The Other Barack (18 page)

A land grant university, the University of Hawaii had overcome some stiff local resistance in its formative years. Obama would have appreciated that just as the British colonists had severely limited educational opportunities for Kenyans in the interest of preserving a malleable workforce, members of the local sugar industry had likewise expressed alarm that a public college would have a negative impact on their labor supply and increase their tax burden.
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Their resistance was ultimately overcome, however, and the Manoa campus opened its doors to a steady stream of plantation workers' offspring.

The compact campus just a couple of miles north of the city's pearly beaches presented a vivid array of tropical flora that adorned its classic beige architecture. Monkey pod trees hovered at the walkways edge, towering palms shaded the graceful stairs to Hawaii Hall, and banks of orange hibiscus and scarlet flame bean nestled against the base of Hemenway Hall. But in the decade's last year, the Manoa campus was a quiet place, a commuter campus of 6,923 students, of which only 172 came from other countries.
⁸
When the sun went down, the students largely went with it, for the majority lived in apartments in downtown Honolulu or in family homes in the lush Manoa Valley.

At the time, the campus activism and protests that would manifest in the late 1960s were unthinkable. Instead, discussion of whether ROTC participation should be compulsory dominated the
Ka Leo
headlines. Furthermore, there was debate in the paper about a proposed new
international center that would promote discussion between the East and West as well as some lengthy observations about the candidates in the annual spring beauty contest sponsored by
Ka Palapala
, the student yearbook.

Even inside the classroom, a certain plantation mentality held sway. With students teethed on the plantation's hierarchical structure, the classroom gestalt was one of deference. Few dared to raise their hand, much less be so bold as to actually challenge a teacher. As one mainland professor lamenting the student body's complacency said to the
Saturday Evening Post
in May 1958, “Whatever you say is accepted as gospel, because it comes from the professor.”
⁹

Obama, not surprisingly, took just the opposite tack. From the moment he arrived, Obama was poised to engage, argue, and debate. Obama had learned his debate lessons well at the Maseno School. Although he held passionate opinions on most any subject, he delighted in arguing the opposite point of view and could do so persuasively at the drop of a hat. Part of the appeal for him was the intellectual challenge, and part of it was his characteristic showiness.

At twenty-three, he was also somewhat older than most undergraduate students and considered himself a more mature intellect. In class he could invariably be counted on to challenge a student or cross a professor. If some students grumbled that he was a know-it-all with his rhetorical flourish and perennial commentary, others breathed a sigh of relief. “Barack grabbed the spotlight during classroom discussions because he liked to talk,” recalled George Ikeda, who took a political science class with Obama and went on to become a researcher in the travel industry management department at UH. “And most of us were willing to let him ... because that saved us from having to recite anything in class. In those days local students didn't speak very much in class and we tended to accept whatever the professor said.”

Nor was the classroom the only place he offered his opinion. When the latest edition of the campus literary magazine,
Asterisk
, was released, Obama would routinely drop into the magazine's tiny office under the staircase in Hemenway Hall with the new issue tucked under his arm to offer an opinion or two. Praise was rarely on his mind. “He'd pull out the magazine and point to a piece of writing and say, ‘This guy doesn't know
what the hell he is talking about.' And then he'd jab a finger at a poem and say, ‘This poem, this poem isn't worth a
damn
.' He was very critical,” recalled Dietrich Varez, then the magazine's editor. “You know, some people were afraid of him, the voice, the opinions, the black shoes, I mean, goddamned black tie shoes. We just weren't like that. Some people just went around him.”

Varez, an English major, had little interest in international affairs and even less in politics. But he had come to Hawaii by a circuitous route himself and was drawn to Obama's story. Born in wartime Germany, Varez says his father had been a member of the Nazi party. When his mother divorced him, she married a Portuguese soldier who adopted Varez and brought the family to Hawaii after the war. Varez liked Obama's blunt manner and the forceful way he talked. The two would often continue an evaluation of the magazine over lunch at the Snack Bar, a popular eating place housed in an old military barracks on campus. Their meal of choice was unvarying: tuna sandwich on white bread for 25 cents. Varez found Obama extremely private, even a bit remote. But one thing Obama commented freely on was other students' behavior and appearance. And Obama did not like those bare feet, perhaps because they reminded him of the days when he ran barefoot to the Ng'iya School in his tattered brown pants. Now a college student being groomed for a higher calling, Obama did not want to be reminded of a childhood in which shoes were a precious commodity. “He'd say about the bare feet, ‘You are walking in the
spit
of another man. Doesn't that bother you?'” exclaimed Varez, now a popular printmaker and painter living on Hawaii's Big Island. “He thought it was unclean, really, not a cool thing to do.”

In the afternoons Obama was often a common sight outside Hemenway Hall, standing under the long arms of the sweeping bayur tree. Usually he was in deep debate about the prospects for the Pan-Africanism movement or the latest news from the emerging civil rights front or the proposed campus expansion. His ubiquitous pipe was used more for theatrical point than something to actually smoke.

A curiosity to the larger community as well, Obama was invited to speak on the situation in Africa at several downtown locations, including local churches, the NAACP, and clubs such as Rotary and Kiwanis. And when the
Star-Bulletin
wrote an editorial predicting mass violence in the
aftermath of the Belgian colonial government's withdrawal from the Congo, Obama wrote a stinging response. In his letter to the editor he objected to the writer's description of the Belgian colonials as being both efficient and sympathetic, saying that he had seen with his own eyes “how the Africans there were whipped and put to jail for as petty offenses as walking on the wrong side of the street. It struck me that maybe you needed more first-hand information before you spoke about their efficiency and sympathy.”
¹⁰

Even UH administrators, eager to attract students from farther reaches of the globe, drew him out. Only two months after he arrived Obama was one of a handful of foreign students invited to discuss a proposed international program to be called the East-West Center with university president Laurence H. Snyder. A photograph of Obama, dressed in crisp, white Oxford shirt and a dark bow tie, sharing cocktails with Snyder and other faculty members, was featured on the front page of
Ka Leo
.
¹¹

Though Obama's worldly ways and his polished shoes set him apart from the rank and file on the UH campus, he nonetheless found a gang he could call his own. They were more varied than the candidates in the Ka Palapala beauty contest. First came Peter Gilpin, California iconoclast, renaissance man, and jazz aficionado. Owner of a collection of blues and jazz records that held them all in awe, he was their cultural guide. Neil Abercrombie was the politician of the group, a refugee from the bitter Schenectady winters where he had been an undergraduate. Fondly known as No-Neck Neil for his muscular physique, he alternately circulated petitions and worked as a sociology teaching assistant. Andy Zane was the local boy. Born to Chinese parents on Maui, he was a freshman with a burning desire to travel around the world. Somewhat surprised to find himself hanging out with some up-and-coming
haoles
, Zane would soon change his first name to Pake, Hawaiian for Chinese. There were a few others, like Abercrombie's younger brother, Hal, who came to Honolulu with his wife and enrolled at UH for a year, and Kimo Gerald, a Hilo native studying psychology and looking for a reason to drop out. Each of them found something different in Obama in the year or two they knew him. But Abercrombie and Zane would forge much longer-term relationships with him and would follow him to Kenya years later, when they would find him a very different man.

The Stardust Cocktail Lounge on South Beretania Street was their hangout, their home, “their union hall,” as Zane dubbed it. A small working-class bar west of the campus, they had chosen it largely because of the generous pupu platters, an assorted appetizer tray that might include spareribs, Chinese eggrolls, and wontons. For students on a budget, as most of them were, pupus could serve as their primary meal of the day. “We'd go to class at nine and then head for the Stardust,” explained Zane. “If you got there before 10 a.m., the pupus were for free. And then people would drift in and out all day, depending on your schedule. We had lunch there, we did our homework there, and then we might wind up having pitchers of beer at midnight.”

Sometimes they branched out to the George's Inn, a beloved local restaurant nearby, or the Forbidden City, a popular nightclub famous for its striptease and topless go-go dancers. But by far the more popular alternate retreat was Gilpin's apartment, where they listened to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the best of the Delta bluesmen. One of the guys who had a car would pick up Obama at Atherton House and drive him to Gilpin's. They ate pizza and talked, and then talked some more. “We were all, ‘counter-culture people': we hated authoritarian personalities of any sort and were anti-war and anti-A&H Bombs,” as Gilpin described the group in an e-mail. “We actively worked against these horrors. We read Kafka, Nathaniel West, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos & many others. ... We were also students of Daruma and Dogen, Zen masters.”

For the group, Obama was many things: a provocateur, a source of entertainment, and a living, breathing manifestation of the struggle against imperialism that had landed in their lap. Obama's tales of the African bush and his lyrical accent mesmerized Zane in particular, for they gave a face to the wanderlust that had long simmered within him. He wrote Obama's address in his address book and vowed to go to Kenya to visit him, and a decade later he would do just that. “Meeting Obama, it was like here is someone I can go visit on the other side of the world,” said Zane, who sells antiques at the Antique Alley cooperative in Honolulu. “It made my dream seem real. This was a place I could actually go to.”

Abercrombie understood Obama the best. Deeply engaged with the unfolding social questions of the day, Abercrombie was drawn as much to Obama's political ambition as his connection to the seismic events
unfolding on the other side of the globe. At the forefront of a host of campus issues and a well-known figure with his long, dark beard and thick black glasses, Abercrombie would go on to represent Hawaii in the U.S. Congress for two decades and was elected governor of Hawaii in 2010. Often he and Obama stayed up late at night discussing how things would work in a postcolonial world and assessing the similarities between the budding civil rights movement in the United States and the quest for independence in Africa.

That Obama had decided to become an economist was due only in part to his particular love of the field and his considerable aptitude. He was equally inclined to the profession because he believed that it would cast him as a catalyst in the unfolding drama of Kenya's independence, a Big Man in the tableau of movers and shakers just then coming to the fore. As an economist, someone knowledgeable about the philosophy of finance, econometrics, and foreign trade, he would be invaluable to an emerging country. It would be his hand that would help shape not only the country's financial underpinnings but also its very ideological framework.

Obama's passion for his country was visceral, and he readily launched into a discussion of events unfolding in Africa at any opportunity. In his discussions with Abercrombie, he described his particular interest in the concept of property and his conviction that the African notion of communalism could be squared with private ownership in a capitalist society. Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah espoused some of the same themes in his writing about African socialism and his commitment to preserving traditional humanist values. Like him, Obama intuitively understood the value of Africa's traditions as well as the economic vulnerability his country would face as an independent nation.

Obama was fiercely passionate about Kenya in part because the Kenya of his moment was about men and women like him. Twenty-five years earlier he would likely have spent his life as a low-level administrator under colonial domination or, if he was lucky, as a teacher. But coming of age at the singular moment that he did opened a door to a completely different kind of a life for him. And he was not going to let anything get in his way. “He talked about ambition, his ambition for independence in Africa in general, and his own personal ambition to participate in the emerging nationalism in Kenya. He saw himself a key element,” said Abercrombie.
“He was not obsessed, but it was the central focus of his life. He was full of such energy and purpose. We all had such high hopes for him, hopes that people like Barack would be the next leaders of Africa. He seemed completely capable of it.”

But Obama also worried about the challenges of independence. From a budding economist's point of view, he well understood the difficulties of trying to wean the country from foreign capital and economic dependence. He also appreciated the challenge of trying to blend aspects of a capitalist economy with some of the more communal African traditions that he valued. Tribalism was also high on his list of concerns. Kenyatta's Kikuyu supporters were already a powerful and tight-knit group. Although some political differences among the country's different ethnic groups had been put aside in the determined drive toward independence, Obama predicted in his late-night conversations with Abercrombie that when the choke hold of British control—which had long suppressed those factions—was removed, the old tribal rivalries would reappear. In this, Obama was prophetic.