allow himself to be beaten by his master and that was the term of between the war in kenya there was nothing to beat your house servant. they wouldn't stand for it on one occasion he actually took the king of his boss to and hit him with it and he was arrested and then released because the magistrate said that was in the protection. so although he did live with the british under the british rule he was a young man. >> host: he seems to be fiercely independent. certainly not someone to put up with nonsense from anyone either on his wife or his son. on the other hand he does raise a politically incorrect question because he asks the question how did we, the africans, get into this situation, how did the white man in particular britain on the tiny island control one-third or one-half of the real estate on the planet. it's got to be something to do with technology and power and organizational skills and commercial and military strength. so in some sense she is saying the african isn't up as of right now, and it seems like this is what -- this is the parity if you will that obama, the idea that there might have been something successful about colonialism from which even the colonized can learn. >> guest: i don't think that's probably true. the british colonization is a really prickly question. it's not a matter of whether in fact the british were good or bad or whether it was a good thing or not. in the late 19th century it was inevitable. somebody or other was going to call on is that part of africa as antique decolonized india and large parts of the far east. and so, you had from the 18 eighties this scramble for africa when you had the europeans get together berlin and literally sat down and carved up the continent in an extraordinarily arrogant way, and it happened to britain because they had a powerful navy and sending ships out to india to establish themselves in the late 19th century in kenya but actually the british weren't that interested in kenya. they didn't have a lot of resources and had very poor communication in land. when you have to remember is a huge continent like africa. the only way into the continent is actually rivers and canyons never had this sort of big rivers like the congo to give steamships access into the interior and so kenya was left to the very end the late 19th century before the british got involved at all in developing it, but then of course there was the power struggle with the other colonial nations and germany was on the rise and imperial russia was on the rise, and therefore i guess the british had to consolidate their power. the other important thing is the souci canal was being built towards the end of the 19th century and the british would completely fixate about somehow controlling the headwaters of the nile and thereby controlling their interest in egypt which is very important in the time, and access to the red sea. and so the british and interested quite late in the day and not for the sort of reason you normally expect them to, - a large land in africa. >> host: let's talk if we may but barack obama, sr., and he was born of course under colonialism. but he came of age of the time when kenya became a free. he came to the united states, 1959i believe shortly before kenya independence. now he was a strange man as you've described. he had four wives, he had at least eight known children and seemed if i can say to fairly lookout for any one of them. he was a chronic alcoholic, got into multiple drunk driving accidents, kill the man on one occasion, and now get this man, a polygamist, alcoholic, failure would sit outside of his hut according to his sister and rant and film at the mouth. this is the man of whom the president rights dreams from my father, his autobiography at least in his early years. this is a man that had a tremendous impact on him, and my question is what is it about barack obama, senior? you wouldn't think this would be able model. what is it about this man that had such an impact on president obama? >> guest: i am familiar with some of the things he's written about the roots of obama's rage. i'm not even sure that his father had that much influence on him because what we didn't address in his life is the influence of his mother. now in his 2004 introduction when dreams from my father was issued he did say first of all you need to look at this book and the context and the time and he got political ambitions and maybe he was wiggling out of it a little bit. but nevertheless, he did say that maybe, because his mother was dying at the time in the book was originally published, and he did look back and think maybe he rode the wrong book, that in fact it shouldn't have been an absent father but more the celebration of the one consistent person in his life, his mother. now his mother was bohemian. it was the mid 60's when she married a second time. she was probably a bit of a hippie i guess and i think actually his mother had a bigger influence on him and his father. >> host: we agree that this is what i think about it. i want to focus on your book, not mine. i think what happened with his mother is she was a bohemian, she rebelled as many young americans to against her parents a little bit and the country a little bit. she wanted to marry a third world american and found one, barack obama, senior. and when he dumped her which he did going on to harvard, she married another former world anti-american now -- guy and took the young obama to indonesia and becomes more pro-western and pro-american and began very antagonistic and would attack him and say don't be like this guy come he was a real man, uncompromising, and i do think that obama had an enormous influence. she was his father's first convert, and so she was the one who elevated in his mind this mythical larger-than-life image of the father and then as obama grew older it was a shock for him to realize my father isn't quite this romantic sort of gone beyond of kenya but was a very flawed man and that is when he undertakes the journey to africa to find out for himself the great scene you write about obama at the family grave and weeping. so let's talk a little bit more about barack obama senior's world. he came to america in 1959, he went to hawaii. you refer to a 1965 essay that he wrote and which problems facing us are socialism and he called himself an african specialist. to describe that essay in the context of debates within kenya and it was. when we think of anticolonialism we think there are different species of anticolonialism. it was more pro-western, more pre-market, it was tom, obama's tauter's mentor. he was more on the left and then on the far left and he was basically pro-soviet and so you have these species of anticolonialism. talk a little bit about that landscape. it's fascinating people often think about anticolonialism as one thing, but it actually has many different colors. >> guest: it was an exciting time in kenya because they had at long last gotten their independence in 1963 and all the students in the american universities for all pulling back into my robie to get jobs in government most of which had been vacated by the british who were going home. and was a very exciting time in which the government would try to find out really what sort of political system was going to invest in their country. you were searching intercolonial and actually they would post into a colonial let that time the doctor country dhaka. they actually left kenya in a pretty good state, a major real way, they got good road system airports, telegraphs and telephones. compared to this the other countries were left by the european colonial powers kenya was in pretty good shape and so they had gotten what they wanted after i admitted a rather nasty struggle. so these people were debating the about what it was they wanted and i don't think that obama, senior. he was an angry man and he did have rage and he did drink himself to alcoholism but i think his anger wasn't directed at the british i think it was directed at the other politicians because you had the first president who came to power in 1963 who i should rightly say was at the case in the next economy, but i think that was more of a cover because what they went on to do was to plead tribalism card. he indulged in nepotism and allowed corruption to become endemic in kenya as it still is today. and he eventually moved the government to a single party state in which he couldn't be elective office, and i think that obama, senior was margaret did with what was going on in his own country than with the british had done and the other thing is even his best friends will tell you that obama, sr. was a very arrogant man and had a high opinion of himself and was very clever but he was arrogant and the other thing he did was he what real against his superiors and they didn't like that and he was often publicly denounced on one occasion the head of the central bank of kenya is a real clever man around here and that didn't go down very well with the senior people in the government and the major departments and so obama, sr.'s fall from grace was i don't think anything to the anticolonialism, i think it is with watching his country decline and also him to decline as well not to getting the credit he thought he deserved. >> host: think that's absolutely true and. he was a pompous man, and if you mentioned that when he was at harvard and would call himself dr. obama even though he didn't have a doctorate. >> guest: he got a master's but he never made it to a doctorate. >> host: so yes, you have this postcolonial world, and i think that you would agree. you're from britain, i grew up in india, that the 50 years or so after colonialism remain the dominant political trajectory. seen through the lens of colonialism and the leaders were educated, the advocating a species of ideas that were often the last export of colonialism. you mentioned the revolt and a must have you say a word about this for this reason. it seems to me that even when you think of where people get their ideas you often think you get your ideas and college or in the lounge but for those of us that have grown up in the third world and other countries you often find powerful historical event and sometimes very bloody which a lot of people get killed these anticolonial wars were not hypothetical wars, they were real and many people died. in india there was a revolt in the 50's with the soldiers, the british came, people were arrested and shot and my grandfather remember all of that, but that was still 150 years ago. my grandfather was born in 1899. and my point is that in kenya into a colonial revolt was in the 1950's, and obama was born in 1961, right in his lifetime affected his grandfather and his brother and his father so talk about the revolt and what significance it might have had for the obama family. >> guest: fi obama revolt was one of the dark sides of the colonial history. >> host: you mean the revolt? >> guest: yes. the soldiers were drafted in the second world war and they fought and died in india and when they came back the untold they were fighting for the freedom of democracy and they got back and found no change, there's no freedom and no democracy from them and out of the roots of that frustration after the second world war grew threefold which ended up as a very bloody, very nasty revolt not only against the canyons, but a lot of people who hadn't looked at this period in great detail there is a civil war within the africans themselves. many more people, black kenyon's by more then ever. in my group in the 1950's in britain and i can still hear the echo of the news reels and how the black savages were massacring whites. this did happen, but you're talking about, not to diminish the serious but you have a school with white people and in the tens of thousands killed and so this uprising was shocking even more so for the black community and the white community, but the british response to this was to suppress it violently. the the tens of thousands of so-called sympathizers but went through and subjected them to the most appalling the brutal torture and a lot of people died and disappeared and there have been some grandiose estimates by a number of people. estimate 250, 300,000 people. i think the figure is probably closer to 70 or 80,000 but that is an awful lot of people in the population of maybe 50 or 20 million at a time. >> host: and one of the man you say in custody for six months or more than six months, probably interrogated, allegedly tortured was -- >> guest: yes, the grandfather of the president. that is a very strange story because what everybody seems to agree on is it happened in 1949. now that was at the very beginning of the inspection. he was arrested. i talked to her about it. the news of that particular episode broken the times of london and actually when i was out there doing my research and was familiar with the serbs story in the times and had spoken to sarah and it is a complicated thing. i can quit actually happened was i don't think -- >> host: a collaborator. >> guest: i think he had too much respect for the british. i have no absolute evidence for this, but he was a different man and he had a number of local chiefs who themselves were used by the british to control the local population and had a number of running this with a local chief called not related to tom come and he was fingered by somebody, by an african according to sara obama although she didn't specify who it was, and i think that this every chance he was arrested in the schools rather than anything to do with his involvement. the other thing is you have to remember that the insurrection was primarily a continued insurrection. they had all their land taken away from them in the area north of nairobi. they were the people who were beaten from the land grab that happened in the early 20th century. they were actually used by the british as wardens to control so the british effectively control the population by playing off against has no love lost between the two of them the british tend to use them and so in the end, there were certainly people involved in the insurrection. the numbers were small. >> host: he might have been framed or set in some way or someone basically falsely accused him. let me ask you this, he comes home and he seems scarred and said obama says he essentially can old man. i want your opinion on the sort of interesting hypothesis. one that i think actually brings all of this to light. when president obama came into the white house he noted in the oval office winston churchill and was reported in britain and america that this unlaid obama wanted it returned. the british a little sugar and because the long time special relationship and said don't get it back to us, put it somewhere else. but obama was sort of consistent and today it is in the home of the british ambassador in washington, d.c. so it is in a sense on british soil. for many americans, republicans, democrats, the fury of understanding obama can't make sense of it. obama is a progressive leftist, socialist. so why do this? interestingly, it was winston churchill who was the prime minister really liked after world war ii who directed the british special trips to go to kenya, basically lot of every able-bodied male and not only was barack obama, senior at one point in jail, but on the ankle allegedly tortured. so here's my point. is it possible that this churchill episode otherwise inexplicable can be understood by looking at this family history that you solve the early document in this book? >> guest: what you didn't mention i think president obama replaced the statute of churchill with that of abraham lincoln, his great hero, and to me it is entirely understandable the american president should -- >> host: the issue wasn't sending it back. >> guest: it hit the news in britain for a while and the tabloids were very upset about it in the end i think the brits -- it is not easy. i'm not an apologist for president obama. i don't fully understand but you have to remember also the reason churchill was a great leader there's no doubt about that and hadn't not been for him being the prime minister during the second world war who knows what would have happened so there is no doubt that the people in the 21st century were recognized as the greatest british leader of full-time. but there are parts of his political career which actually do not stand up to scrutiny, and certainly he was a very senior of the member of the government and president obama understands that. i'm not sure that i would want the best of the man responsible for killing 70, 80 or allowing 70 or 80,000 members of the nation of my father staring across the oval office. >> host: when i was growing and india we didn't know so much of world war ii churchill, we knew about churchill from gondhi and supply will not be the first minister to preside over the british empire. so i'm not defending churchill. i am saying it seems to me this is explanatory power and we know obama knows the colonial history. here he is in africa and he comes across the street with a sign. well, this was one of the hoodlums if you will who was one of the leaders of the revolt and one of the basically his captor and shooting so obama knows the history extremely well and i think for many americans there is a bit of a surprise when we think about obama, we think about african-american descended from slaves, segregated lunch counters, martin luther king, the migration to chicago. there's none of this in your book. you get a sense that with obama weigel he is african-american and the technical sense descended from black man and a white woman, his own history isn't multi-cultural, it is mono culturally and comes out of a specific history, a specific country going through a specific set of challenges. how does that equip obama growing up in america to be sure and educated here to face this completely different world. you have pictures in your book and the only from a generation ago and as you say, this is the irony, this is in the stone age but it isn't far removed. it is a picture of putts and beads, which doctors, medicine men, no cars, and yet from that to now the highly competitive global list world. how ready in your view is he for this new world or his background for the troubled? >> guest: you have to remember when he first went to kenya he was 26-years-old as a university student. and then as i said, when he wrote dreams from my father he was only 33. and i think that his trip out to kenya clearly had a very profound effect. there's no doubt about that. i would say a good thing, too. the american president's travel as i think the ministers should travel more. i think the more you get out and see the list of the world, the more you understand, so i think actually discuss it with president obama very well because we are living in a globalized world. we are as we see what decisions being made in the white house this week will affect the lives of the kenyans moly for the american people the egyptian people as well and the rest of the world because if we get it wrong then things will go very badly around the middle east. so i think the very fact that president obama did spend the best part of four years in indonesia as a young boy he traveled to kenya has a young student and these are all positive things to actually help him understand that there is something more beyond the boundaries of the usa and there is a big role with a lot of people living there. we are affected by the decisions. given a more global perspective? >> guest: i think so, yes, i think so. >> host: we are talking about your book, the untold story of an african family. we have been looking at president obama's lineage to his father's side in africa and kenya. let's put one thing to rest. you are not eighth birther and d