time. “I remember watching this guy, and the charisma was coming through the television screen,” my father said. His father-in-law was less impressed. Bhoi had written his fair share of speeches for world leaders; they were recited at international delegations or the UN General Assembly.
Back in Kenya, where he had been born as a member of that country’s large and thriving Indian diaspora, Bhoi once had a colleague named Barack Obama, and in 2008, that former colleague’s son was elected president of the United States. The senior Obama served alongside my grandfather as a ministry advisor in the country’s newly independent government, more than four decades earlier. Over ten foundational years, Bhoi had almost single-handedly established Kenya’s foreign service as its second-in-command. He was an individual who shaped history. But, growing up, I just knew him as my grandfather, or “Nanu,” as I called him.
Inder Bhoi was a pillar of our family — my mother’s universe, my father’s mentor, and my grandmother’s life partner of more than fifty-five years (a love marriage, at a time when arranged marriages were the cultural norm). For me and my siblings, he was like another parent. Growing up, whenever we returned from school to my grandparents’ home, he awaited us with a hug and was prepared to help us complete our homework. I recall our conversations, often over steaming cups of chai, where he sought to impart his knowledge about history and world events. My older brother, Arjun, told me he still considers our grandfather “probably the smartest person I’ve ever known.”
My older sister, Amar, remembers bringing an old black-and-white photograph of our grandfather into her high school’s world religions class: Bhoi, in his trademark white turban and fine Western suit, shaking hands with Haile Selassie, the former Ethiopian Emperor, who was sitting on a golden throne. The rest of her classmates were awestruck. It was just one example of the many luminaries Bhoi met during his life.
“He was such a big man in our family and our community,” Amar told me. “If I had to think about how I saw him, at first, it was probably through the lens of other people, and realizing how significant he was.” Kenyan by birth, Indian by heritage, and later, Canadian by citizenship, Bhoi had spent his life crossing borders in every sense.
I could still see glimpses of that maverick, from those old photographs, in the elderly man I knew — now clean-shaven, and more likely than not to be dressed in an undershirt and shorts around the house. He was a creature of comfort who liked to have all of his possessions neat and organized, not a ballpoint pen out of place.
Kamal Sethi, the former deputy chief of staff for Kenya’s armed forces, and fellow diasporic Indian, worked closely with Bhoi and remained friends with him until the end of his life. “We thought he would surely be appointed as the United Nations secretary-general one day,” Sethi said. “That was the caliber of the man and his character.”
As Inder Bhoi would say himself, he had lived two different lives: a public one in Kenya, as a statesman, and then a private one in Canada, after retiring from his government job and later from his law practice. His speech-writing skills, once deployed for diplomatic addresses, were later channeled into touching toasts at family birthday parties and anniversary celebrations. He would quote Shakespeare, but also devise wicked lines of his own. One of these, which he came to relish when talking about the American president, was, “Obama came in like a rockstar, and then governed like a rock.”
In that famous 2004 speech, Obama told his fellow Americans, “I believe we have a righteous wind at our backs and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us.” Bhoi must have been skeptical. He had lived through a historical moment that fell far short of its promise. Among the many lines of Shakespeare that he copied in his journal and sometimes quoted was, “Ill blows the wind that profits nobody.”
W hen a young Inder Bhoi was called in for an interview with the departing colonial administration in Kenya, he did everything to sabotage his chances of getting the job.
It was 1960, and Bhoi, twenty-two years old, had just become a lawyer from King’s College University in London. The seventh of fourteen siblings, he had followed in the footsteps of his father, a former Nairobi police chief who later traveled to England to study law. When Bhoi returned from his own education abroad, he fully expected to join his father and work at the family’s private law practice. But he arrived right at a historical turning point for his country.
That same year, in a landmark speech in Cape Town leading up to African independence, the British prime minister Harold MacMillan decreed, “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.” Kenya had just emerged from a decade-long period of civil strife called the Mau-Mau Uprising. This loosely organized guerilla rebellion, spearheaded by the country’s dominant Kikuyu tribe, sought to drive the British from the country. In turn, the British used violent methods of suppression and committed many wartime atrocities against their subjects, from mass executions to suspension of civil liberties. Great Britain had already begun the gradual process of decolonization shortly after the Second World War; MacMillan’s speech signaled that his country would soon leave its African possessions. Kenya achieved its independence three years later, in 1963.
Back in 1960, Bhoi’s father came across a government job posting in the newspaper in search of nine candidates to fill the country’s emerging civil service; the British, on their way out, were replacing themselves with homegrown cadres. Bhoi reluctantly applied to make his father happy. Out of hundreds of applicants, the British public service commission called him back for an interview. During the entrance interview, Bhoi told his British interviewers what he thought of their behavior during the Mau-Mau Uprising. He assumed that such insolence would cost him the job that he never wanted. Unfortunately, his plan didn’t work. He was chosen to work opposite the governor’s office, helping to develop the country’s nascent foreign affairs department.
As Indians with ties to the colonial police force, the Bhoi family enjoyed a more secure status than most. Their experience reflected the broader condition of Kenya’s Indian diaspora, also known as “Asians.” Through the British Empire’s global network, Indians began arriving in East and South Africa to pursue jobs in labor, commercial, and civil service in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is how Inder Bhoi’s father, named Bhajan Singh, first arrived in the country in 1918, as a low-level police officer who soon ascended the ranks of the colonial administration.
Indian Kenyans occupied a middling status in colonial Kenya. Still colonial subjects, they enjoyed comparatively more privilege and opportunity than the native African population. Bhupinder Liddar, a Kenyan-Indian and then later Canadian diplomat, used the metaphor of a bank to explain the social pyramid at the time: a white Briton could be the manager of the branch; an Indian, the clerk; and an African, the servant making tea.
The higher standing of Indians made them less willing to join the anti-colonial movements, although there were some exceptions — Liddar’s half-brother had worked with Makan Singh, a pivotal Indian trade union leader in Kenya and supporter of the Mau-Mau rebels. But the broader Indian diaspora, many of whom worked in business, sat on the sidelines during Kenya’s struggle for Uhuru (the Swahili word for “freedom”).
Once the country achieved independence, this put many Indians, Bhoi included, in a complicated position. To use Liddar’s metaphor, the pyramid was reversed, with Africans now at the top, and Indians below them. Having spent decades under systemic oppression, the country’s native majority population held understandable grievances, which later surfaced in the country’s post-independence politics. After 1963, Indian Kenyans were given an ultimatum between British or Kenyan citizenship. Many chose the former and moved to England. Bhoi chose to stay and was appointed as the deputy to Joseph Murumbi, independent Kenya’s first foreign minister.
“How [Bhoi] attained that position, as an Asian Kenyan, was truly remarkable,” said Karen Rothmyer, Murumbi’s biographer and veteran journalist who lived in Kenya. Bhoi was the only non-African applicant accepted in the upper echelons of this new government.
In preparation for his role, Bhoi had spent a year studying international law and diplomacy at Columbia University on a Carnegie Endowment fellowship sponsored by the Kenyan government. Around that same time, another incoming civil servant, who shared Bhoi’s hometown of Kisumu, also traveled to America for further education. His name was Baraka Hussein Obama.
Obama was the son of Hussein Onyango Obama, a Luo tribal leader who served as a British army cook. Despite his humble beginning, the young Obama took advantage of the opportunities provided by the proto-independence movement in the late 1950s. Supported by nationalist Luo leader, Tom Mboya, he earned a scholarship to study at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, where he met a young woman named Stanely Anne Dunham. The two would eventually have a son, Obama’s third child, whom they named after him (Obama was already married, with two children, in Kenya). In 1964, he left his new son and Dunham to study economics at Harvard University, before returning to Kenya post-independence to work in the new ministries of finance and transport.
As far as cultural backgrounds go, Bhoi and Obama were worlds apart: Bhoi was a Sikh man of Punjabi heritage, and Obama, an African Luo. But in their own ways, the time they spent serving together under Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, taught them each a sobering lesson about the dangers of being a political outsider in a newly forming state.
I n the eighth grade, I ran for president of my school’s student council. I was inspired by watching the TV series The West Wing with my parents and its idealistic portrayal of political leadership.
The show’s most famous episode features the fictional US President, Josiah Bartlet, delivering a scathing monologue in Latin addressed to God. But for me, the most memorable line from this episode came in a flashback scene earlier, with a younger version of him.
“You’re a boy king,” another character, a life-long mentor, calls a young Bartlet. It’s a title that resonated with me. As the youngest in my family, I’d grown up with no shortage of validation from my relatives, including my grandfather. He had affectionate Latinized versions of mine and my siblings’ names, as if we were ancient Roman pupils learning from an older wiser mentor. To him, I was “Vikramus.”
Inder Bhoi was just fourteen years old when he first left his home in Kenya to study in England. He came from a large family full of high-achievers; his siblings went on to become successful doctors, lawyers, and civil servants, and yet, he still distinguished himself through his government career — a “boy king,” as it were, within the Bhoi family. He moved through his life like a star and everyone he encountered — colleagues, community, and family — orbited around him.
My grandfather, as much as my TV viewing, played a formative role in who I became. Just as Barack Obama studied at his father’s alma mater, Harvard, so too am I now here at Columbia, where my grandfather’s journey in diplomacy began. History had thrust him into an influential position at an early age. During our after-school conversations, he wanted to impart his wisdom to me, gleaned from his first-hand experiences, about how a successful nation could prosper.
I was born in the era of “hope,” the word that appears nine times in Barack Obama’s 2004 speech. My generation’s innocent belief that one right-minded individual could steer a nation toward progress and that civil service, guided by altruistic ideals, was enough.
I aspired toward leadership. I recognized the grandeur of my grandfather’s role — his proximity to power and ability to affect change. I didn’t realize that things on a TV screen look very different from reality. I won the election for the student council that year, but as president, I didn’t accomplish much.
I heard this story many times growing up. It was our family’s foundational myth, the reason why they left Kenya.
The story took place on the evening of August 9, 1972, in the lounge of the Pegasus Hotel in Georgetown, Guyana, where my grandfather had come to attend a Non-Aligned Foreign Ministers Conference. This meeting would go down in diplomatic history for some consequential events: the admission of a Viet Cong shadow government in South Vietnam as a full member of the association (prompting a walkout in protest by three other countries) and the creation of the “Georgetown Declaration,” calling for the end of Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
Bhoi entered the lounge after a long day’s work, hoping to unwind. By the time he joined his Kenyan peers at the hotel bar, they were already imbibing; the energy was high, and tongues were beginning to loosen. I imagine Bhoi ordered a scotch, his go-to drink.
Then, a news flash appeared on the television set above the bar. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who had come to power via coup d’etat a year earlier, had expanded on his executive order to expel Asians from his country. This proclamation was first decreed on August 4, and originally only meant to encompass Indians who had British citizenship. Now, it would include the entire diaspora, whom Amin referred to as “bloodsuckers.” Around eight hundred thousand would be ordered out of Uganda. Amin gave them ninety days to leave.
It was the culmination of a growing backlash against Indians in East Africa, who were viewed, at best, as unsupportive of the larger anti-colonial project and, at worst, an obstacle standing in the way of the native population’s flourishing. Images flashed on the hotel television, showing just a sample of these tens of thousands forced to leave their homes, heading to railway stations, with nothing apart from what they could fit in a single suitcase.
In response, some of Bhoi’s peers raised their expensive glasses. They clapped and cheered. The tipsy delegates wondered aloud — half anticipation, half hope — if the same should happen in Kenya next.
According to my family’s version of the story, those who were cheering soon came to their senses, clocking their Asian colleague sitting right there beside them. Their expressions morphed from proud to sheepish and profuse apologies followed. But to quote the wartime adage that Bhoi would deploy often in his elderly years, loose lips had already sunk ships.
Njoroge Mungai, then Kenya’s foreign minister, turned to Bhoi with sympathy. Afterward, he tried to console his deputy, telling him not to mind the unfiltered reactions of his “ignorant” colleagues. Bhoi’s white turban, and his comparatively fairer complexion, had always made him an outlier in the Kenyatta administration. The message on the black-and-white television screen in front of him would do the same.
I never saw my grandfather cry. But when he returned home to Nairobi from Georgetown and told his wife, my grandmother, Jaswindar, about what happened, his emotions purportedly spilled over. Bhoi was thirty-three years old. By that point, he had served over ten years in the Kenyatta government, long enough to be eligible for a pension. He had three young children and a family tree firmly rooted in this country. But he was always looking to the future and it became apparent to him that, because of his cultural identity, that future was no longer in Kenya.
A chance meeting with a Canadian industrialist-turned-diplomat, Maurice Strong, would set his life down a new path. Strong and Bhoi worked together to found the United Nations Environment Programme, headquartered in Nairobi. So impressed was he by the Kenyan statesman’s character and integrity, that Strong introduced Bhoi to connections which eventually led him to take on a role at a nascent Canadian government organization, founded by the country’s Nobel Laureate Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson. The fact that three of Bhoi’s brothers had already moved to Canada to pursue their own professional opportunities gave him added incentive.
Bhoi’s transition from his Kenyan government role took place over a year and a half. During that time, their posh family home became the venue for “endless farewell parties,” as my mother, who was seven years old at the time, recalls; their sadness over leaving only increased after each one. At a special reception, Mungai described his outgoing deputy as “one of the most loyal, honest, and industrious officers in his ministry.” In February 1974, Bhoi and his family left Nairobi for their new home, another national capital halfway across the world: Ottawa, Canada.
In his new country, Bhoi reinvented himself. At forty-two, he returned to law school to regain his qualification in Canada. At fifty, he suffered a life-threatening heart attack, which later led him to retire from his private law practice and to quit drinking alcohol altogether. From there, his life transitioned from a public one to a private one — from open to insular. He spent more of his time watching television, following American politics from afar.
Tavinder Nijhawan, Bhoi’s eldest daughter (and my mother), was eight years old when her family moved to Canada. “I think a lot of him got jaded by how we left Kenya,” she admits. “I honestly think had we stayed there, or if he hadn’t been exposed to the political reality at the time, he would’ve been a different person.”
A ten-year-old Barack Obama once told his innocent classmates in Honolulu that his father was a king, and that his family name meant “Burning Spear.” It wasn’t true — he had filched this word from a library book about Kenya, but he knew little about his father’s background. “At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man,” wrote Obama, in the opening of his 2004 memoir, Dreams from My Father. Their only interaction that he was old enough to remember was when his father visited him in Hawaii, during December 1970, on a month-long sabbatical from Kenya.
Much as his son would later share his optimistic vision for America, Obama Sr. saw great potential for a free Kenya. “To some African leaders, independence meant nothing more than the assumption of the African’s ‘right’ to rule himself,” wrote Kenyan political scientist Ahmed Mohiddin, about the challenges that faced early African democracies. “These people did not care what kind of institutions they were operating, whether they compromised their independence or not; they did not care at all, so long as they were in power.” But there was another way. Mohiddin was an advocate for governments adopting democratic socialism across the continent, a political sympathy that Obama Sr. shared.
In July 1965, Obama Sr. authored an article in the East Africa Journal, criticizing the economic policies of the post-independence government. In breathless tones, he shares his concerns that continued inequality among the population, a holdover from their colonial legacy, could undermine the country’s fragile democratic foundation. “The question,” he wrote, “is how are we going to remove the disparities in our country such as the concentration of economic power in Asian and European hands while not destroying what has already been achieved and at the same time assimilating these groups to build one country?” This letter was a bellwether for what was to come: Obama falling out of the Kenyatta government’s good graces.
Jomo Kenyatta’s government privileged Kikuyus like himself: members of the tribe who had done much of the fighting against the British in the country’s struggle for independence. But this tight-knit tribal loyalty also led to factionalism and corruption in a competition for limited resources and opportunities. “It was true in Kenya, as in other countries that became independent after colonial times,” said Rothmyer, the journalist who lived in the country during this time. “If the pie isn’t that big, everyone is competing for the biggest slice.”
It wasn’t uncommon for high-level government officials to be offered land as political graft. Even Inder Bhoi had been offered a valuable plot near Mombasa, a city on the country’s coastline. While my grandfather’s principles made him decline this offer, many of his colleagues accepted similar ones themselves.
It was acts of corruption like this that incensed Obama Sr. enough to vocally oppose the Kenyatta government, and he wasn’t the first. This inter-tribal rivalry turned bloody when Tom Mboya, one of the country’s founding fathers and Obama’s sponsor, responsible for arranging his education in America, was assassinated in 1969.
Obama Sr.’s disagreement about the country’s direction eventually led him to be blacklisted by the government, barring him from prominent postings. This set the stage for a downward spiral into alcoholism, unemployment, and a dereliction of his parental duties to his many children across multiple marriages. He died in a car crash in 1982 — one of many Kenyan civil servants with high hopes for their country, rendered disillusioned by bitter experience. By then, his American son who bore his name had just turned twenty-one years old and was studying political science and English at Columbia.
In his memoir, a pre-presidential Obama Jr. visits Kenya and his extended family still living there. The young American struggles to reconcile the image of what his father became — “a defeated, lonely bureaucrat”with the ambitious and idealistic man he once was. “The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside,” wrote Obama.
At the end of his memoir, in front of the graves of his father and grandfather, at the family’s ancestral home in Kisumu, he recognizes that his forebears had been swallowed up by the forces of a changing world. His father tried to reinvent himself, to succeed in a changing world, but he lacked “faith,” according to Obama. “And for lack of faith,” wrote his son, “you clung both too much and too little of your own past.” Obama Jr., too, contends with the prospect of having to reinvent himself to succeed in a changing world, and in doing so, compromise himself as well.
What Obama later promised during his presidency may have reminded Bhoi of his own ideals in a previous life. But the failed objectives of his Kenyan nation-building made him cynical about the prospect of an inclusive national vision succeeding. In his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention, Senator Obama proudly declared, “There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America — there is the United States of America.” As a civil servant, Bhoi didn’t see that come to pass in the country that he and Obama’s father called home.
Obama’s apocryphal translation of his surname, “Burning Spear,” was the same name of a real Kenyan public service award Inder Bhoi was approved to receive in 2009 — the Elder of the Order of the Burning Spear. The same year President Obama entered the Oval Office, my grandfather returned to Nairobi to give a keynote speech on his role in laying the country’s early diplomatic foundations. He later waited through cross-border bureaucracy for the award to be sent to him in Canada. Years after his passing, it still hasn’t arrived.
W ith Barack Obama Jr., Inder Bhoi wanted to have his cake and eat it too. On the day of the forty-fourth president’s inauguration — January 20, 2009 — my sister Amar, then seventeen, baked a cake in celebration (she used Splenda instead of natural sugar as a sweetener so that our diabetic grandfather could also partake). He would occasionally chime in with the refrain “No-Bama,” with an impish grin on his seventy-year-old face, but otherwise sat quietly and comfortably in a corner of our living room, sipping his can of Diet Coke.
For the following eight years, my grandfather watched every major speech Obama gave, only to criticize them. From the safe perch of his comfortable home in Canada, he preserved many biting one-liners in his journal, like, “Obama won on words, rhetoric, promises and made media steroids of the liberal press.”
In his first year, Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” — or, in my grandfather’s words, “for doing nothing.” This meant a lot coming from the same man who had once traveled to Stockholm, to unsuccessfully lobby for his former country’s president, Jomo Kenyatta, to receive that same honor.
“For me at the time, it was easy to attribute conservative values like that to ignorance,” said Amar, whose own developing liberal views led her to often argue with our grandfather. “But in his case, he was the most well-read person I knew, and I think he also went out of his way to read what confirmed his thoughts.”
Bhoi had demonstrated revolutionary qualities in life, but he was never a revolutionary at heart. He enacted change through sensible, not radical means. In that way, he wasn’t so different from the leader he criticized, and the most significant liberal thinkers of my lifetime shared that opinion.
The late Christopher Hitchens, whose writings my grandfather grew to like, described Obama’s fundamental flaw before the president-elect stepped into the Oval Office: “He treads so lightly and deftly that all impressions he has so far made are alarmingly slight.” Later, Ta-Nehisi Coates would remark of the president, retrospectively on his rule, that Obama remained “constitutionally skeptical” of those who seek to achieve change outside the consensus of public opinion, and that this aversion prevented him from addressing deep-rooted societal issues facing African Americans.
The capstone of my grandfather’s political journey was yet another quote he wrote down in his journal, one that shaped his view of Obama’s presidency as well: “Needed in politics is pragmatism, not idealism.”
In 2017, Inder Bhoi died at age seventy-eight of another heart attack. He spent his final days surrounded by family who knew and loved him, and the living who honored his contributions and memories. He left us in the first year of another presidency which would upend all assumptions about the destructive cost of leadership.
“What has he actually accomplished?” he said. I was sitting beside him in his living room one afternoon in 2016. He was referring to Obama’s final speech, which the outgoing president had delivered the night before. Fox and Friends was playing on the TV.
“In fact, I actually feel sorry for him.” He said this with complete sincerity, like he meant those words.
