The Other Barack (8 page)

That is exactly what he did. Within days, Onyango and his family had packed a few items and made their way to the northeast side of the lake where his ancestors of the Kogelo clan had lived nearly one hundred and fifty years earlier. The move was impetuous, a decision fueled by wounded Luo pride. None of Onyango's wives were happy about it. Because Helima was getting on in years and could not be expected to help in establishing a new home, Onyango permitted her to remain with her family in Kendu Bay. Alego was a much fiercer area, where leopards roamed freely and would sometimes boldly scratch at the door. The land was also thick with heavy brush, and a great deal of work was needed to be done before it could be planted. Habiba in particular was fearful of animals lurking in the dense foliage, and when Onyango returned to Nairobi to work for the
mzungu
again, she often cried into the night.

As it turned out, Habiba had just as much reason to be afraid when her husband was at home as when he was away. Despite Onyango's mellower ways, he continued to complain about Habiba's housekeeping, and their quarrels raged on. Nor did the addition of Sarah to the family mix help matters in the slightest, for the two women had their own differences. Feeling displaced by a younger wife, Habiba was dejected and often lonely with only her three children for company in Alego. Onyango, however, continued to cane his wives at the slightest annoyance until one day he completely lost control during a disagreement with Habiba.

Furious at her stubbornness, Onyango grabbed a shovel and stalked to the compound's edge, where a deep trench ran the length of the property. He dug steadily until at last he had cleared out a space the size of a grave. He stormed back to the house, seized Habiba, and dragged her to the side of the grave, where he pulled out the Somali sword he had nicknamed “Kogelo” in reference to his clan. Just as he was lifting his sword to slice Habiba's throat and throw her into the grave that he had dug, a neighbor caught sight of the two of them and ran screaming at Onyango to stop.
“My father had my mother on the ground and was about to cut her neck when the neighbor came by,” said Hawa Auma. “He said, ‘Onyango, don't you know you are about to commit a terrible taboo?'” Habiba hastily threw her small daughter in a nearby sisal bush, presumably fearful that her husband would next attack their child. Auma added, “I was just a little baby and my father's cat alerted people to my being there. Later they rescued me.”

For Habiba, the marriage was finally over. She did not act right away but again bided her time until the moment was right. Onyango went about building a new compound on the family's land that other relatives had occupied. With the shillings he had carefully saved, he constructed a house so different from any other that villagers still recall it in fine detail. Unlike their round dwellings, Onyango's house was square and had separate rooms for sleeping and cooking. It had a tin roof that made a “pinging” sound in the rain but kept everything dry. Even the chicken hut had a small metal roof protecting the birds from the elements. As Onyango and Sarah fussed over the compound and planted lush mango and banana trees, Habiba plotted her escape.

One night Habiba pulled twelve-year-old Sarah and nine-year-old Barack aside and told them devastating news. They had lived in Alego for two years, but she told them that if she was going to survive their father's rage, she had to run away to her family in Kolonde. Although the journey was too arduous for them to accompany her, she urged them to follow her when they got older. Then, leaving all three of her children alone in her hut, she slipped into the night.

Barack and Sarah were heartbroken. Not only did they miss their mother deeply, but their father's wife Sarah was far too busy with an infant of her own and their own younger sister to pay them much attention. Within weeks of their mother's departure, Barack and Sarah decided to set out on their own to see if they could find Habiba and bring her back, leaving little Hawa Auma behind.

They walked through the darkness of night. Although the eyes of hungry hyenas and leopards surely fixed on their small moving forms as they passed through the dense bush, the children decided that if they traveled during the day, adults would likely see them and promptly send them back home. With the elder Sarah in the lead, they took two weeks to cover the
roughly one hundred miles from Alego to Kanyadhiang. They slept in open fields during the day and lived off the fruit they could scavenge and the small amount of ugali they carried with them. By the time they reached the village their feet were bleeding and their clothes were in tatters. A relative promptly sent word to their father that the children had been found, and when he came and saw them, the tears streamed down his face. It was the only time anyone ever saw him cry. “He did not beat them. But he told them that they could not stay. They had to come home with him,” said Rajab Ouko Obama, who lives in Nairobi and is the son of Sarah Nyaoke. “They tried to get Habiba to go back with them, but she would not.”

Barack and Sarah's failed pursuit of their mother would mark each of them indelibly, leaving a void that shaped the course of their childhood. Although they would see her occasionally during their youth and far more when they were adults, they were left to the ministrations of their kwiny father and his remaining wife. The young Sarah would grow to be a fiercely independent woman and the single mother of several children. She would often tell her children of her journey to find her mother, as though she found some solace in its retelling. Barack rarely spoke of it to anyone.

As they set out on their long walk back to Alego the following day, Onyango, observing his headstrong son, impulsively coined the pakruok:
winyo piny kiborne
, meaning “for the bird the world is never too far.” He understood that even as a boy, Barack was prepared to travel great distances toward goals to which others might never aspire. Onyango would prove to be right, for his son would indeed journey an unimaginable distance from his humble beginnings, and the nickname stuck.

But as the years unfolded, Barack was forever in want of something precious that he lost on the night that his mother left him. For the rest of his life he would be haunted by a sense of unworthiness that made it difficult for him to commit himself to anyone, including his wives and children.

B
arack Obama had his first run-in with a woman in a lush, open field beneath the sprawling arms of an ancient fig tree. He was eleven years old.

She was not a romantic interest. She was his teacher at the Nyang'oma Kogelo Primary School, and every day she sat in the shade and taught reading and writing to a solemn group of children. The school had no building, so the great tree served as a classroom for the fledgling school that the Anglican Church had started a decade earlier.

During the years of the colonial administration, only those African children who showed extraordinary promise and whose parents could afford to pay school fees were able to attend school. But after just one week there, Obama refused to go anymore. He was a man, he declared, and he was not going to be taught by a mere woman who could not possibly have anything to teach him that he did not already know. A man must be taught by a man. He was, after all, the son of Hussein Onyango. If some of the other boys secretly felt much the same way, they said nothing of it. Instead, they watched in astonishment as Obama abruptly stood up and headed back home. “We all felt that women teachers were not as good as men teachers because that is what we had been taught,” said Joseph Akello, Obama's childhood friend. “Barack said he was not getting the information he wanted from that lady and so he wanted to go to another school farther up the road.”

Nyang'oma Kogelo would not be the last school nor its instructors the last women with whom Obama would find fault. Although his teachers in the years to follow were invariably impressed with his facile mind and
intellectual curiosity, his reckless behavior and critical commentary often disappointed them. At a time when education was virtually the only avenue to a life beyond the village gate, Obama frequently played a highstakes game with school administrators, pushing their tolerance to its farthest edge. As an adult, he would do much the same thing with anyone who claimed authority over him.

When Obama refused to be taught by a woman, Onyango did not disagree. Within days Obama was transferred to another Anglican school on the road toward Kisumu called the Ng'iya School. There Obama discovered a male teacher whom he liked, and he soon became one of the school's most enthusiastic pupils—at least temporarily. Each day he eagerly pulled on his uniform of tan pants and a white shirt bearing the school's shield of a blue cross on its pocket. He packed in his pocket a small meal for midday and headed out to run the five-mile journey to school. Neighbors, impressed with his speed as much as his enthusiasm as he sprinted barefoot along the dirt road, often referred to him as a
guok jarikni
, or “swift dog,” and shouted out,
piyo, piyo
, or “faster, faster.”
¹

Typical of the mission schools, the program at Ng'iya was a blend of academics, religious study, and vocational training designed to mold good Christian followers. At the beginning and end of each day, students read from the Bible and prayed together under the elegant limbs of the lilac jacaranda trees outside the main administration building. The daily pastoral program also included a variety of Christian teachings and songs, most of them new to Obama.

In addition to their math and English studies, students learned useful skills. Boys studied rope tying, a skill useful in caring for animals, whereas girls learned to make bowls. Students were responsible for a host of chores. They swept the corridors each morning, and in the afternoon some students helped the teachers maintain a large garden that supplied the school staff with vegetables. And every other Friday a handful of boys were charged with the task of smearing a layer of cow dung mixed with dirt on the school's earthen floors in order to keep the dust down. For a time, Obama was assigned the job of bell ringer, signaling a change of lessons.
²

Onyango's early math tutoring of his son paid off handsomely, as Obama was soon identified as one of the smartest students in the school.
John Rabuku, one of Obama's teachers and later the school's principal, remembers Obama's voracious appetite for learning and still calls him “the brightest boy in the school.” When reading, he could distill large amounts of text in a short period and succinctly explain its major points. But math was his forte. With only the slightest direction, Obama was able to perform sophisticated functions far in advance of what his peers were doing.

But the missionary teachers valued academic ability only up to a point. They had little interest in any inquiries that might call into question their personal authority or that of their teachings. A good student in the mission school was one who listened closely and followed the rules. Students who raised too many questions or attempted to take their inquiry beyond what was taught in the classroom were considered mischievous or impudent. School administrators were careful not to mete out excessive canings or beatings, as they had learned that students so disciplined often stopped coming to school.
³
But too many questions could easily earn a student a trip to the school headmaster's office for a little discussion about the importance of compliance.

This was a lesson that Obama had great difficulty absorbing. Even as a young boy, Obama flaunted his intelligence and challenged those around him on any matter or subject. Arthur Reuben Owino, a childhood friend who attended the Ng'iya school as well, remembers Obama as always asking, “Why not?” When they were young boys and Owino was taking his cows out to pasture, Obama would ask him why he was going to a certain field. “And I'd say I was taking the cows there because the long grass is there. And Barack would say, ‘No, no, you must go elsewhere for the long grass. You know, they're not going to chew it well where you are going. You must go this way.' And if you argued with him, he'd say, ‘You don't know
what
you are talking about. I'm telling you what I
know.
' And then you would be arguing with him endlessly, endlessly.”

Owino grew accustomed to Obama's verbal drilling, and in later years he often found his friend's hard-edged interrogations more endearing than offensive. But the missionary teachers considered his battery of questions disobedient. What they found particularly annoying was Obama's habit of seeming to listen closely to their lessons, only to leap to his feet and declare it all untrue. “He'd say, ‘Why not this way,' or ‘Why not that way.' Or just, ‘Why?'” recalled Owino. “But the missionaries
would get upset and they'd say, ‘No, no, no. You are not ready to ask those things or make those suggestions. You are to read what we are telling you to read and believe what we are telling you to believe. You are not to go beyond that.'”

But Obama persisted with his queries and cross-examinations. Sometimes he dared to question a teacher in front of the entire class. Even when the teacher admonished him, Obama refused to back down. But as time passed, the novelty of the game wore off. At age eight Obama began skipping classes and refusing to go to school for weeks at a time. Only Onyango's harsh words sent him scurrying down the road again. All that missed class time didn't seem to impact his performance in the slightest. When exams rolled around, Obama would pore over a classmate's notes and absorb in only a few hours what other students took many days to learn. When the grades came in, Obama would run home and boast that, even without attending classes, he was still number one.
⁴

Nor was his challenging nature the only thing that got him into trouble at the Ng'iya school. When the time came for the students to head back home at the end of the day, Obama often mysteriously disappeared. When Onyango appeared at the school's doors looking for his son, as he often did, Rabuku would dispatch a team of boys to search for Obama in the dense brush outside the school's perimeter. Sometimes they found him playing not far away and turned him over to Onyango, who led him home to a sure beating. But other times the boys could not find their classmate no matter how hard they looked. Rabuku began to realize that Obama was reluctant to go home, perhaps anxious about what awaited him there. And then one day, when the school's gate swung open at the end of the day, he noted that Obama walked in the opposite direction from his home. On those days Obama would spend the night eating guavas and sleeping in the high trees so that the hyenas would not get him. “When we brought him down the next morning, I could never bring myself to cane him,” sighed Rabuku. “He was so amusing and I quite liked him. I think sometimes he was afraid to go home.”