The Other Barack (41 page)

Obama Sr.'s visit to Hawaii generated mixed emotions on both sides of the equation. For the elder Obama the sights and sounds of the island where he had lived in the flush of great promise were bittersweet. He did not look up many of his old friends and made no effort to connect with either Zane or Abercrombie. He sat, inexplicably, for a series of photographic portraits at the University of Hawaii, and these are filed in the school's archive bearing no explanatory label. In the photos Obama is dressed in a gray suit with a dark handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, and he stares solemnly into the distance. There is little resemblance to the ebullient young undergraduate in shirtsleeves photographed amidst a throng of his friends in a photo shot a decade earlier.

Presumably aware that his marriage to Ruth was nearing a bitter end, Obama apparently initiated the Hawaii visit in part with the expectation that his former wife might return to Kenya with him. Ann, then twenty-nine, had her own marital troubles with Soetoro and likely intuited that her marriage was not to last long either. She was already talking about enrolling at the University of Hawaii in order to pursue a master's degree in anthropology. Although she considered Obama's suggestion, she concluded that she and her children were better off staying in Hawaii where
their lives would be more stable. “He had come back and wanted her to go to Africa with him, finally,” recalled Ann's old school friend, Susan Botkin Blake. “Of course this was what she had wanted all those years he had been away. But now, she told people, she could not face leaving again.”

With the finality of Ann's refusal generating palpable tension, Obama's visit soon began to sour. Toot and Gramps were growing weary of Obama's presence and waited impatiently for him to retreat at the evening's end to the rented apartment in which he slept. The stress finally erupted one evening when young Barack turned on the television to watch the cartoon special
How The Grinch Stole Christmas!
, a favored Christmas ritual. Obama Sr. promptly ordered his son to turn off the television and head to his room to study. When Ann argued that the boy should be allowed to watch, the matter mushroomed into a fierce family squabble that consumed four highly irritated adults. As Barack Jr. watched the green Grinch alone behind his closed bedroom door, he “began to count the days until my father would leave and things would return to normal.”
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His countdown ended two weeks later when Obama gave his son a farewell hug at the airport and disappeared into the blue skies overhead. Obama would never see his father again. For a time the two exchanged letters. But by the time Barack reached his twenties and was swept up in his own quest for rootedness and identity, the letter writing had stopped and the stack of aerogrammes from his father were stored neatly away in a closet. After the painful Christmas encounter, another two decades would pass before Barack turned to the pages of his memoir to sort out some of his complex feelings about his father.

On his return to Nairobi, Obama was dismayed to encounter still more rejection. In his absence Ruth had not only consulted with a lawyer about getting a divorce; she had managed to have their marriage terminated. Beside himself, Obama once again tried to talk her out of it, just as he had when she fled to the United States with their first son in 1967. But this time Ruth was not to be swayed. “He said don't go through with this, don't go through with this, please,” said Ruth. “And I said, ‘No, no, no. I
am
going through with it, Barack, because I've had enough of this nonsense.' I said I would still live with him even though we were divorced because you see then I had some leverage. I had the custody of the children now.”

Ruth's hard-won leverage changed little. On the contrary, Obama continued with his dissolute lifestyle, seemingly impervious to his wife's outrage. Finally, one night he stumbled back into the house and raised his hand over his youngest son, David Opiyo, and struck him. With that, Ruth's seemingly inexhaustible forbearance came to an abrupt end. Days later, after Obama had headed out for the afternoon, a friend of Ruth's pulled his pickup truck in front of the Woodley house and Ruth swiftly filled it with her belongings. By nightfall she and her two sons and the family housekeeper were moved into a small rented house in Westlands. The following morning a furious Obama was banging loudly on their door. “He shouted at me, ‘You prostitute, I am going to take the children. I am going to kill you.' You know, on and on. It was drunken rages, and more drunken rages. I think he followed me because he was ashamed. And I think part of the shame was that the community knew what was going on. They had witnessed it,” Ruth said. “He kept coming back every week, the same thing, shouting and calling me names. It was very, very disturbing. It lasted for about a month and then we contacted the CID [Criminal Investigation Department of the Kenya Police] and they called him in. They said, ‘Look Barack, stop bothering that woman.' And from that time on he never bothered me again. So, that was that.”

Ruth wasn't the only one who had heard Obama raging at her door. Neighbors were horrified at his belligerent behavior, and in Nairobi's tight-knit social circles, the word got around. “The man was very much an outcast at that point,” said Harris Mule, a high-ranking government economist then serving as deputy permanent secretary for planning in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, whose wife was a friend of Ruth's. “Part of it was his personal history. I mean, Obama lived pretty much like an African. There were real horror stories of how he treated his wife. My own wife would tell me about this quite often so I would not think of such a thing myself. But the bigger problem, quite frankly, was the man was always broke. He would be a nuisance because he'd go to a bar without money and he would expect people to buy him drinks and he used to drink very expensive liquor which was whiskey. So his friends would get upset about that. They would try to avoid him.”

With Ruth and the two younger boys gone by 1973, Obama was left virtually alone in the red-roofed Woodley house. The housekeeper had left
with Ruth. Ezra had departed the previous year to take a job managing spare machine parts at Coca-Cola's Nairobi plant. Obama had landed him the job, a position that developed into a flourishing career that lasted for two decades. Malik, a student at the prestigious Lenana School, was also not around very much. Auma had recently been accepted at the Kenya High School and boarded during the week, returning home only on occasional weekends. More often than not, Obama found himself alone in the house with no one to cook for him or take the glass out of his hand when he fell asleep on the couch.

Auma, then thirteen, felt the breakup of the family deeply. Ruth had lived with the children since Auma was four years old, and she was the only mother Auma and Malik had ever really known. Now, not only were her “Mummy” and her younger brothers gone, but there was also no woman in the house to tend to her basic needs or to shield her from her father's self-destructive behavior. Often, when she returned to the empty house on vacations or on a weekend, she found the cupboards bare of food. Although Obama was able to borrow funds to pay for his necessities, he often gave the money to charities to maintain the illusion of prosperity. In the months after Ruth left, as Auma wrote in her 2010 memoir,
Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen
(“Life Comes In Between”), “a sad time began.”
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“It appeared that both my father and brother tried to escape from the stillness of our house as much as possible,” Auma wrote. “Many times I was already asleep when they came home and often my father woke me up to talk with me.”
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Inviting his daughter to come sit with him in the living room, Obama turned to the young girl for solace in the long lonely evenings. As Auma stared coolly at him from her end of the couch, Obama insisted that he deeply loved his children and was working as hard as he could to provide for them. As the night wore on, he played his beloved Schubert's Fifth Symphony on the record player while detailing the host of difficulties he had encountered in his life to his sleepy daughter. But Auma was unmoved by his sorrows. His late-night effort to forge a connection with a child he had long neglected was too little, too late. Engulfed in the dramatic cascade of flute and horns, she could not hear him. “I was far away from him. I did not understand his deep sadness and felt no compassion for his
loneliness,” she wrote. “At that time I was firmly convinced that the situation to which he had brought us was his own fault.”
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To some extent Obama himself agreed. Although he publicly blamed Kenyatta and his Kikuyu coterie for his travails, Obama was painfully aware that in the end he was the one who was unable to provide for his children or his extended family. On his trips to Kanyadhiang he never mentioned that he had lost his job. On the contrary, he always arrived laden with food and gifts, purchased with funds he had borrowed from friends or the Kogelo Union Association. Dressed in his trademark European suits, now thinning at the elbow, he unfailingly presented himself as a flourishing government economist. But in private he mourned the sorry state of his fractured families to his closest friends and turned increasingly to drink. “It was a very, very tough time for him,” said his old friend Peter Aringo, a former member of Parliament representing Alego. “I think he understood that the problem somehow lay within his own personality but he did not know how to correct it. It really broke his pride. So he blamed Kenyatta. It was Kenyatta who had made it impossible for him to take care of his families. Barack was fighting this huge monster and he could never win. By this time he had begun to drink a lot in the daytime. He really had nothing to occupy him.”

What gnawed at Obama the most was his inability to pay for the education of his vast network of family members or even his own children. Ever since he had been a child performing math sums at Onyango's table, he had been taught that education was the passport to achievement and success. He had long preached the benefits of a college degree and proudly paid the school fees for countless young nephews and cousins. That he, Dr. Barack Obama, could no longer do even
that
galled him deeply. It was not for lack of trying. During the years that he was unemployed, Obama routinely dropped into the downtown office of the Institute of International Education, a U.S.-based nonprofit that provides international educational opportunities and training in hopes of securing funding for one or two of his relatives. Almost once a week Josephine Mitchell, director of the office from 1972 to 1975, who sometimes worked late into the evening, would look up to find Obama at the door. “He was looking for money,” recalled Mitchell, now seventy-three years old and living in Vancouver
Island. “He always had a long list of family members in mind. He'd say, ‘I have this brilliant nephew you must let me tell you about,' or ‘Here are the schools I have in mind for him,' or, ‘Did you know that these are the schools I went to?'”

Mitchell found his determination moving. But she found the strong smell of alcohol on his breath distinctly less appealing. “He was usually quite tight,” added Mitchell. “If you got him in the morning, he'd be OK. But he had a few at lunch and a few more on the way home. By evening he was pretty wasted. You know, by then he was someone people had really cast aside. He just wasn't much use in the scheme of things anymore. It was really very sad.”

Although some of Obama's colleagues and friends kept their distance, Omogi Calleb did not. Calleb was not just a man of similar tastes but was also born not far from Kanyadhiang in the same year as Obama. For a short while the two had attended school together. A gregarious and amiable man, Calleb owned a popular new restaurant in Westlands with a dance floor famous for its Congolese bands. Worried that his old friend was slipping into a perilous state, Calleb took him under his wing. He made sure Obama had ample funds for his Double-Doubles and provided him a bed in his own home for months at a time. On some weekends the two of them hit the road looking for excitement. They went to the beaches in Mombasa, stayed in fine hotels in Tanzania, and ate at luxurious restaurants in Nairobi. And sometimes they arranged to meet some young women at their ultimate destination. “We liked going out with pretty young ladies,” said Calleb. “We had a philosophy which was that they must be presentable. So sometimes we did that. But to be fair to Barack, this was not always his practice. At this point in his life, what he really liked was his
pombe
, his alcohol, and always the general company of other people drinking.”

Like others, Calleb worried about Obama's alcoholic intake, and he was especially worried when Obama was behind the wheel of his car. During the early 1970s Obama had a series of minor traffic accidents, most of them at night, and the police frequently lectured him for his perilous driving habits. But driving under the influence of alcohol was hardly uncommon, and Obama paid the police little mind. As Obama's mother had done some years ago, Calleb warned Obama that he would meet his end in a car
crash if he was not careful. “I said, ‘Your death will be caused by drunkenness,'” recalled Calleb. “He said, ‘To hell with it. If that's the cause of my death, so be it.'”

Inevitably, Obama wound up in yet another serious car accident. This time he not only broke both of his legs but also shattered his left knee cap. The knee required a cast for three months and a hospital stay of twice that duration.
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During his recuperation Obama sunk into deeper gloom. Unable to walk during much of his hospitalization, Obama could no longer manage even the small amounts of contract work that had kept him financially afloat. When he was finally released from the hospital on crutches toward the end of 1973, he walked with a limp that would stay with him for much of his life. Obama, Harvard graduate and son of Hussein Onyango, was now a man with a physical handicap, no means of support, and a dwindling number of friends. “He was ostracized mostly because of his penury, having no money,” said Mule. “In Kenya, if you have no money that's a big problem.”