Above: March 1953: A Kenyan suspect, detained by the
police, is led away with his hands bound with rope during
the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya.
(Photo by Express/Express/Getty Images)

Telegraph

Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, the Kenyan family of the US President-elect has claimed.

Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama was part of the Kenyan independence movement when he was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years.

His family allege he was tortured by his British guards to extract information about the insurgency.

“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, told the Times.

Mrs Onyango, who Mr Obama calls Granny Sarah, described how “white soldiers” carried out “disciplinary action”.

Above: Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama (the President-elect’s
Kenyan grandmother) described how ‘white soldiers’ carried out ‘disciplinary
action’ (Photo: REUTERS)

“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she told the paper.

The alleged violence was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and deeply anti-British.

“That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango, 87, said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.”

Mr Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, but states that his grandfather was “found innocent”.