The Other Barack (17 page)

Continuing pressure from the nationalists ultimately triggered a series of decisions in London in the months to come that would vastly accelerate the move toward independence. The fall elections marked the replacement of colonial secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd by Iain Macleod, one of the most liberal of the Conservative party's young men. Keenly aware that the gradual pace of decolonization once favored in London was no longer acceptable, Macleod took action. He announced that in the coming year a constitutional conference would be held to design specific steps and a timetable for Kenyan independence. All members of the Kenya Legislative Council would be included. In one of his earliest speeches, Macleod dropped his bombshell: The state of emergency in Kenya would at last be lifted. When the announcement was made in Nairobi, the streets erupted in celebration and cheering.

For Obama, it must have been difficult to walk away from such seismic developments, with the prospect of self-government so tantalizingly near. He must have sensed that events were about to accelerate rapidly and that he would be absent from his country's long-awaited renaissance. But Obama had worked hard to shape his own destiny, and he was anxious to embark on the new path that lay before him.

With a one-way ticket to New York booked in August, Obama spent a hurried final month making preparations. He completed the last of the Otieno books and helped make a film strip about the work that the literacy office had achieved. Mooney was still fretting about what she would do next, eager for divine guidance, as her faith hit at low ebb. Homesick and troubled by a painful back, she wrote Laubach that she was tempted to take the next plane home. Making matters worse, her faithful Barack, who had done all her typing, was now gone. “Now I can't make the typewriter work,” Mooney wrote to Laubach the day after Obama left the country.
⁴⁰
She had no way of knowing that her own life would change radically in the next few months as well.

Obama did not linger long over his departure. He made a final visit to Alego and sat for a family photograph with the Old Man, Kezia, and his son in a local studio. Then he left his small family under the watchful eye of Sarah and the Old Man. Kezia, weeping, promised to wait for him.

On August 4, Obama flew out of Nairobi en route to the United States. Two years later to the day Barack Obama Jr. was born.

L
ess than two months before Barack Obama arrived in Honolulu, the bucolic, orchid-scented archipelago changed forever. On June 30, 1959, a cream and maroon Boeing 707 barreled toward the Honolulu Airport runway at 518 miles per hour. One of the Australian Qantas fleet, the plane didn't just break the record for the San Francisco-to-Hawaii run by one hour and fifty-nine minutes; it transformed the world's most isolated land mass into a destination resort. The Boeing's celebrated landing marked the arrival of the Jet Age on the Hawaiian Islands.

“4 hrs, 49 mins.
W-h-o-o-s-h!
”
The Honolulu Advertiser
headline proclaimed. With that, the once-sleepy paradise was now easily in reach of tourists the world over.
¹

The landing was one of a pair of momentous events that occurred in 1959, making it arguably the most transformative year in the history of the Polynesian island chain. Seven weeks later Hawaii officially became the fiftieth state admitted to the Union, ending a hard-fought battle by local civic and political leaders that had lasted for over a century. The celebration had swept through the islands months earlier when the statehood bill was approved by U.S. Congress, igniting a series of huge bonfires, impromptu parties in the streets, and a torrent of firecrackers. The party would continue until the end of the year.

Those twin events—the arrival of the Jet Age and the advent of statehood—would transform Hawaii into the bustling tourist mecca that it is today. During the three years that Obama lived in Honolulu, a construction boom would start to redefine the shoreline, perching dozens of hotels and office towers at the water's edge and drastically altering the rhythm of
island life and culture. As thousands of visitors poured onto the airport tarmac, tourism soon became one of the largest industries in Hawaii along with sugar, for better or worse. Even on the languid University of Hawaii campus, where some students still spoke a local creole language known as “pidgin” when their professors weren't paying attention, the zeitgeist of optimism that pervaded the new state was palpable.

“It was a very exciting time because you felt that the whole world was opening up to you,” recalls George Ikeda, a classmate of Obama's. “I was nineteen years old and before statehood I had never thought of going to graduate school or even going to the mainland. But suddenly there were opportunities everywhere, and people were reaching out to get Hawaiian people to participate because we were the new state. It was a great time to be from Hawaii.”

When Obama first stepped onto the cool cement floors of the old Honolulu Airport that August, change was already sweeping across the islands on the gentle trade winds. Obama and Hawaii were both on the cusp of a new epoch, each embarking on a journey of growth and redefinition. Obama embraced the significance of the moment, no doubt noting that just as his own homeland was about to be liberated from an imperial power's long domination, his new home had at long last shed the second-class status of a territory and now reveled in the full standing of statehood.

As with Hawaii, a newfound sense of mission motivated Obama during his time there. With the difficult years in Nairobi behind him, he now found himself the subject of intense curiosity and discussion. Thousands of miles away from the churning events in Kenya of which he so often spoke, Barack Obama was a manifestation of the uprising of oppressed peoples round the world, the spokesman for the Africans' need—no, their
demand
—for self-determination. Although he worked hard in his undergraduate years, he could not resist preening in front of such a fascinated audience of students and assorted groups who invited him to address the situation in Kenya. If there were some students who found his passionate oratory about his beloved homeland annoying, others listened to his thundering paeans with tingling spines. When a teenage girl, with her own willful nature and a dreaminess that made her bold, smiled across the classroom at him, he was distracted from his central focus. But not for long. By the time he graduated Obama was prepared to do and say just
about anything that would ensure that he achieved the academic degrees that he so craved. Hawaii was the first step in a destiny of his own making, and he was not to be diverted.

Like his new home, Obama was unhesitating in his willingness to turn his back on his past in his fervent pursuit of the man he wished to be. In Hawaii, statehood brought with it not only the blessed tourist dollar, but also an erosion of indigenous culture and natural beauty that would be almost impossible to reclaim. Similarly, when Obama headed to America, he left behind a pregnant wife and a young son, all of whom seemed to vanish into the parched red dust of Africa. Obama neither spoke of them nor acknowledged them to school or immigration officials, until, that is, he deemed them an asset to his résumé. In his recasting of himself during his years in America, he would marry one white woman, propose to another, and seduce many more. Polygamy was surely an aspect of the culture from which Obama sprang, but in the Luo tradition a husband makes his home with all of his wives. Obama did just the opposite: moving from one to the next, ultimately betraying not just the women he left in his wake but also the children he sired but little fathered.

But in the heady days of 1959, much of that was yet to come. It was time for Obama and Hawaii to get to know one another.

What Obama had read in the
Saturday Evening Post
was true. Then as now, the defining cultural feature of the islands was its varied ethnic makeup. Hawaii claimed the honor of being not just the last state to be admitted to the union, but it was also the only state with a nonwhite majority. The bulk of its citizens sprung from a host of ethnic groups, dominated by Japanese and Chinese, who had come to work in the sugar and pineapple plantations a generation earlier. There were also substantial numbers of Filipinos and Hawaiians. Caucasians, called
haoles
, accounted for about one-third of the population in 1959, and blacks represented less than 1 percent of the island's 632,000 residents.
²
Although the ethnic groups tended to stay largely among themselves rather than meld into the cliché melting pot, the encompassing spirit of aloha had enabled them to peacefully coexist.

In part, this diversity is what had drawn Obama to the Pacific. But although nonwhites were in the majority, a black face was still something of an event on the streets of Honolulu. Obama was not only the first
African student on the University of Hawaii campus; he was the first black person that many students had ever seen in their lives.

That his color marked him as unique among the student body was only the start. Obama differed in almost every respect from the campus norm, starting with his imperious baritone, right down to the cuffs of his neatly pressed trousers. The UH campus, like Hawaii itself, was strictly casual. Students wore brightly colored Aloha shirts and floral muumuus and baggy shorts. Sandals, or flip flops known as slippahs, were the footwear of choice—or no shoes at all.

Obama wanted nothing to do with such informality. For him, education was a serious business and he dressed the part. His uniform was unvarying—an ensemble that put as much distance as possible between himself and his goat-herding days on the dusty paths of Alego. It consisted of a white, button-down, long-sleeve shirt; dark, pressed gabardine pants; and stylish lace-up shoes, usually black. On occasion, he even sported an elegant silk tie. Whereas most students carried their books in a loose jumble, Obama chose a trim black leather briefcase. With his purposeful expression and classic attire, he was an intimidating figure striding between the nodding palms. And that was before he opened his mouth.

“He was the first real black person I had ever met. And he was not just black but a deep dark purple,” recalled Pake Zane, a UH freshman and a member of Obama's closest circle of friends. “He'd walk into a room and say, ‘Good Evening,' in a voice that was more resonant than James Earl Jones's, and it had just that bit of an Oxford clip to it. You'd think, who the hell is
that
?”

So when Obama walked between the neoclassical pillars of Hawaii Hall on a brilliant September morning for the first time, many eyes were on him. Barack Obama was exotic fruit. That fall, he was the subject of three newspaper stories, each more breathless than the last over this extraordinary being.

The campus newspaper,
Ka Leo O Hawaii
, which means “The Voice of Hawaii,” noted that the arrival of the “tall well-built African” marks the end “of a long two year struggle through rigid British correspondence courses while working as a clerk for several private firms.”
³
The
Honolulu Advertiser
exclaimed that the first African student on campus was “delighted with the hula girls, whose swiveling and swaying is akin to the
owalo, a sort of seldom seen African hula.”
⁴
In another story in the
Star Bulletin
, Obama expressed delight with the pace of his adopted home, saying, “I think people here are so much more relaxed. You don't see them hurrying around to do things as in New York City or London.” Featured in a companion photograph showing him hard at work at his typewriter, Obama added that he found the lack of racial prejudice on the island “unique.” Most surprising, he said, was “the inter-racial attitude where no one seems to be conscious of color.”
⁵

But paradise was not perfect. In the interview with
Ka Leo O Hawaii
, Obama confessed to some disappointment. Hawaii was supposed to have been much grander, a metropolis of the Pacific dotted with skyscrapers and star-studded nightlife. Then there was the staggering cost of living, far higher than he'd expected, with food costing three times as much as it did in Kenya. In a prediction that proved all too true, he added only partly in jest: “My money was supposed to have lasted a year and a half but it looks as if I will be working to supplement my income next semester.”

Obama then went on to explain “the political turmoil that is now prevalent all over the Dark Continent.” When people have asked him whether Kenyans are ready for self-government, he responded, “To these people I say, ‘Nobody is competent enough to judge whether a country is fit to rule itself or not.' If the people cannot rule themselves, let them misrule themselves. They should be provided with the opportunity.”
⁶

In his first few months Obama settled into a monastic room in the YMCA's Charles H. Atherton House, a handsome building with a commanding view of Diamond Head, the iconic volcanic cinder cone that looms over Waikiki. Just across University Avenue from the UH campus, Atherton was one of the first university residence houses for males, and its ground-floor lounge was a popular hangout spot for the increasing numbers of international students who arrived on campus in the years after statehood.

Just as Obama was disappointed in Honolulu's size, however, he quickly grew bored with the university's tempo. When foreign students began to come to the school's new international graduate program on campus during his second year, Obama would complain that the undergraduates were slackers, certainly not able to hold their own in the kind of sophisticated conversation to which he was drawn.

On his latter complaint, he was not entirely off. Half a century after its founding in 1907, the university was home to predominantly local students, and the flavor on campus was distinctly parochial. The student body was heavily Asian, with a handful of haoles from the mainland in search of adventure and good climate. Students, however, tended to congregate less according to their ethnic group than with the classmates with whom they attended high school. Although they were required to speak English in the classroom, students often lapsed into pidgin as soon as they were in the corridors. University administrators struggled to stem the use of pidgin well into the 1960s, and students were routinely examined to ensure that they spoke proper English before they graduated. Nor did the chickens squawking at the College of Agriculture on the east side of campus lend the place a particularly sophisticated air.