The Other Barack (44 page)

Obama's file also contains multiple requests beginning within months of his hiring for funds to cover the costs of traveling on home leave to Alego with his “wife and five children.” At that time, however, he had no wife living with him. Two of his children, Mark and David, were living with Ruth, and Auma and Malik were often living at boarding school. Another child lived in Hawaii, and Bernard and Abo lived with their mother, Kezia. Nonetheless, the Ministry routinely approved funds for rail fare for the mythically happy family to travel together.

Nor had Obama's heavy drinking slowed in the slightest. “Double-Double” drank consistently on the job and most people knew it. In fact, some of his colleagues observed that he performed better with alcohol in his system than without it. During one trip to Addis Ababa to discuss the Lake Turkana project in 1980, members of the Ethiopian delegation watched in consternation as Obama downed one whiskey after the other during the course of the evening, alarmed that he would be unable to function at their meeting the next day. But by the following morning
Obama was in high-performance mode and stunned the Ethiopians as he rattled off statistics and details of the project that they could barely recall.
²⁴

Not long after Kenyatta's death, Mule was promoted to the position of permanent secretary of the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development.
²⁵
Even in his high-ranking job, Mule managed to keep an eye out on Obama, of whom he was fond. And when he felt that Obama was stuck on a particular task or could not make his calculations work out as they should, Mule handed him fifty shillings and suggested he go get a shot of whiskey at his own favorite bar down on Moi Avenue—or maybe two shots.

“I encouraged him to go get a drink,” said Mule. “I knew that he had difficulty working without any whiskey in him so if I saw he was having a mental blockage of some kind, I'd just send him off to Tina's. And then he would come back and do a wonderful job.”

Sometimes, however, Obama's alcohol intake was less than conducive to work. Most Mondays, Obama's colleagues noticed that he smelled of alcohol, the residue of his heavy weekend intake. More than once Obama managed to burn through his travel advance while on assignment, and sometimes he did so before he had even left town. Sebastian Okoda, an assistant secretary in the Ministry of Finance who briefly shared an apartment with Obama, tells of a night in 1976 when Obama had a travel advance of 7,000 Kenyan shillings burning a hole in his pocket. Instead of heading to the airport and preparing for his journey, Obama decided to take half a dozen of his friends out drinking at the popular Revolving Tower Restaurant on the twenty-seventh floor of the iconic Kenyatta International Conference Center that dominates downtown Nairobi. By early the next morning the group was still cavorting at the bar and Obama was broke. “Barack had to borrow money from everyone for the trip and then he raced off to the airport,” Okoda said.

Obama's alcoholic exploits were easily tolerated among the largely male crowd with which he drank. Nairobi was a hard-drinking culture, so heavy consumption was de rigueur. As some of his friends saw it, Obama was just a bit extreme. That his mother and a handful of close friends had pleaded with him to stop drinking was a telling measure of how extreme his drinking had become by the late 1970s, but anyone unfamiliar with his drinking patterns and the way in which the Ministry indulged him found
his demeanor shocking. For instance, Clive Gray was a consultant with the Harvard Institute for International Development working with the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture in 1981 when he happened to see Obama walking down a corridor in the ministry. Gray had been a graduate student at Harvard at the same time as Obama and instantly recognized him. He was thinner, yes, but Gray couldn't mistake that broad face and the heavy-rimmed glasses. As he watched, Gray noticed that Obama was staggering slightly, raising his hand to the wall to steady himself. Clearly, Obama was drunk. And it was still an hour before lunch. “I asked a friend what had happened to him. You know, I remembered him from Harvard,” recalled Gray. “And I was told that he was drunk most of the time. It was a shame, just a real waste.”

 

IN JUNE 1980 BARACK OBAMA TURNED forty-four years old. He was by then a middle-aged man with a complex domestic history, even by Luo standards. He had three wives in his wake and five or seven children, depending on who was doing the counting. His relationship with virtually all of them was strained at best. And then things got even more complicated.

Obama met a woman.

Her name was Jael Atieno. In the Dholuo language, Atieno means “born at night.” She was tall and soft-spoken with long braids that reached down her back. When his half-sister, Marsat, with whom she attended school, introduced Jael to him, she was twenty years old—the same age as Obama's only daughter, Auma, and twenty-four years younger than him. The following year she moved in with him and the two agreed that they would marry. Because Jael was pregnant, the traditional dowry payment of cows could not be made. According to traditional Luo custom, payment of dowry when a woman is pregnant results in bad luck such that the baby might die. But one of Obama's brothers paid her mother 1,000 shillings in
ayie
, the first step of a Luo wedding process that is a gesture of appreciation to the bride's mother and an indication that both sides are committed to continue with the marriage. The wedding ceremony was scheduled to take place in December of 1982, when the baby would be about six months old.
²⁶

For Obama, the union with Jael provided a stability to his life that had long been lacking. Like many African men, Obama continued his nightly
visits to the bars in town with his male friends, leaving his young wife at home. But he now had home-cooked meals and someone to look after him. Their lifestyle in the boxy Mawenzi Gardens complex, with its cement block walls and tiny outdoor patio, was a far cry from that to which he had once been accustomed, but it was a vast improvement over the dingy hotel rooms and bachelor pads of recent years. Obama also felt that at long last he had gained some recognition for his hard work on the Lake Turkana and Sudan road projects. Early in 1982 he was selected to partake in the country's fifth national development plan covering the years 1984 to 1988, considered a vital government project. Obama was to chair a planning group on roads and housing that would review the country's progress since independence and establish goals for the future. Seven years after he had been confined to a behind-the-scenes accounting post, he was now overseeing dozens of government workers at regular committee meetings each week. It wasn't a division head or even an official promotion, but the position gave Obama a bit of the authority he felt he deserved.

Establishing development goals in Kenya of 1982, however, was a daunting task. President Moi's honeymoon period had lasted barely a year when the deepening world recession began to have a severe impact on the Kenyan economy, and the country faced an acute shortage of foreign exchange. As a scarcity of goods became commonplace, a series of strikes shook the country and many grew alarmed about the adequacy of the country's food supply—and for good reason. In an effort to maintain control of the increasingly turbulent situation, Moi began to crack down on dissent and increased the army's size in a deliberate show of muscle. On August 1, 1982, the country's air force personnel staged an attempted coup d'état and seized control of the Voice of Kenya radio station, claiming they had taken over the government. The maneuver was short lived, as army troops managed to regain control within hours, although looting and chaos on the streets continued for days. For weeks afterward a curfew remained in place, as the deeply shaken nation struggled to regain an equilibrium.

As the year drew toward an end, Jael found herself anxious about her husband. Their baby, named George Hussein Onyango Obama after a cherished cousin, had been born in May. Although the birth of another
son invigorated Obama, he remained anxious about his finances and how he would be able to pay for yet another round of school fees. He was also deeply upset about the country's state of economic crisis and Moi's drift to the right. The specter of a return to the bad old years, even a pale version of them, left him despondent. When Obama headed out in the evenings, Jael cautioned him to be circumspect, worried that he might antagonize one of the soldiers patrolling the streets and wind up in jail. Amir Otieno Orinda, Obama's half-brother by his mother, who was visiting the couple, agreed. “She told him not to go outside,” recalled Orinda. “She knew he was a hot-headed man and that he would not be afraid of the patrol. He kept saying the country was
piny rach
or ‘the country is no good.'”

There was still another matter that contributed to Obama's dark mood. His old nemesis, Philip Ndegwa, had just reached an unprecedented pinnacle and his shadow fell longer than ever. Ndegwa had held a succession of high-profile positions in recent years, including serving as adviser to newly elected president Moi and then as chairman of the Kenya Commercial Bank. But in November of 1982 it became clear that Ndegwa was going to be named governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, one of the most influential positions in the Kenyan government. Ndegwa, who of course had been famously tutored by Obama back in their Harvard days, was now the commander of the same bank that had dismissed Obama after ten months as a graduate trainee fifteen years earlier. Ndegwa's posting, which would become effective in December, was galling.

On a day in late November Obama came home with some chilling words. He told Jael that if he should die, she must make sure that George went to the best schools. And if he should die before the boy turned eighteen, she must make sure that all of his children received an equal share of whatever he had. He was adamant that he did not want “[unclear] to get five cents out of this.”
²⁷
Although Jael pressed him repeatedly to explain why he was saying such things, Obama refused to say anything further.

Three days later Obama was dead. On November 26 Obama's pickup truck had slammed into a eucalyptus stump as he was heading home at night from the Kaloleni bar. No one knew exactly how the accident had occurred, and some in his circle of drinking pals promptly questioned if it was an accident at all. On that day Obama had worked later than usual. He
was preparing for an upcoming committee meeting on the fiscal constraints that were expected to shape the fifth development plan and had wound up in the office later than expected. As he was leaving the building early in the evening, en route to the Kaloleni, he happened to run into Edgar Edwards in the basement garage. Edwards, the senior economic adviser, could tell from Obama's thick speech that he had put away a few drinks already. As he often did when he encountered Obama in such a condition, Edwards took a few minutes to urge Obama to drink less so that he could make better use of his substantial talents. Obama listened noncommittally, as he usually did to Edwards's admonishments. “He was always very reserved around me,” recalled Edwards. “He listened and nodded his head, but he would never respond positively or negatively. He just listened respectfully.”

Obama continued on his way and dropped in at the Intercontinental for a couple more drinks. By the time he reached the Kaloleni at around 8 p.m., he was in exceptionally high spirits. The score of regulars there were also well into their cups and the place was humming. Otieno was hunched over the table, deep in conversation. So too were Obondo and Olum. Obama headed to the bar, where he ordered his trademark Double-Double set of whiskies and bought a round of drinks for several other customers. At 10:30 p.m. Obama asked a friend, David Owino Weya, who often bought him drinks when he was out of money, to walk with him to his car. On that night the man who usually drove Obama home when he was in no condition to drive himself was otherwise engaged. A few people offered to drive him, but Obama was adamant that he could drive himself. “He was a bit tipsy but in quite a good humor,” said Weya. “When we got to his car he gave me two hundred shillings. He said, ‘I am leaving but you go and buy yourself some drinks. I will see you tomorrow at lunchtime.'”

Weya was the last person to whom Obama spoke. A half hour later Obama drove into a broad stump at the edge of the Elgon Road a short distance from his home. He died instantly. The police came upon the wreckage several hours later and moved his body to the mortuary. As word of his passing spread quickly during the day, a handful of stunned relatives hurried to his side to say their final goodbyes.

Speculation about the accident mushroomed just as quickly. Not surprisingly, the elements of Obama's death were as mysterious to his family
and friends as were fundamental aspects of his life. Family members, many of whom attribute Obama's employment difficulties to payback for his brazen outspokenness, believe that nameless government enemies murdered him. It is a matter of gospel among them that Obama's body was unscathed in the accident and his car undamaged—the very windshield unbroken. Even his eyeglasses, they maintain, were intact.
²⁸
If Obama had careened drunkenly into a tree, surely his body would have been brutally broken, his car a shattered wreck. He must have been killed in some other manner and his body placed in the car in such a way as to make it appear that he had an accident. Or so their reasoning goes.

Others were convinced that Obama's death was a suicide. How else to explain his curious remarks to his wife? Obama's rage about the arc of his own life and his aching disappointment in his country's path was hardly a secret. Nor was his self-destructive habit of drinking. Peter Aringo, traveling outside the country, remembered in one of his last conversations with his old friend that Obama had been despondent about his children, as they were scattered so widely and, in some cases, doing poorly. “It weighed on him greatly,” said Aringo. “So I was not surprised to hear that he had died.”