By Billy Bragg

Boris Johnson’s attack on President Obama, launched in a Sun column last week, tells you everything you need to know about those behind the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union. Many have taken issue with Johnson’s reference to Obama as “part-Kenyan,” arguing it echoes the low politics of the U.S. “birther” movement, but they have misconstrued his point. Johnson has no problem with someone of mixed heritage rising to the highest office in the land. He sees his own ancestry—born in New York to parents with Turkish, Swiss, French and Russian blood—as no impediment to his ambition to be Prime Minister.

Johnson’s aim in bringing up the President’s Kenyan heritage was to remind his readers that Obama’s grandfather had been a staunch opponent of the British Empire. Onyango Obama was jailed for six months in 1949, convicted of being a member of the Kenyan independence movement. Three years later, the Mau Mau Uprising exploded, an armed insurrection against British rule in Kenya. The brutality of the insurgent’s attacks were widely reported in the British press, with lurid reports of people being hacked to death. Perhaps more shocking to the British public was the idea that Africans should resist colonial rule.

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