The Other Barack (3 page)

Two months before the 2010 midterm elections in the United States, Auma published a memoir in the language of her adopted Germany, called
Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen
, or “Life Always Comes In Between.” Her book is a deeply felt lamentation for a father so preoccupied with his own ambition, so riven by his own insecurity, that he barely sees the lonely little girl gazing up at him. When at last he reaches out for her toward the end of his life, she yearns for him but does not absolve him. “I simply could not forgive my father,” Auma writes. “So much had gone wrong while we were together and in my eyes, then and now, it was his fault.... He never had time to listen but acted as if everything was alright. He had never asked us, and maybe himself, how we children were actually doing.”
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Few were as profoundly affected by the Old Man as Mark Ndesandjo, the oldest of two boys born in Kenya to Obama Sr. and his third wife. By that time in his life, Obama Sr. was, according to Mark and his mother, a profoundly abusive husband who cheated on his mother repeatedly and often beat her. Deeply traumatized by his childhood years, Mark left Kenya to attend college in the United States in the 1980s and resolved to have nothing more to do with the hated Obama name.
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When he met his half-brother Barack for the first time on a visit home to Kenya, Mark told him, “At a certain point I made a decision not to think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.”
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Determined that he would be nothing like the cold and loveless man who haunted his childhood, Mark had blocked all memory of him.

By the time the presidential cavalcade came two decades later, Mark was a forty-three-year-old international marketing consultant living in Shenzhen, China, with a BA in physics from Brown University and master's degrees from Stanford and Emory Universities. At least once during
the campaign he met with the half-brother he resembles markedly in both stature and expression. Obama describes his brother's appearance as though he were “looking into a foggy mirror.” Like his siblings, Mark found himself propelled by his half-brother's inspiring success to reexamine the family's turbulent history and open doors he had long thought firmly closed behind him. He spent months reading the diaries that his mother kept during the seven years she was married to his father and began to ply her with questions he had never wanted to ask before.
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Years earlier Mark had begun work on a book that explored many of the same issues that Barack Obama wrestled with in
Dreams from My Father
. Mark was likewise struggling with questions about his own mixed-race identity, his relationship to his father, and his search for rootedness. Obama's election in November of 2008 is what moved him to complete his manuscript, and at the end of 2009 he wrote an autobiographical novel called
Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East
under the name Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo. The world's embrace of the Obama name had at last enabled him to take ownership of it as well.

In his book the father figure is a menacing and dangerous presence. His son—David in the book—remembers him as “the hulking man whose breath reeked of cheap Pilsner beer who had often beaten his mother. He had long searched for good memories of his father but had found none.”
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One night, the father turns violently on his wife while their six-year-old son cowers in the next bedroom listening in horror. “His mother's voice was screaming as if terrified,” Mark wrote. “The child almost didn't recognize it. And then there were some thumps as of someone falling. His father's angry voice raised itself as if in a duet with the unrecognizable voice. . . . His mother was being attacked and he couldn't protect her.”
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Nor did his conversations with his mother trigger particularly happy memories of his father. “I do not remember him ever smiling. Except when he drank,” Mark said in an interview.

Yet, as with his older brother's memoir, even Mark found a resolution of sorts through his writing. In revisiting his experiences, he began to reflect on his own father's life and the hardships he too had endured. “I knew that my father had been through some traumatic experiences as a child and I began to realize that there must have been an emotional hardening in him
that was not his fault,” Mark explained. “When love is absent or you are physically abused as he was you develop a hard emotional skin. And that made me think differently about him.”

Next in line is George Hussein Onyango, the youngest of the sibling tribe, now twenty-nine, who lives in the sprawling Nairobi slum of Huruma on the city's east side. In the final months of his life Obama Sr. moved in with a young woman less than half his age, named Jael Atieno Onyango. George, their only child, was born six months before Obama died and had little contact with other Obama family members until his political half-brother came on the stage. His mother's claim as an heir is what triggered the legal battle over the question of who was Barack Obama's wife at the time of his death.

George too has grappled with his enigmatic father. A year after Obama's election George wrote a memoir called
Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival
. For George, the absence of his father initially propelled him downward, not up. But his tale is one of resurrection. It begins with a grim depiction of his youth: School expulsion is followed by the drinking of the alcoholic brew known as
chang'aa
and the smoking of weed which culminates in a prison stay on robbery charges that are ultimately dismissed. Confronted with Obama's inspirational Senate victory in 2004, however, George managed to bring an end to his ghetto lifestyle and recast himself as an advocate for Huruma's poor and dispossessed. Now, soccer is his passion.

Obama Sr. wafts through his book like the ghost that he was to his youngest son, materializing briefly in often heroic proportions. Family members describe him as famously generous, readily paying the school fees for a host of nieces and nephews and doling out fistfuls of cash on his visits back home. A man of abiding principle, Obama Sr. burned with a passionate faith in his country and a willingness to challenge its increasingly corrupt political leaders at a profound personal cost. He may not have always shown it—he was an African man, after all—but he felt deeply. As George flounders through his early teenage years in the book, family members are forever reminding him of the brilliant economist who was his father and urging him to follow in his father's footsteps. He quotes his mother as saying that Obama Sr. “would have been a role model for me
if he were still alive.... She remarked what a tragic loss his death had been for her and the wider family, if not the country as a whole.”
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Despite the sometimes brash tone of his book, in person George is a shy young man who seems a bit bewildered by the juggernaut of his American brother's success, not to mention the trail of international reporters who began to journey down the rutted dirt road to his shack in 2008, marveling in their stories at the disparity between his life and that of the president. The comparison was jarring on both ends, as each Obama son was cast at the radical end of an astonishingly unlikely spectrum.

Although George has mourned the lack of his father, the absence of much of his immediate family occupies him even more as he sits under a string of drying laundry in the makeshift tin shack in which he lives with several cousins. In fact, only when Obama visited Kenya in 2006 did George meet some of his relatives on his father's side for the first time and visit the home of his step-grandmother, known globally as Mama Sarah.
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Jael has remarried and lives with her new family in an Atlanta, Georgia, suburb, though she has tried repeatedly without success to get him a visa to come to the United States.

In the churning alleys of Huruma, however, an Obama is still an Obama, and many in Kenya assume that must mean a link to the White House and all its power and riches. George is often accompanied by a heavy-set young man with blood-shot eyes whom he half-jokingly calls “my security man.” But the truth is that George has little more access to the president than the tattered beggars who live next door to him in Huruma. George has met Barack Jr. on two occasions—once when Obama dropped in on his school when he was a five-year-old and again when he visited as a U.S. Senator.

George is hopeful that eventually he will get to talk to President Obama about their father. For when George himself wanted to learn about the Old Man, it was to
Dreams
that he turned
.
“I still have a lot of questions,” George shrugs. “I'd like to know who my brothers are and I'd like to know who my father was. I'm proud of him. I think.”

 

A YEAR AFTER HIS FATHER'S DEATH
, Obama met him one night in his sleep, “in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams,” he wrote in his memoir. He found his father locked in the cell alone, dressed only in a cloth
wrapped around his waist, his face ashen and thin. The elder Obama appraised his son and told him how much he loved him. But when the son tried to depart with his father and insisted that they leave the cell together, Obama the father refused. Obama awoke weeping at the loss of his father but realized also that “even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint.”
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Obama resolved then and there to search for his father, to somehow come to know him.

While still in his twenties, in the course of a search for his own identity that he chronicled in his memoir, Obama Jr. spent years inquiring about the father he met only once in his life. In talking with family members in Kenya, he made the painful discovery that his father had not been the towering success that he had been led to believe as a child. Although he gained a radically new perception of his father, Obama acknowledged in the end that “I still didn't know the man my father had been. What had happened to all his vigor, his promise? What had shaped his ambitions?”
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Like many of his half-siblings on his father's side, ultimately Obama was unable to comprehend the forces that created and shaped the Old Man.

The person in the world best positioned to uncover the story of the first Barack Hussein Obama is, of course, the president of the United States. With infinite resources and manpower at his disposal, he could presumably assign a team of investigators to the task and have a comprehensive profile for his eyes only in short order. Family members who have presented sanitized narratives to the media or even refused to talk at all would likely be more inclined to share their blunter perceptions with one of their own. But, apparently, he has not done so. Despite the research he completed as he prepared to write
Dreams
, his old man remains a thinly understood character in his book, a brooding specter. Obama seems ambivalent about just how far he wants to go in probing his father's soul. There are many places he has not gone.

What he discovered on his Kenya sojourn was that Barack Senior was a man fundamentally flawed by his own inner demons and undone by his own fears, much like his own father, Hussein Onyango, before him. If he had been so inclined, the younger Obama might have gone one step further and discovered a curious reflection of himself, another “foggy mirror.” After all, the two men have much in common. Both Baracks grew to
be men of keen intellect and analytic ability. A boldness of ambition enabled each of them to imagine a life for themselves far beyond the proscribed circumstances of their birth. Each man exhibited hubris, some would call it arrogance, that enabled them to dream large—and they did so despite the fact that they had each been orphaned by a parent, left to explain that empty space as best they could. As it happened, the two of them came of age at a time when the currents of change revealed before them a life once thought impossible.

And each of them walked toward that opportunity without hesitation.

Barack Obama Sr. believed he had failed in his life, but the full scope of his existence was unknown to him. Had he been aware of the events to come a generation later, he might have appraised himself somewhat differently. For what greater success could a man aspire to than to have produced a child who would become the first black president of the United States, the person who stands at the helm of the world? One wonders what he might he have said if he had known of his own filial legacy. Neil Abercrombie, governor of Hawaii who was a student with Obama Sr. at the University of Hawaii, grasped his essence better than most. “If someone had come up to him and said, ‘You know, your son might be the president one day,' he would have said, ‘Well, of course. He's my son.'”
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T
he tribal prophet Kimnyole arap Turukat foretold its coming long before the white man knew of it himself. It would rear from the vast lake to the east, a lethal iron snake belching smoke and fire and uncoil across tribal lands before at last quenching its thirst in the waters to the west. The beast would bear with it a kind of foreigner never seen before, a “red stranger” who would one day rule the land. Kimnyole was right.

The white man called it the Uganda Railway, a 582-mile steel corridor that would link the coastal city of Mombasa to the shores of Lake Victoria and the dark heart of the African interior beyond. Launched by the imperial British government in 1896, it was the one of the largest engineering efforts in the empire's history. It was also a colossal financial disaster, costing more than double its original price tag of £2.2 million and requiring the importation of more than thirty thousand Indian laborers, many of whom were devoured by lions. As the beleaguered railroad inched across the arid African plain, the British press dubbed it the “Lunatic Line.” But when it was complete, it dramatically altered the land that would become Kenya, propelling the nation into the twentieth century at a dizzying pace.