The Kenyan bowed his head as his captors opened the prison cell door to deliver another brutal whipping - a punishment meted out after he was accused of taking part in the independence movement against the British colonial authorities.
The man had been working as a cook for a British Army officer. And his name? Hussein Onyango Obama - President Barack Obama's paternal grandfather.
He had been arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison. There, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence. They say British soldiers used torture in an effort to get him to reveal rebel secrets.
A family together: Barack Obama (back row, second left) with Granny Sarah (front, second right) in 1988
'The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he repented,' says Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango's third wife, and the woman President Obama calls 'Granny Sarah'.
Mrs Onyango, now 89, says 'white soldiers' visited the prison every two or three days to carry out 'disciplinary action' on the inmates in, what she terms, 'the British torture chambers'.
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