The Other Barack (27 page)

Ruth Beatrice Baker, graduating from Simmons College in Boston, in 1958. Baker dated Obama for several weeks in Cambridge and then followed him to Nairobi where she became his third wife on Christmas Eve, 1964.

Obama and his growing family lived in the Woodley Estate section of Nairobi in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Neighbors could often hear his booming baritone over the fence and were well aware that the Obama marriage was a troubled one.

The two Barack H. Obamas pose for a photo that was apparently taken in Honolulu in 1971. The Christmas visit was the only time the two were together after the elder Obama left his small family in Hawaii to attend Harvard University in 1962.

Hawa Auma Obama, the sister of the elder Barack Obama and president Obama's aunt, standing outside her home in Oyugis, Kenya. Auma sells coal by the roadside for a living.

The Kaloleni Public Bar, a favored Luo watering hole on Nairobi's southeast side. Obama retired to the Kaloleni almost daily after work and passed his final hours drinking there with friends before he died in November of 1982.

Habiba Akumu, Barack Obama's mother, sits mournfully beside her son's coffin in 1982.

The gravesite of Barack H. Obama on the Obama family compound in Alego. The gravesite of his father, Hussein Onyango Obama, is a short distance behind it.

Mark Ndesandjo, one of President Obama's six siblings on his father's side, is interviewed in Guangzhou, China, in 2009. Ndesandjo wrote what he calls a semiautobiographical novel in which the father is described as physically abusive and a heavy drinker.

The second oldest of President Obama's siblings, Auma Obama, published her autobiography,
Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen
, or Life Always Comes in Between, in 2010. Auma Obama, who studied in Germany, writes that she found it hard to forgive her father for the breakup of their family and years of neglect.

The youngest brother. Born six months before his father died, George Hussein Onyango Obama never knew the father that he shares with the U.S. president. A resident of the Nairobi slum of Huruma, George penned his own memoir,
Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival
, in 2010.

Barack Obama's oldest son, Malik Obama, made headlines of his own in the fall of 2010 when he took his third wife, a nineteen-year-old still in secondary school. Malik, 53, lives in Alego next to his grandmother, Mama Sarah.

The first of Barack Obama's four wives, Kezia Obama, maintains that she never divorced her late husband and that he continued to father children with her, even after he married two American women.

Noll, who had earned a BS with honors in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, was one of the math guys. With his West Coast openness and affable manner, he was also an approachable sort. So he was the one Obama stopped one day in the lounge and asked if he would give him a hand with a class on calculus that was at the heart of the program. “Obama was saying, boy, this is hard, this is really hard. This is not what I thought economics was,” recalled Noll, who worked with Obama on several occasions. “But he did not complain. He was just reacting to a different kind of economics than he had studied as an undergraduate. He was not at all unusual for the twenty-five or so other students who were completely underwater. There were a lot of students who were in worse shape than he. The disparity of preparation in the class was immense and it made it an extremely difficult group to teach.”