The Other Barack (2 page)

Some called him an impatient intellectual. Others saw him as an idealist, a man who could not square the political reality of the day with his heartfelt vision of a genuinely democratic Kenyan society. Whatever he is called, Barack Obama committed his life to the belief that the bounty and the burdens of the country he so loved should be shared by all. In the end what broke him was his disappointment in the failure of that dream.

The sign is meant for tourists. But not many get this far.

It stands on the side of a red dirt road in western Kenya so pocked with holes that it is nearly impassable, its historic message shrouded in a thick coating of dust. “OBAMA OPIYO,” it declares in blue capital letters, “Great grandfather of BARACK OBAMA Jr. (President, USA.)” A mere four generations does not begin to tell the story. This is Africa and so the forefathers must be acknowledged too. On the right side of the sign there is a list of the names of the past eight generations.

A red arrow points to the left, where the village of Kanyadhiang lies one teeth-jarring kilometer away. This is where the Obama side of an unlikely presidential epic begins. The American president's father, Barack Hussein Obama, was born here in a round mud hut with a thatched roof, a short distance from the once-bountiful waters of Lake Victoria. Nearly one hundred years before him a young farmer known as Obong'o decided to settle
here in the mid 1800s, one finger of a vast diaspora of Luo pastoralists that came out of Sudan starting in the fifteenth century.
¹
Although the earliest Obama ancestors, known as Jok' Owiny, had migrated to the lake's Winam Gulf region generations earlier, Obong'o was the one who established the family's home on the south side of the gulf, attracted by the rich fishing prospects and abundance of wild animals in the surrounding forests. The hut is long gone now, but several hundred Obamas still live in the shadow of the towering blue gum trees that the president's grandfather planted.

Since Obongo's arrival, little has changed in Kanyadhiang, which means “the place of the daughter of the cows” in the tribal language of Dholuo. There is no electricity, and people must still carry water by bucket up the hill from the muddy shores of the Awach River, although now they must treat it with purifying agents before it can be used. Cows and an occasional chicken wander the gently rolling terrain and pause to nibble the delicate yellow blossoms of the siala tree that hangs over Obama Opiyo's grave.

This is Luoland, the ancestral home of the Obama family's Luo tribe. It is a place where a young man's bottom six teeth were once routinely removed as a symbol of coming of age, and children are still often named for the conditions that prevailed at the time of their birth. In the Luo language “Onyango” means born in the early morning, whereas the common name “Okoth” means born while it is raining. In the weeks after the name Obama was engraved in history as the forty-fourth president of the United States, a great many babies were given the name. “Obama” is derived from the word
bam
, which means crooked or indirect.

The first Barack Obama is Kanyadhiang's greatest success story. Long before that name entered the global political lexicon, it carried great weight in these parts. Many among the older generation in the village remember Obama as a child swimming at Rapandu Beach, a point of the river reserved for men, and his prowess at the dance competitions in the lantern-lit dimness of the Kanyadhiang Social Hall. But Obama's mind was even faster than his feet, and he wielded his intelligence as a passport to transport him to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Ever since his son became a candidate for the U.S. presidency, a truncated version of the father's life story has become stock fodder. It goes like this: In the late 1950s, as Kenya was beginning to prepare to assume
independence from the British colonial government that had occupied the country for over sixty years, Obama was one of a select cadre of young men and women chosen to travel to the United States to get a college education. He ventured to the University of Hawaii, where he met a young girl with luminous brown eyes named Ann, and in only three years he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Then, incredibly, the boy who had walked barefoot five miles to school each day and whose job had been to lay a mix of cow dung and mud on the earthen floor to keep the dust down, won a scholarship to pursue his PhD in economics at Harvard University. On his return to Nairobi at age twenty-eight, Obama landed a job as an economist at Shell/BP and was poised to take his place among the
uhuru
, or “independence” generation charting the course for newly independent Kenya. With a wardrobe of tailored suits and a
mzungu
, the Swahili word for a white person, for a wife, Barack Obama was destined to be a Big Man, for sure. A photograph of him leaning against his blue Ford Fairlane and flanked by beaming villagers, which was taken on the day he returned from the United States, sits on a cousin's mantel in Kanyadhiang and is a cherished family possession.

As suddenly as it began, however, his ascent was over. Six years after he returned from the United States, Obama had been let go from one promising job and was fired from another, his career abruptly dead-ended. All three of his marriages had failed, and he was barely on speaking terms with any of his children. Penniless and increasingly dependent on his beloved Johnnie Walker Black, he collapsed at night on the floor at a series of friends' homes and lived for periods alone in a solitary hotel room. It was a monumental fall. Few, even among those closest to him, understood why it happened and the elements that contributed to it.

“Barack was a very upsetting case,” said Wilson Ndolo Ayah, a schoolmate of Obama's who worked in a host of government ministries and served as a member of the Kenyan parliament. “He didn't commit a crime. He didn't do something wrong particularly. He just didn't finish the race. As schoolboys, we were always taught that you must finish the race no matter what. But he didn't. He just collapsed.”

 

LATE ON A NOVEMBER
evening in 1982, Obama was driving home when he rammed his white pickup truck headlong into the high stump of
a eucalyptus tree at the side of the road and died instantly. He was fortysix. Obama's eight children, some of whom had not seen him for years, largely closed the door on the subject of their father. For better or worse, the Old Man was gone.

A quarter-century later another Barack Obama emerged, this one a cerebral U.S. Senator from Chicago who was angling, quixotically it seemed, for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency. As that heavily laden name dominated the headlines and the nightly news, it triggered a flood of complex emotions among some of the elder Obama's children. They were struck at how oddly the younger Barack's name was pronounced. The Old Man had also been called
Barack
, but his was a working man's name, with the emphasis on the first syllable. The American pronunciation was heavy on the second syllable, giving the name a more formal, somewhat aristocratic cast. This particularly amused the elder Barack's three surviving wives—not that they were talking to each other.

Reporters scoured the younger Obama's background, and questions invariably arose about his namesake and the Kenyan family he had met on a handful of occasions. The phenomenon of Obama's candidacy and the worldwide prominence that his name achieved after he became America's first African American president prompted some of the children to begin rethinking their relationship with the Old Man and to grow curious about the elements of his chaotic life. Somehow they were all bound by that restless, bespectacled onslaught of a man who was their father and now to this gentler but no less intense version of him on the front pages of America's newspapers.

The questions led to more questions. Who was their father? And who, for that matter, were really his children? To get to the truth of the man, how could any of them penetrate the skein of lies and half-truths he had woven? Even the makeup of his immediate family was a confounding jumble. Three years after his death some of his children and wives became embroiled in a legal brawl aimed at establishing exactly who his legitimate heirs were and to which of his “wives” had he actually been married.

The colorful legal drama, which went on for years, pitted the first wife against the fourth, the eldest son against the youngest, and generally divided the family into two warring camps. At the heart of the matter was
a claim by Obama's first wife, Grace Kezia Aoko Obama, that she had never divorced her husband and remained married to him at the time of his death.
²
If that were true, then none of his subsequent three marriages—including the one with the president's mother—would have been legitimate. A host of family members who took sides on the issue provided conflicting affidavits peppered with name-calling and insults. Even Obama's sixty-seven-year-old mother, frail and heartbroken over her first son's death, weighed in and declared that Grace had long ago divorced her son.
³
The Nairobi High Court judge considering the dizzying squabble apparently believed Obama's mother: In 1989 Judge J. F. Shields ruled that not only had Grace divorced her husband but also that two of the four children she claimed he had fathered with her were not his sons at all.
⁴
And that was just the first phase of the battle.

The name of Barack Hussein Obama II, the second son, crops up only incidentally in the bulging pink case files in Nairobi's High Court. No one in the case ever challenged the legitimacy of his paternity. But in July 1997 Barack Hussein Obama of Chicago, Illinois, deftly extracted himself from the matter with a brief letter to the court disavowing any claim he might have on the estate, which was worth about 410,500 Kenyan shillings, or $57,500, at the time his father died. He wrote the letter six months after he was sworn in to serve his first term in the Illinois Senate representing the 13th district.

Nearly a decade earlier, in the summer of 1988, Obama had launched his own effort to uncover the father about whom he had often wondered. At the time, his father had been dead for six years and he had just completed work as a community organizer in Chicago and was preparing to enter Harvard Law School. During a five-week visit to Kenya, Obama met many members of his sprawling clan for the first time and listened to their stories of his father's political frustrations and domestic travails. He also found that many of his relatives had no greater command of his father's essence than he had gleaned from his mother's recollections. The elder Obama seemed a baffling mystery to many with whom he had lived and worked, including his disparate tribe of children.

Although he was a master of the verbal parrying and one-upmanship that are the Luos' stock in trade and was famous for his legendary black velvet baritone, the elder Obama confided in virtually no one, not even
those in his wide circle of drinking comrades. Talk of personal matters, and certainly of children, he considered to be a show of weakness. He mentioned the son he had fathered while in Hawaii to only a handful of his closest friends and family members, even though he kept a photograph of that little boy, riding a tricycle with a small cap perched jauntily on his head, on his bureau. Taken a couple of years after he had left his small family in Hawaii, the picture always followed him through his many moves and dislocations.
⁵

His children may have understood him least of all. As Auma Obama, President Obama's half-sister, says in
Dreams from My Father
, “I can't say I really knew him, Barack. Maybe nobody did ... not really. His life was so scattered. People only knew scraps and pieces, even his own children.”
⁶

Some of his children have pored over the letters and papers their father left behind, trying to pull all those inconclusive scraps and pieces together. Four of the five children indisputably fathered by Barack Obama have written books that are at least in part a rumination of the Old Man and his impact on their lives. Like
Dreams from My Father
, each of the works is a yearning of sorts, an effort to make some sense of their father's character and complex legacy.

Only his firstborn son, Abong'o Malik Obama, a volatile fifty-three-year-old who lives with his three wives near the family's compound in western Kenya, has not written a book about his father—at least not yet. Malik recently made headlines of his own when he took a nineteen-year-old schoolgirl as his third wife. He has also irritated some Obama family members when he built a small mosque on his property that the steady parade of tourists heading to the Obama compound pass daily. Some Obamas worry that such a glaring symbol of the family's Muslim faith will negatively impact the Obama presidency. Malik has accused others of trying to profit from his father's life and says that he intends eventually to write the definitive biography of his father himself.
⁷

Auma Obama, Obama's only daughter and the second of his children born to his first wife, Grace Kezia, has painful recollections of a distant father who rarely spoke to her and often returned home from work drunk and irritable.
⁸
But as she read some of the newspaper accounts of his life, she found she wanted to understand more about the forces that shaped his experience and left him so embittered. She called Peter Oloo Aringo, a
longtime friend of Obama's and then a member of Kenya's Parliament representing the Alego district where he spent his childhood, who recalled that Auma was “very troubled about [her father's] life. She had spent more time with him than most of the children, but she felt she had not known him at all. She wanted to know how we had gotten along, how we had been friends, that kind of thing. But mostly she wanted to understand what had led to his downfall.”