The Other Barack (5 page)

At the back of the book, several of Onyango's employers wrote assessments of their servant, which were largely positive. Onyango held a series of jobs for which he was paid about 60 East African Shillings a month,
equal to about $145 today.
²⁰
Capt. C. Harford of Nairobi's Government House wrote that Onyango “performed his duties as personal boy with admirable diligence.” Mr. A. G. Dickson gushed that “he can read and write English and follows any recipes . . . apart from other things his pastries are excellent.” But he lamented that he would no longer need Onyango because “I am no longer on Safari.” But Mr. Arthur W. H. Cole of the East Africa Survey Group was distinctly unhappy with his houseboy after one week on the job and declared that Onyango “was found to be unsuitable and certainly not worth 60 shillings per month.”
²¹

Although he lived much of the time in Nairobi, Onyango regularly returned to Kendu Bay, the larger township near Kanyadhiang, walking the entire 220-mile journey on foot. Onyango had carefully saved his money and built himself a home not far from those of his brothers. However, he lived in a manner that was so different from his siblings, so unlike that of any other villager, that he became the object of great curiosity and conversation. In leaving the confines of the village and adopting some of the white man's ways, Onyango had begun to hold himself apart from some of his own people, thus becoming alien to their ways. At times he was no longer at ease with his neighbors, and his stratification between the two cultures was a foreshadowing of the kind of dislocation that his son would experience in an even more extreme way.

Onyango had learned a great deal more from his
mzungu
employers than how to bake scones or on which side of a plate setting to put the knife or fork. Onyango was now a clean man, one nearly obsessed with hygiene and orderliness. He washed himself constantly and demanded that people rinse their feet before they enter his hut. His home, too, was immaculate, and he demanded that things be returned to their proper place. Whereas the villagers regularly ate
ugali
, a staple porridge of maize and water, or
sukuma wiki
, a plate of cooked greens, Onyango prepared for himself aromatic breads and scrambled eggs in butter. He did not allow cows anywhere near his hut because he felt the flies that accompanied them were unsanitary.

A man of few words, Onyango had an elaborate set of rules governing how things should be done. Charles Oluoch, a village elder whose grandfather was one of Onyango's seven brothers, recalls that at mealtimes Onyango insisted that others wait to wash their hands until after he had
washed his own. He would then eat his meal alone, “and no one could sit down at the table until he was done,” explained Oluoch, fifty-six and still living in Kanyadhiang.
^a
When Onyango visited the homes of his brothers, he instructed their wives on how to cook their food and demanded that only a single measure of water ever be put in a pot, with no additional liquid allowed.
²²
He did not like people visiting his home. And if a person wished to see him, he required that they make an appointment. And when they arrived at the arranged time, if he consented to see them at all, they had better have something specific to address, or beware.

“You would fear facing him,” recalled Arthur Reuben Owino, seventynine, who attended school with Barack, Onyango's son. “You would think
very
carefully what you wanted to say to him. He was a very frank person and if he didn't like what you were saying he would tell you point blank. He liked to argue. He'd say, ‘No, no no. It's not like that,' or, ‘It's not done that way.' Even if it was your way of doing it. You had to do it
his
way. That was the
right
way.”

With his impressive city job and fluency in English and Swahili, Onyango was a man of significant stature in the village. But his manner instilled more fear than respect. The two words that people invariably use to describe him are
kwiny
, meaning harsh, or
ger
, which means about the same but in a different dialect. Onyango could not bear the sound of a crying child, and if a mother failed to keep her baby quiet, he would promptly strike her with his cane. Likewise, a woman who did not answer his summons on the first call would feel the weight of his cane or, worse, the fourlashed whip made of stiff hippopotamus hide that he kept at the ready beside his door. Hawa Auma, one of his nine children, remembers that when women in the household heard his voice as he approached the house, they would hide behind large pots, or
dak
, so he could not see them. “My dad was very harsh,” Hawa Auma declared in Swahili. “If he was caning one of his children and someone happened to ask him why he was doing so, he would turn around and cane them senselessly, too.”

Obama Madoho remembers the sting of the dreaded whip all too well. Seventy-three and curved with age, Madoho was eleven years old when he
made the mistake of allowing his cows—and their attendant flies—to stray too near to Onyango's hut. He recalls his age because he had just begun to wear clothes for the first time. “The whip had four straps to it, so when he hit you, it was like he was hitting you four times at once,” explained Madoho, who lives next door to the Obama compound in Alego. “I can tell you I was never so foolish as to take the cows near to him again.”

Nor was Onyango like most other Kenyan men in another significant aspect: his religion. During his childhood in the early 1900s Christian missionaries were just beginning to set up the schools that would provide an education for many Kenyan schoolchildren, including Onyango himself. At the time many were eager to learn the ways of the white man and therefore readily converted to Christianity, which is now the dominant religion in Luoland.

But the mission teachers also taught a submissiveness bred of Christian doctrine, one that colonial administrators wholly endorsed. A good and forgiving Christian was to “turn the other cheek” and “forgive your enemies.” The missionary teachers also declared un-Christian many African practices of which they disapproved, such as polygamy and witchcraft, and insisted these practices be abandoned immediately. The Africans, who had traditionally regarded multiple wives as a status symbol reflecting a man's wealth, were made to feel ashamed of their behavior and uncertain about their own beliefs. Christian doctrine reinforced that sense of inferiority by proscribing that Africans accept their lot in life as ordained by the Almighty and bend to the fate that befell them. Passivity was the mantra, and the colonial administrators were glad of it. As the esteemed Kenyan historian Bethwell A. Ogot put it, “Thus both the Government and the Missionaries aimed at producing obedient and meek Africans who believed that the white man was always right because he was morally superior.”
²³

But Onyango was not buying it. Although he respected the white man's discipline and organizational strength, he considered many of the
mzungu
's practices unjust and their cultural affectations foolish. To him, such Christian homilies had never rung true. Who was a Jesus who could wash away a man's sins? Only a fool would show mercy toward an enemy.

Like some 165,000 other Africans,
²⁴
Onyango was enlisted to aid the British when they battled the neighboring Germans in East Africa during
World War I. For nearly four years Onyango worked with road crews in Tanganyika, the German protectorate, which included Rwanda, Burundi, and almost all of Tanzania, before winding up on the island of Zanzibar, which was also under British control. There he discovered the Islamic faith, a set of beliefs that appealed to him far more than Christianity or Nyasaye, the god and ubiquitous spiritual force that many Luos traditionally revered.

Onyango was so drawn to Islam's goal of religious and moral perfection as well as its highly disciplined practices that he converted and took the name Hussein. In doing so, he became part of a religious minority that many Luos regarded with suspicion. Although Muslim traders began arriving on the coast of East Africa in the eighth century, not until after the railroad reached the Lake Victoria region in the early 1900s did Islam gain a foothold inland. When Onyango returned from the war, there were still only about twenty Muslim families in the district, representing a tiny fraction of the local population.
²⁵
Although Islam would become more common in the area in coming decades due to widespread Muslim proselytizing in the later part of the 1920s, it had to overcome some significant cultural hurdles. One of the main impediments among Luos was the requirement that Muslim males be circumcised, a practice Luos traditionally do not believe in. And so it was that on his return home, Hussein Onyango, as he now called himself, was seen as stranger more than ever before.

By then Onyango was in his mid-twenties and it was beyond time for him to marry. Given his demanding ways and eccentric habits, finding a wife was not going to be easy. That Onyango had taken to wearing a long red
kanzu
, a traditional robe worn by Arab men, did not help the matter. Onyango paid the traditional dowry of a dozen cows or more for several young women, but when he beat them for falling short of his rigid housekeeping standards, they fled back to their parents' homes. One girl, who the senior members of the Obama clan only dimly recalled, did become his wife, but soon she too fled. Finally, late in the 1920s Onyango found a docile young woman named Helima who was able to endure his harsh ways and moved in with him. But when she was unable to have children after a few years, he was on the prowl again.
²⁶

One day while walking in the woods, he spotted a beautiful young woman with broad cheeks and deep-set brown eyes carrying a basket of
fish. Although another man had already claimed her, Onyango managed to talk her father into rejecting the other man's offer and accepting a dowry offer of fifteen cattle. The following day he captured the girl on her way to the market and dragged her back to his hut. Her name was Akumu Njoga. Onyango soon persuaded her to convert to Islam and she took the name of Habiba, a variation of the Arabic name for “loved one.” But Akumu never forgave Onyango for abducting her, and their marriage was tempestuous from the start.

Their first child was a girl, Sarah Nyaoke. Then, blessedly, three years later the first boy arrived in June of 1936.
²⁷
In the Luo patrilineal culture, ancestry is defined through the father's family line, and the birth of a son is a much-celebrated event. Males are generally more highly valued than females, and in many family trees the names of a man's wives are not even recorded. Male babies, for example, would be kept indoors for four days before being taken outdoors, whereas female babies could go outside after only three days.
²⁸
Firstborn sons in particular were prized and anointed with weighty responsibilities. Referred to as
kadier ng'eya
, meaning “my back” in Dholuo, a first son was to literally watch his father's back both in terms of protecting him and also learning from him. He would be the custodian of the family's cultural knowledge and their interrelationships with other clans. The family's general well-being would be his responsibility for as long as he lived.

Onyango's baby son was gifted with his mother's attractive features. His face was broad like hers, and his brown eyes were so deep that his mother was fond of saying they were “entered in” his face. His parents named him Baraka, meaning “blessing” in Arabic.

As the firstborn son, Baraka was bound to partake in certain rituals with his father, designated just for the two of them. When a new home was built, for example, the eldest son was designated to go to the site with his father and prepare it for their home. The father would carry a cock, symbolizing male power or polygamy, and the son carried a new axe on a new handle, signifying his growing autonomy. The first wife brought fire.
²⁹
When the first son eventually had a family of his own and built his own house, he was given a location of some honor set to the right of the father's homestead. The second son's home would be positioned farther out from the father's house but to the left. The third son went to the right and so on
in a physical manifestation of the family tree.
³⁰
On this sacred familial land, which the members of an extended clan held collectively subject to shifting seasonal claims, both the placentas of newborns and the bodies of the dead would ultimately be buried.

Even the curmudgeonly Onyango was taken with the wide-eyed little Baraka. On his return from work in Nairobi, he brought him special fabric for clothes and mosquito netting for his crib. When Onyango and his son traveled outside the village, he dressed the boy in a white kanzu like his own with a matching white cap. Keenly aware of the benefits an education could bring, he taught his son to read at an early age and told him stories of his far-flung travels. As the family grew with the addition of a third child, Hawa Auma, Onyango took to addressing only his son Baraka and would often refuse to talk to his daughters. The girls, after all, would soon move on with husbands of their own. “He would talk only to Barack because he was the boy,” recalled Joseph Akello, a childhood friend of Barack's. “He would say to the girls, ‘Ladies, you are all going to go away from this home. You are going to get married and not stay in this place.' And so then he would not talk to them.”