The Other Barack (42 page)

Obama believed he had a much larger problem—bigger than his damaged legs, bigger even than his financial worries. And that was a vengeful Kikuyu determined to pay him back for his role in Njenga's trial. Although it is unclear whether Kenyatta's regime in fact targeted Obama in any way or threatened his family with death as he told a handful of friends, his fear seemed genuine. When his old Hawaii friend Pake Zane and his then girlfriend, Julie Lauster, arrived in Nairobi for a visit in 1974, they were both struck by Obama's fixation with Kenyatta's government. Not only had the president betrayed the country with his capitalist ways and nepotistic practices, Obama declared, but he had sought to assassinate Obama himself. He explained that his leg had been injured when a car had tried to run him down on a city street, which he called “a direct attempt on my life,” recalled Zane. Obama appeared to be in near constant pain, and his anger was unrelenting. Accompanying him on his circuit of downtown bars at night, Zane found listening to his diatribes difficult. “He'd go out and get wasted and piss off all of his friends,” recalled Zane. “We'd be at an outside bar and he'd pour out his anger at someone for their stance on this or their opinion on that or something they had done. He'd be sarcastic and right in their face. He'd point at someone and say, ‘That man is a fool,' or ‘He has no understanding of
what he is talking about.' You couldn't get a word in edgewise. It was really hard to be around all that rage.”

Zane and Lauster had intended to stay at a campground just outside the city during their week in Nairobi but had instead moved to Obama's house at his insistence. After a few days staying with Obama, however, they decided to move back to the campground. “He was funny and charming and a real bore,” declared Lauster. “We went back to the park because it was much calmer there.”

Sometimes when Obama went off on a rant about the miserable state of Kenyan affairs, fistfights would develop. Aringo recalls a night at the Nyanza Bar when Obama was crowing so loudly about his Harvard degree that others in the bar turned to look at him as the room grew quiet. “And then a voice from the back of the bar called, ‘Go to hell,' and that was that,” said Aringo. “Obama went after the man and there was a huge fistfight. We finally separated them. Obama was very apologetic the next day. I said, ‘You cannot fight in public like that. You are far too senior.'”

Then came the ultimate humiliation. In the administrative office of the Kenya High School, Auma Obama's tuition was often unpaid for weeks beyond the due date. Not just once, but repeatedly. Each time, Auma was summoned to the bookkeeper's office, where she was given a bill for the derelict amount and told to return home until the account was settled. And each time, when she arrived home, Obama contacted several of his friends who agreed to cover the debt. But Obama knew full well that they had little intention of doing so. Refusing to acknowledge his inability to pay for his daughter's education, Obama briskly wrote out a check as though doing so would somehow replenish his empty account. Auma solemnly trudged the two-mile distance back to school, painfully aware that the check in her hand was worthless.
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“So I was more than once again sent home a few days later and again had to ask my father for the payment,” wrote Auma. “With each visit I had to grow a thicker skin to be able to cope with this terrible situation. My skin became thicker and thicker until I totally distanced myself from my father and the pain I saw in his face.”
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After several such instances, a headmistress at the school learned of Auma's plight and stepped forward to offer her a scholarship. Auma was able to continue her schooling and returned home as little as possible.
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By the end of 1975 there was no real home to return to. Unable to pay the rent, Obama was forced to leave the Woodley house in which he had lived for six years. Virtually homeless, he slept on the couches of his friends Aringo and Calleb or at the home of his nephew Ezra. When he was able to borrow money or claim a favor from a friend, he stayed alone in a hotel room.

Despite his abject financial state, Obama continued to frequent his favorite bars, usually able to find an acquaintance who would stand him a round or two. One day, as he maneuvered slowly through the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, still favoring his injured leg, he ran into his young friend Oyuko Mbeche. It was in Cambridge that Obama had met Mbeche, the high school student who had been so inspired by Obama's eloquent articulation of mathematical principles that he had changed his career from medicine to engineering. Mbeche, who had spent many a night in Obama's Cambridge apartment listening raptly to the older man's stories, had since earned a couple of university degrees himself and was now a lecturer at the University of Nairobi. Taken aback by Obama's slender frame and his halting stride, Mbeche said he was sorry to hear about Obama's accident. “Obama said, ‘Well, you see, now even God does not want me,'” recalled Mbeche. “Here he'd had this accident in which he should have died but ... as he saw it, not even God wanted him.”

 

THE YEAR 1975 BROUGHT A SERIES OF
pivotal developments that broke the free fall of Obama's life. It opened with a political tragedy that tore at the Kenyan heart. But it ended with Obama's surprising personal resurrection, a renaissance that was initiated, fittingly enough, over double shots of whiskey at an elegant bar.

The politics came first. In the years after Tom Mboya's death and the banning of Odinga's KPU, Kenyatta enjoyed a period of relative political peace during which the voices of his perennial critics remained quiet. But it did not last. Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, a colorful member of Parliament known as J. M., had once been a personal secretary to Kenyatta and a devotee of the aging oligarch. But like some other dissident Kikuyus, Kariuki had grown increasingly unhappy with what he considered to be the administration's disregard for the poor and its gradual accumulation of riches. Championing himself as a man of the people, Kariuki famously
declared that “We do not want a Kenya of ten millionaires and ten million beggars.”

Kariuki was no mere gadfly warning against the perils of class formation, another naysayer to be squashed. He was a popular former insider with a following in parts of Kikuyuland. And so it was that he had to be eliminated. On March 3, 1975, two Masai elders found his body in a thicket in the Ngong Hills. He had been shot several times and several of his fingers had been cut off.
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The assassination prompted widespread outrage as students boycotted lectures on the University of Nairobi campus and members of Parliament denounced the government and formed a committee to probe the murder. The banner headline of the
Daily Nation
on March 14 trumpeted, “WE WANT THE TRUTH.”

Once again, as he had in the case of the Kisumu rioting after Mboya's death, Kenyatta came down hard on his enemies. A report critical of the government investigation into the matter was shelved, and several critics in Parliament were either detained or forced out of office. Kenyatta may have been an old man showing signs of senility, but he was still capable of slapping down his opponents with an iron hand in an iron glove when he wanted to. At the annual Kenyatta Day celebration several months later, Kenyatta concluded his remarks with the chilling words, “The hawk is in the sky. It is ready to descend on chickens who stray from the pathway.”
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Like many Kenyans, Kariuki's murder deeply disheartened Obama, as it came only six years after Mboya's assassination. For months afterward it was the topic of heated, if somewhat guarded, conversation in the bars and restaurants around town. Indeed, Obama and Aringo had been discussing the political consequences of the administration's crackdown over drinks one October afternoon at a table at the Intercontinental Hotel when they noticed Mwai Kibaki, then the Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, stride across the room toward his usual spot at the bar.

Kibaki, an able economist, had already worn a number of hats in his career and had gotten to know Obama when he worked as Tom Mboya's deputy in the planning ministry in the mid-1960s. Although a Kikuyu who commanded a prominent government post, Kibaki had a soft spot for Luos, partly stemming from his days with Mboya. He had even been aligned temporarily with Odinga over some internal KANU struggles in
the pre-independence days. Kibaki not only shared Obama's appetite for whiskey, but he had also been deeply impressed by the other man's mathematic skills and economic modeling. And so when Obama approached him at the bar that day, Kibaki held out his hand. Obama got right to the point, as Aringo recalls it. “He said, ‘I have no job so I cannot buy myself a drink. Why is it that you have a job and yet I am twice the economist that you are?' Kibaki really liked Obama. He understood him and the way he talked. So he bought him his double shots of whiskey and then he told Barack to come to his office in another week. There would be a job for him there.”

Obama was deeply pleased. At long last he faced the prospect of serious work and could begin to piece together a semblance of his old life. In early November 1975 Obama walked into the Finance Ministry on Harambee Avenue, the same building in which Edgar Edwards had him turned down for the job of chief planning officer on his return from the United States eleven years earlier. Obama was instructed to report to Harris Mule, the deputy permanent secretary in charge of planning, and Mule was not displeased to see him. Although he took issue with aspects of Obama's domestic life and was well aware of his problems at KTDC, he also admired Obama's abilities and felt he could make a valuable contribution.

Mule and others had carefully considered what kind of job to give Obama, keenly aware of his sometimes abrasive personality. They had concluded that he would be best suited for a technical job, one without any of the fiscal or management responsibilities that had led him into trouble at KTDC. Obama was made planning officer for commerce development in the Industry and Infrastructure Section. The job, strictly crunching numbers, was at a level usually reserved for recent college graduates.
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He was to be paid 1,446 pounds a year, significantly lower than his salary at KTDC. That the graying Kenyatta apparently did not object to Obama's hiring indicated that either he was simply unaware of it or could not be troubled by such a low-level posting. “The man was qualified and I knew he could do the job,” said Mule. “At KTDC he had been assigned to help run an institution but his personality quite frankly was not up to it. What we were giving him was a behind the scenes job where you sit down and get information and crank it up and come up with the product in the end. And that is what he did.”

Obama recognized a lot of the faces on the second floor, many of them economists with whom he had started out and who now held positions far more exalted than his own. Although the number of economists and planners in the Ministry had significantly increased over the past decade, they still shared a camaraderie and zeal for their mission that Mboya had fostered. Edwards, the professor from Texas who had turned him down so many years ago, was still there working as a senior adviser. Philip Ndegwa, whom he had tutored at Harvard, had recently left his post as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance and Planning to take a job at the United Nations. And Francis Masakhalia, who had been a few years behind him at the Maseno School, was now chief economist in the planning department and Obama's new boss. Masakhalia, who was deeply fond of Obama, welcomed him warmly. “I had all the sympathy for my old friend and I was glad to see him back,” said Masakhalia. “Here was a very well educated individual who was not being utilized in our society. And that pained us.”

Not everyone was so pleased to see Obama reporting to work. Some who knew him were uncomfortable, even a bit embarrassed, to see Obama at such a low rank. Others were concerned that the grandstanding and drinking about which they had heard so much would become a problem. But when another permanent secretary questioned Obama's employment, Masakhalia leapt to his defense. In a letter to the secretary, Masakhalia wrote, “regarding Mr. Obama's tendencies, let me assure you that the latter have been common knowledge to everyone who has known Mr. Obama for some time.... We, however, have been made to believe that Mr. Obama has reformed considerably. Furthermore, he has been advised of the conduct and discipline that he has to maintain while in the Civil Service.”
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Two weeks later deeply saddening family news dampened the buoyancy that Obama had felt on returning to work. The Old Man, Hussein Onyango, frail and nearly blind at eighty, had died. As the oldest son, Obama was responsible for pulling together the funeral. Because he had just started work and had not yet been paid, Obama had to request an advance on his salary to do so. Five months later he requested a second advance in order to pay for myriad other expenses. It was just the beginning. Throughout his years in the Ministry of Finance, Obama was forever
short of funds, frequently raising the specter of family tragedies or personal problems for which he needed immediate cash. His requests were almost always granted. “I just do not have any money at all,” Obama wrote to Masakhalia in a November 1975 letter asking for an advance. “Could you please arrange for the money to be paid to you, then hand it over to Olweny Ogutu, who is my nephew?”

In May 1976 he politely requested an advance of 1,000 Kenyan shillings. In a letter to the Treasury's senior personnel officer, Obama wrote that he was plagued by financial problems. Not only was his oldest son, Malik, sick in Kisumu and about to start private school, “I also have to pay quite a lot of money in school fees and uniforms for all my children going to school. Added to this I just lost my father recently and as such I find myself very much squized [
sic
] financially.”