The Bridge_The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

Part One
You have to leave home to find home
--Ralph Ellison, marginal note in an unfinished manuscript



Chapter One
A Complex Fate
It is an ordinary day, 1951, downtown Nairobi. A city sanitary inspector sits alone in his office. He is moon-faced, with wide-set features, an intelligent young African of twenty-one, stifled in his ambitions at a time of political turmoil. He is testing milk samples for the local health department. The colonial government has initiated a crackdown on the Kenyan independence movement that began to flourish after the end of the Second World War. By 1952, the British will institute a state of emergency and carry out a systematic campaign of arrests, detentions, torture, and killing to quell the Kikuyu nationalist movement they've come to call "the Mau Mau rebellion."
The door opens: a white woman steps through carrying a bottle of milk. Farming families, Europeans and Africans, come to the office all the time to have food products examined and to make sure they are free of disease before taking them to market.
The young man offers to help. Being a trained functionary in the sanitation bureaucracy is considered a decent job. He grew up in eastern Kenya, on Kilimambogo, a vast sisal farm owned by Sir William Northrup McMillan, a Great White Hunter sort. The farm was in the "white highlands," near Thika, where Europeans owned all the land. His farm manager carried a kiboko, a whip made of the hide of a hippopotamus, and was not reluctant to use it. The health inspector's father was illiterate, but he held a relatively privileged job as a kind of foreman on the estate. The family lived in a mud-and-wattle hut with no plumbing or electricity, but he made seven dollars a month, enough to send his son to missionary schools. At Holy Ghost College, a secondary school in the town of Mangu, the young man studied English and learned about Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington. Soon, however, he was at a dead end. There was only so much he could learn in schools where there were no textbooks and students sometimes wrote their lessons in the sand. There were no universities in Kenya. The children of Europeans went "home" to study and the few blacks who could afford college went elsewhere in East Africa. He thought about studying for the priesthood, but, as he said later, the white missionaries in Kenya were "among those who constantly told the African he was not ready for various advances, that he must be patient and believe in God and wait for the day when he might advance sufficiently." And so the young man studied instead on scholarship at the Royal Sanitary Institute's training school for sanitary inspectors.
The European woman regards the young man coolly. His name is Thomas Joseph Mboya, though the woman seems to have no desire to learn that.
"Is nobody here?" she says, looking straight at Tom Mboya.
When Tom was still living on Sir William's farm, his father used to tell him, "Do not set yourself against the white man." But Tom couldn't bear the manager of the estate, with his whip, his entitled swagger; he couldn't bear the fact that his white colleagues in the inspection bureaucracy made five times as much as he; and now, on this ordinary day, he cannot bear this impertinent white woman making so determined an effort to stare right through him, to will him into invisibility.
"Madam," he says, "something is wrong with your eyes."
The woman stalks out of the inspection lab.
"I must have my work done by Europeans," she says. "This boy is very rude."
Like thousands of other Kenyans at the time, Tom Mboya was listening to the speeches of Jomo Kenyatta, known as the Burning Spear, the elder statesman and leading voice of the Kenyan independence movement. Anti-colonialist movements were gaining strength throughout Africa: in Nigeria, Congo, Cameroon, the Gold Coast, Togo, the Mali Federation of Senegal and French Sudan, Somalia, Madagascar.
In 1955, when he was twenty-five, Mboya won a rare scholarship to study for a year at Ruskin College, in Oxford, where he read widely in politics and economics, joined the Labour Club and the Socialist Club, and discovered a circle of liberal, anti-colonial professors. For Mboya, who had no prior university experience, the year at Ruskin prodded him to think of what other Kenyans could gain from a higher education abroad.
When Mboya returned to Nairobi, the next year, he began to make a name for himself as an activist and labor organizer. With Jomo Kenyatta in jail for nearly all of the last decade of colonial rule, people began to speak of charismatic young Tom Mboya, a member of the minority Luo tribe, as a future leader of post-colonial Kenya and a politician of a new kind. Kenyatta was the singular Kenyan hero, but he was a traditional anti-colonial fighter surrounded mainly by loyal Kikuyu. Mboya hoped that Kenya would look beyond tribal divisions and toward an integrationist conception of democratic self-rule and liberal economic development.
In 1957, after the British made concessions concerning the number of Africans permitted to sit on Kenya's Legislative Council, Mboya, at twenty-six, won a seat representing Nairobi, a predominantly Kikuyu-speaking constituency. Mboya's Luo tribe came mainly from the areas near Lake Victoria, in the western part of Kenya. Soon he became the secretary-general of both the Kenya African National Union, the leading independence party, and the Kenya Federation of Labor. He was an electrifying speaker and an effective diplomat. Well before he turned thirty, Mboya was an international symbol of anti-colonialism and civil rights. In the U.S., he met with Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins and even shared a stage with Martin Luther King, Jr., at a civil-rights rally. In Kenyatta's absence, he led delegations to Lancaster House, in London, to negotiate the final arrangements for Kenyan independence. In March, 1960, the editors of Time put Mboya on their cover as an exemplar of independence movements across the continent.
One of the movement's frustrations was that there was no easy way to develop the intellectual potential of young Kenyans. Kenyatta and Mboya could more easily envisage the end of colonialism than they could a sufficiently educated cadre of Africans to run the country. "Too often during the nationalist struggle," Mboya wrote, "our critics informed us the African people were not ready for independence because they would not have enough doctors and engineers and administrators to take over the machinery of government when the colonial power was gone. This criticism has never been justified. At no time has a colonial power deliberately educated the mass of the people for the day of independence." The Kenyans would have to do it themselves.
Mboya tried to persuade the British to provide some of the most promising young Kenyans with scholarship money to study abroad. He came up with the notion of an "airlift" to foreign universities. He worked closely with a number of wealthy liberal Americans on the idea, particularly the industrialist William X. Scheinman. For the Americans, the airlift had a Cold War motivation: as African countries became independent, they might tie themselves more closely to the West, rather than to the Soviet Union, if their young elites went to universities in the United States and Western Europe. In 1958, as Mboya was developing the idea, the total number of black Kenyans in college amounted to a few hundred in African schools, seventy-four in Great Britain, and seventy-five in India and Pakistan. Albert Sims, a former State Department and Peace Corps educational expert, estimated that, in sub-Saharan Africa, only one child in three thousand attended secondary school and one in eighty-four thousand went to college "of any sort." That was certainly part of the reason that a colony of sixty-five thousand Europeans had been able to retain power for so long over more than six million Africans.
The colonial administration rejected Mboya's airlift proposal, telling him that his "crash" educational program was more political than educational and that most of the students were under-prepared, ill-financed, and bound to fail out of American colleges.
The U.S. State Department was not eager to defy the British by sending Mboya money. Instead, Mboya came to the United States to raise money privately. For six weeks, he gave as many as six speeches a day on college campuses in the hope of arousing interest in the program and in collecting promises for scholarships. He obtained promises of cooperation from a range of schools, especially historically black colleges like Tuskegee, Philander Smith, and Howard and religious-based colleges like Moravian College, in Pennsylvania, and St. Francis Xavier University, in Nova Scotia.
Along with his new American friends, Mboya helped found the African-American Students Foundation to increase fund-raising. And, in the fall of 1959, with the support of the A.A.S.F. and dozens of American universities, the airlift began. Among the eight thousand donors were black celebrities such as Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier, Mrs. Ralph Bunche, and Harry Belafonte and white liberals like Cora Weiss and William X. Scheinman.
Back in Nairobi, Mboya didn't have much time to review applications. Hundreds of people lined up outside his door every day, petitioning him about health care, divorce decrees, dowries, land disputes. Mboya studied the stacks of files of young Kenyan men and women who had worked hard in secondary school and were now in dull or menial jobs far below their potential. The students' applications were sincere and patriotic. Their ambitions were not of emigration and escape but of education and return, of service to an independent Kenya.
The airlifts, which continued until 1963, had a profound effect, and the program soon expanded to other African countries. "My father was one of the few Kenyan politicians who was equally at home in a village and Buckingham Palace," Mboya's daughter Susan said. "Africa is a very complex society, and you need people who are educated and worldly enough to translate those worlds to each other. Without it, you are lost. The airlift provided a pool of people like that for Kenya's future."
The airlift was a signal event in the history of Kenya as it approached independence. According to a report conducted by the University of Nairobi, seventy per cent of the upper-echelon posts in the post-colonial government were staffed by graduates of the airlift. Among them was the environmentalist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Another was a Luo from a village near Lake Victoria, an aspiring economist with a rich, musical voice and a confident manner. His name was Barack Hussein Obama.
In Selma, Barack Obama, Jr., had said that he could trace his "very existence" to the Kennedy family because the Kennedys had donated money to Tom Mboya's educational program for young Kenyans. Factually and poetically, Obama had overreached. The Kennedys did not contribute to the first airlift that, in September, 1959, brought Obama's father and eighty others from Nairobi to the United States. As the Washington Post reported a year after the Selma speech, Mboya approached Kennedy at the family compound in Hyannisport in July, 1960, after the first airlift and in the hope of funding the second. At the time, Kennedy was chairman of a Senate subcommittee on Africa and was running for President. He listened to Mboya's proposal and then gave him a hundred thousand dollars from a family foundation named for his brother Joseph, who was killed in the Second World War. Vice-President Richard Nixon, who was running against Kennedy that year and was also eager to win black votes, had earlier tried to get support for the plan from the Eisenhower Administration but failed. This, and the prospect of Kennedy's getting to advertise his largesse, deeply frustrated him. A Nixon ally, Senator Hugh Scott, accused Kennedy of making the donation from a tax-exempt foundation for political purposes--a charge that Kennedy called "the most unfair, distorted, and malignant attack I have heard in fourteen years in politics."
One of Obama's campaign spokesmen, Bill Burton, belatedly apologized for the error in the Joshua generation speech, yet the thrust of Obama's narrative in Selma was hardly a hoax. The Kenyan side of his family had not escaped history. His father was a member of a transitional generation, making the leap from colonialism to independence, from enforced isolation to the beginnings of worldly opportunity. And Obama himself was proposing not only to be the first African-American elected to the White House but to do it as a man whose family was one generation removed from a rural life, an oppressed life, under colonial rule.
When Obama was running for senator in 2003 and 2004, he said that his father had "leapfrogged from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century in just a few years. He went from being a goat herder in a small village in Africa to getting a scholarship to the University of Hawaii to going to Harvard." The notion that Obama's father or grandfather was a mere "goat herder" is also a form of romantic overreach. Manual work was never their destiny or occupation; goat herding was something that all villagers did, even distinguished elders, like the Obama men. "All of us who grew up in the countryside were part-time herdsmen," Olara Otunnu, a Luo and a former foreign minister of Uganda, who was a close friend of Obama's father, said. "It was absolutely of no consequence. It's just something you did while you were in school. Obama's grandfather was, by African standards, middle or upper middle class. He brought china and glassware to the home! The earnings he made as a cook for the British were a pittance by Western standards, but it was cash in hand. He was exalted in his village. And Obama's father grew up with all of that and, of course, surpassed it. Look at the cover of Dreams from My Father. Look at the photograph on the left of Obama's father in his mother's lap. He is wearing Western clothes. A true 'goat herder' would be in a loincloth. Clearly, the grandfather was far more Westernized than most and it went on from there."
Barack Obama, Sr.,'s father, Onyango Obama, was born in 1895 in western Kenya. He was impatient with village life. "It is said of him that he had ants up his anus," his third wife, Sarah Ogwel, once said. He learned to read and write English, then made the two-week trek to Nairobi, where he found work as a cook for white Britons. A "domestic servant's pocket register" that Obama saw when he visited Kogelo, shows that, in 1928, when Onyango was thirty-three, he worked as a "personal boy," and there are short remarks of evaluation in the register from a Mr. Dickson, a Captain C. Harford, a Dr. H. H. Sherry, and a Mr. Arthur W. H. Cole, of the East Africa Survey Group. Mr. Dickson praised Onyango's food ("His pastries are excellent"), but Mr. Cole declared him "unsuitable and certainly not worth 60 shillings per month."
After Onyango's first wife, Helima, discovered that she could not conceive, he outbid another man for a young woman named Akumu Nyanjoga, paying a dowry of fifteen head of cattle. In 1936, Akumu bore a son, Barack. Soon afterward, Onyango Obama met and married Sarah Ogwel. Akumu found her husband to be imperious and demanding. She left him with two children. Barack considered both Akumu and Sarah to be his mother. (And, today, Barack, Jr., calls Ogwel, who is in her late eighties and still lives in the village of Kogelo, "Granny" or "Mama Sarah.") Sarah recounted to her grandson tales of her husband's mythological adventures--how Onyango, on his trek to Nairobi, fought off leopards with his panga, climbed a tree, and stayed in the branches for two days to avoid a rampaging water buffalo, and how he found a snake inside a drum.
Onyango was an herbalist, a healer, a well-respected farmer, and a prominent man in his village. He was also, like most Luo men, a stern father, demanding that his children behave like the obedient little boys and girls he had seen when working for the British colonials. "Wow, that guy was mean!" Obama quotes his half brother Abongo as saying. "He would make you sit at the table for dinner, and served the food on china, like an Englishman. If you said one wrong thing, or used the wrong fork--pow! He would hit you with his stick. Sometimes when he hit you, you wouldn't even know why until the next day." Before Barack, Sr., was born, Onyango lived for a while in Zanzibar and converted to Islam. Well over ninety per cent of the Luo were Christians; the decision to convert was highly unusual and the reasons were vague. Onyango added "Hussein" to his name and gave it to Barack when he was born.
During the Second World War, Onyango served as a cook in the British Army in Burma. He was likely attached to the King's African Rifles, a colonial regiment that drew on British-controlled lands on the African continent. He was called "boy" by the British officers and soldiers and suffered all the other indignities of a black African in such a situation. The work itself was an indignity: in Luo society, men do not cook. "So here is a grand village elder, the head of an important clan, doing women's work for the white man: he has to psychologically adapt," Olara Otunnu, Obama's Ugandan friend, said. "The colonials treated their servants very badly. They were rude and disrespectful. It would hurt anyone to be a 'coolie,' to use the old colonial term, but especially a village leader like Onyango."
Onyango had also come to sympathize with the independence movement. Working for the British, he had earned cash in the new money economy, but he had also accumulated a well of resentment. "He did not like the way the British soldiers and colonialists were treating Africans, especially members of the Kikuyu Central Association, who at the time were believed to be secretly taking oaths which included promises to kill the white settlers and colonialists," Sarah Ogwel said.
In the nineteen-fifties, the colonial government tried to smash African uprisings by any means necessary--land confiscation, midnight roundups, forced marches, mass arrests, detention, forced labor, food and sleep deprivation, rape, torture, and executions. The government fed the British and the world press lurid tales of savage Mau Maus, rebel gangsters, led by the anti-colonialist fighter Dedan Kimathi, taking wild occultist oaths to slaughter Europeans, who, after all, had come to the "Dark Continent" in the nineteenth century with nothing more than a "civilizing mission" in mind. Except in the most liberal and left-wing circles, very little was said against the anti-Mau Mau campaign, or against colonialism as it was actually practiced. The rebel Kenyans, the colonial British charged, had not taken an oath of ithaka na wiyathi, land and freedom, as they had claimed, but, rather, a "black-magic" vow to kill.
The colonial government set in motion an elaborate system of exaggeration and repetition that spawned stories all over the world about bloodthirsty Africans and the noble civil servants and soldiers fighting to prevent the collapse of civilization. Those stories--in British newspapers, on the radio, in Life magazine--tilled the emotional ground and provided the political pretext for a campaign of vicious retribution. The colonial government established many detention centers--Langata, Kamiti, Embakasi, Gatundu, Mweru, Athi River, Manyani, Mackinnon Road--that historians, such as Caroline Elkins, later termed the "Kenyan gulag." The British claimed that these detention camps held only a few thousand Kikuyu temporarily and were merely a tool of re-education, rehab centers where classes in elementary civics and handicrafts were taught. In fact, when the colonial administration declared a state of emergency, in 1952, it went on a campaign of "pacification" reminiscent of the worst state terror rampages in history. The campaign of mass arrests only increased in its virulence with the commencement, in April 1954, of Operation Anvil, as Britain's soldiers, under General Sir George Erskine, sought to purge Nairobi of all Kikuyu. In the years of the Mau Mau rebellion, fewer than a hundred Europeans were killed; the British killed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Africans. The Mau Mau leader, Dedan Kimathi, was arrested in 1956, hanged, and buried in an unmarked grave.
"During the Emergency," Mboya wrote in his memoir, Freedom and After, "most publicity was centered around what the Mau Mau did and very little was concerned with what the security forces did. The many Africans who disappeared never to be seen again, the many people arrested in the night who never came back, the fact that some security forces were reportedly paid so many shillings for each person they shot--these were atrocities that came out only in part during court hearings at the time. It is unlikely that the full story will ever come out, because at most district headquarters there have been bonfires of documents relating to the Emergency period, but there are many facts which cannot be burned into oblivion."
The full story did not emerge until the twenty-first century, but when it did the evidence was overwhelming. After spending years combing the British and African archives, the historian Caroline Elkins concluded that the camps held well over a million Kenyans. Prisoners were often subjected to hideous methods of torture, which had been employed in British Malaya and in other imperial outposts. For her book Imperial Reckoning, Elkins interviewed hundreds of Kenyans who had survived the depredations of the period, including a Kikuyu woman named Margaret Nyaruai, who was questioned by a British officer. Nyaruai was asked:
Questions like the number of oaths I had taken, where my husband went, where two of my stepbrothers had gone (they had gone into the forest). I was badly whipped, while naked. They didn't care that I had just given birth. In fact, I think my baby was lucky it was not killed like the rest.... Apart from beatings, women used to have banana leaves and flowers inserted into their vaginas and rectums, as well as have their breasts squeezed with a pair of pliers; after which, a woman would say everything because of the pain.... Even the men had their testicles squeezed with pliers to make them confess! After such things were done to me, I told them everything. I survived after the torture, but I still have a lot of pain in my body even today from it.
The cruelty, Elkins writes, was limited only by the "sadistic imagination of its perpetrators." One woman she interviewed, Salome Maina, told her that members of the colonial forces beat her, kicked her, bashed heads together, shoved a concoction of paprika pepper and water into her "birth canal"--all in an attempt to force a confession of complicity with the Mau Mau. After she recovered from those humiliations, she said, she was subjected to electric shock:
The small conductor was either placed on the tongue, on the arm, or anywhere else they desired. At first, I was made to hold it in my hands, and it swirled me around until I found myself hitting the wall. When it was placed on your tongue, held in place with some kind of wire, it would shake you until you wouldn't even realize when it was removed.
Although some critics charged Elkins with minimizing the violence of Africans against Europeans, most of their charges seem to be the result of historical disbelief, of having to accommodate a murderous colonial legacy that had been talked about so rarely, and with so little understanding, in both Africa and in the West. This was the Kenya of Barack Obama, Sr.,'s memory, of his youth and early manhood.
During the 2008 American Presidential campaign, many foreign reporters called on Sarah Ogwel, in the village of Kogelo, and, with each visiting television truck and satellite dish, she sat dutifully under her mango tree or in her house and submitted to questions about her husband, her stepson, her grandson. According to an interview Ogwel gave to the Times of London, a white employer had denounced Onyango to the colonial authorities in 1949 and he was arrested, suspected of consorting with "troublemakers." The Mau Mau movement was recognized by colonial authorities in their documents only the following year, 1950; Hussein Onyango Obama was a Luo, not a Kikuyu; and yet it is entirely possible that the British determined that he was sympathetic to the anti-colonial movement. It was not the detention that made news around the world--Obama mentions it in Dreams from My Father--but, rather, Sarah Ogwel's detailed description of his treatment in prison.
"The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed," the Times reported Sarah Ogwel as saying. She said that "white soldiers" visited the prison every few days to carry out "disciplinary action" on the inmates. "He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down." Ogwel said she was not able to visit or send food. He was beaten until he promised "never to rejoin any groupings opposed to the white man's rule." Some of Onyango's fellow prisoners, she said, died from the torture they experienced in prison.
As a young man, Onyango had not disdained the British. He was the first in his village to wear a shirt and trousers and he had sought out employment with the British as a cook. But now, coming home from detention, he was embittered. "That was the time we realized that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies," Sarah Ogwel said. "My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained."
Onyango's fate, and Sarah's description of it in the Times, is plausible, if undocumented. Even though the colonial authorities began "systematic" torture only in 1952, Africans suspected of political disloyalty were sometimes arrested before that and were badly treated. In Dreams from My Father, Obama writes that his grandfather was detained for six months and came home looking old, thin, dirty--too traumatized, at first, to say much about his experience. "He had difficulty walking," Obama writes, "and his head was full of lice." Scholars also say that at the time of Ogwel's interview, the political atmosphere in Kenya was tense and was playing havoc with issues of historical memory and accounting. After decades of silence, shame, and ignorance, the air was filled with claims that are not always easy to verify in every detail. Onyango was almost certainly mistreated in a miserable jail, but the details remain imprecise.
Barack Obama, Sr., was no less headstrong than his father, and a great deal more educated. When he was a child, he refused to go to the school closest to his home, where the teacher was a woman. "When the pupils were naughty, they would get spanked," Sarah Ogwel recalled. "He told me, 'I'm not going to be spanked by a woman.'" Instead, she enrolled Barack in a primary school six miles away, and he either walked or she rode him there on her bicycle. He was hardworking and prideful. "I got the best grades today," he would tell Ogwel when he came home from school. "I am the cleverest boy." Barack attended the Gendia Primary School, the Ng'iya Intermediate School, and, from 1950 to 1953, the Maseno National School, run by the Anglican Church. Like Tom Mboya, Obama did well in his exams and got outstanding grades, but he was expelled, for all kinds of infractions: sneaking into the girls' dormitory, stealing chickens from a nearby farm. He left Maseno without a certificate of graduation. When Barack was expelled from school Onyango beat him with a stick until his back was a bloody mess.
In 1956, Barack moved to Nairobi to work as a clerk. While he was in Luoland, he met a girl named Kezia at a village dance party. She was sixteen. "He asked to dance with me during the party and I could not turn him down," she said. "He picked me from several girls present. A few days later, I married him. He paid fourteen cows as dowry, which were delivered in two batches. This was because he loved me greatly."
Barack, like most young educated Africans, admired Kenyatta and the anti-colonial movement. He was even detained for a few days for the crime of attending a meeting in Nairobi of K.A.N.U., the Kenya African National Union.
Obama was stuck. He could get nowhere without a formal education and a degree. Some of his friends from Maseno won spots at Makarere University, in Uganda. Others went on from Makarere to study in England. In his spare time, with the encouragement of two American teachers working in Nairobi--Helen Roberts, of Palo Alto, and Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, of Maryland--Obama took correspondence courses to get his secondary-school equivalence certificate. He took a kind of college application exam at the American Embassy and scored well. He wrote dozens of letters to American universities--the historically black college Morgan State, Santa Barbara Junior College, San Francisco State among them--and was finally accepted by the University of Hawaii, a modest school in a fledgling Pacific outpost of America. Tom Mboya's airlift program would bring him there. Elizabeth Mooney Kirk underwrote some of Obama's expenses in Hawaii.
"My father was very impressed by Obama's intelligence," Mboya's daughter Susan said. "My father was not much older than Obama, but he developed a paternal relationship with him and hoped his studies would lead him somewhere great, and somewhere useful for Kenya."
In September, 1959, Obama prepared to leave for the United States. He and Kezia already had a son, named Roy, and Kezia was three months pregnant with a girl they named Auma. Obama told his wife that he would surely return, that she should wait for him. Few would deny him the chance to make the journey. A brazenly confident young man, Obama boasted to his friends that after he had studied economics abroad he would return home to "shape the destiny of Africa."
"Tom Mboya, what he did for me and Obama and the others, is more than we could ever have expressed," Frederick Okatcha, who went to Michigan State to study educational psychology, said. "The airlift saved us! We took off from Nairobi and none of us had ever been anywhere. We'd never flown in a plane. When we landed in Khartoum a little while later to refuel, we all thought we had reached America! I grew up about fifteen miles from Obama. For years I never wore shoes. We had things like witchcraft, which is embedded in traditional society. My maternal grandfather worried that jealous witch doctors would bewitch our flight to America. Those were things people believed in. Obama, by the time he finished high school, had attended British-influenced schools so the shock was not so severe. But all of our lives would change forever, so completely."
"There was so much excitement during that time," Pamela Mboya, the wife of Tom Mboya, said. As a young woman she had gone to college in Ohio on the first airlift. "We were going to the U.S. to be educated so we could come back and take over--and that's exactly what we did."
A couple of months into Obama's Presidency, a writer asked Bob Dylan about reading Dreams from My Father. Dylan, who had been uncharacteristically swept up in the campaign ("We've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up"), said that he had been struck by Obama's complicated background: "He's like a fictional character, but he's real." Dylan comes from the long American tradition of self-summoned men and women: in his case, a Jew from the Minnesota Iron Range, who braided together various roots from the national ground--Woody Guthrie, the Delta blues, Hank Williams, the Beats, Elvis Presley--to create a unique voice of his own. Dylan read about Obama's parents, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr., and recognized what a unique set of influences, maps, histories, and genetic codes they contained for their unborn son: "First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas, though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers. Guerrillas. 'Wizard of Oz' Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace. And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot-type heritage--cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean, it's just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love." For Dylan, whose mind races to the mythopoetic, if not to the strictly accurate, the story of Obama's origins and identity is "like an odyssey except in reverse."
What does Dylan mean by that? "First of all, Barack is born in Hawaii," he said. "Most of us think of Hawaii as paradise--so I guess you could say that he was born in paradise." He was also born with an endlessly complicated family legacy, one that stretched from the shores of Lake Victoria to the American plains. Obama's grandmother could recite, as if in a Homeric song, the generations of Luo on his father's side. And as a genealogist at the Library of Congress, William Addams Reitwiesner, discovered, Obama's ancestors included Jesse Payne, of Monongalia County, West Virginia, who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, owned slaves named Moriah, Isaac, Sarah, Selah, Old Violet, Young Violet, and Little William. A great-great-great-grandfather, Christopher Columbus Clark, fought for the Union Army.
In his speeches, Obama usually alluded to Kansas as a kind of counterpoint to faraway Kenya, a locus of Midwestern familiarity--the opposite of (that dubious word) "exotic." But Kansas, for him, is something deeper, more resonant, the crossroads of the Confederacy and the Union, the nexus of the battle between pro-slavery forces and abolitionist insurrection; it is the site of Brown v. Board of Education; and it is, for his grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn, a place of soul-defeating dullness. Kansas was the "dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty."
It took a long time for Obama to learn to negotiate between the restlessness in his parents' makeup and a rooted worldliness that he could live with. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, spent her life in constant motion, as much at home in a Javanese village as she ever was in El Dorado, Kansas, where she went to grade school. Everywhere she landed, in a rural outpost in Pakistan or a densely populated Indonesian city, she looked around and said wryly, "Gee, Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."
Once, after a campaign stop in Kansas, a reporter on the plane asked Obama about his family's legacy of wanderlust, and, from his answer, it was evident that he viewed all the movement--his grandparents' constant flight, his mother's yearning to stay in motion--as something he wanted to avoid for himself. "Part of me settling in Chicago and marrying Michelle was a conscious decision to root myself," he said. "There's a glamour, there's a romance to that kind of life and there's a part of that still in me. But there's a curse to it as well. You need a frame for the canvas, because too much freedom's not freedom." Then he laughed and said, "I'm waxing too poetic here."
Stanley Armour Dunham's parents, Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, Sr., and Ruth Lucille Armour, were stolid Baptists, and when they were young parents they opened a modest restaurant, the Travellers Cafe, next to an old firehouse on William Street in downtown Wichita. Their promise as a young family did not last. Ruth Dunham killed herself, and Stanley, who was eight years old, found her body. The date was November 26, 1926. In his memoir, Obama alludes to his great-grandfather's "philandering" as a possible reason for Ruth's suicide. (The local press obituaries ascribe the death to ptomaine poisoning, Washington Post reporter David Maraniss discovered.) Not long after his wife's death, Ralph Dunham ran off, leaving Stanley and his brother, Ralph, Jr., to be raised by their maternal grandparents in El Dorado, the county seat of Butler County.
In 1918, the year Stanley was born, El Dorado had been an oil-boom town for a few years; through the nineteen-twenties, the region was responsible for nine per cent of the oil in the world. The Depression snuffed out the boom. El Dorado suffered foreclosures and unemployment. Stanley did not usually seem devastated by his bleak beginnings. As he grew up, he became a gregarious, argumentative kid. Sometimes, he betrayed a sense of fury and outrage. In high school, he managed to get suspended for punching the principal in the face. Later, he spent a few years riding rail cars cross-country and working odd jobs. For a while, at least, he seemed like someone aspiring to a role in "Bound for Glory."
When Stanley returned to Wichita, he met a smart, rather quiet girl named Madelyn Lee Payne. Her parents, Rolla Charles (R.C.) Payne and Leona Bell Payne, were Methodists. "They read the Bible," Obama writes, "but generally shunned the tent-revival circuit, preferring a straight-backed form of Methodism that valued reason over passion and temperance over both." Her circumstances were more comfortable than Stanley's and her childhood was far less traumatic. Born in Peru, Kansas, in 1922, Madelyn grew up in the nearby town of Augusta. She was a studious girl and spent her spare time with friends at the drugstores and soda fountains in town: Cooper's, Carr's, Grant's. When they wanted air-conditioning in the summer they went to the movies. Nearly all five thousand people in the town were white. "There were only two black families in Augusta," her friend Francine Pummill recalled. The population was solidly Republican, Madelyn's parents very much included. R.C. worked as a clerk on an oil pipeline and the family lived in a small company house. Despite the family's adherence to strict Methodist rules--no drinking, no dancing, no card-playing--Madelyn used to sneak off to Wichita with her friends to go to the Blue Moon Club and hear the big bands that were passing through: Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey. Kansas was dry but at the Blue Moon you could get a drink, even if you were under-age.
During her senior year at Augusta High, Madelyn met Stanley Dunham and they married in secret. Madelyn told her parents that she was married only after she had a diploma in hand. No one in the family approved of the marriage. Charles Payne, Madelyn's younger brother, said their parents were "shocked" when they learned that their daughter had married Stanley Dunham and hardly thought he was an "appropriate choice."
Some of Madelyn's friends didn't much like Stanley, either. He seemed too loud and cocky. "Stan was a smart-aleck. He was really king of the castle," Pummill said. "He looked like a greasy spoon, with his dark hair slicked down with something. None of the other fellas in Augusta did that then." He also had unconventional tastes: he wrote poetry and listened to jazz records. He was sarcastic, much louder than Madelyn.
The couple moved to California for a while, but after Pearl Harbor they returned to Kansas and Stanley enlisted in the Army. He was inducted on January 15, 1942, at Fort Leavenworth. "He was really gung-ho," his brother Ralph said. "He didn't have to go, because he was married. He could have held off."
The Dunhams' daughter, Stanley Ann, was born at Fort Leavenworth, in November, 1942.
In October, 1943, after a year stationed at various U.S. bases, Dunham sailed for England on the H.M.S. Mauritania. He was an Army supply sergeant, and on D-Day he was serving at an Allied airfield near Southampton called Stoney Cross with the 1830th Ordnance Supply and Maintenance Company, which helped support the Ninth Air Force before it set out for Normandy. To guard against German aerial attack, the company dug foxholes at Stoney Cross, but the retaliation never came. Dunham helped put together a celebration at a local gym. Six weeks after D-Day, the company, with about seventy-five men, landed at Omaha Beach, in Normandy, and worked at Allied airfields across France: in Cricqueville, Saint-Jean-de-Daye, Saint-Dizier, and others. In February, 1945, Dunham's unit was attached to George Patton's Third Army for three months. Dunham's record was solid. "Sgt. Dunham has been doing a good job as Special Service noncom," his commanding officer, First Lieutenant Frederick Maloof, recorded in one of his weekly reports, from September, 1944. The company documents, uncovered by Nancy Benac of the Associated Press, also record the daily activities of Dunham and his men--the hikes, the lectures on tactics and weapons, the drills, the lectures on "sex morality," and, in October, 1944, a talk on "What to Expect When Stationed in Germany." On April 7, 1945, just as the German Army was disintegrating and three weeks before Hitler's suicide, Dunham was transferred to Tidworth, England, where he was to train as a reinforcement for American infantry; soon afterward, he was transferred back to the States. Like many soldiers returning from Europe, Dunham waited anxiously to see if he would be shipped off to the war in the Pacific, but, with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the call never came.
Madelyn Dunham, even with a baby at home and her husband fighting in Europe, worked full-time, taking a job at the Boeing assembly line in Wichita, one of the most famous munitions projects of the war. Henry (Hap) Arnold, a five-star general who had learned his flying at the Wright Brothers school and then went on to command the U.S. Air Force during the war, designed an aerial strategy that called for a huge output of heavy bombers. Designers came up with what was known as the Superfortress, a plane instrumental in the bombing of Pacific targets. The rapid design and construction plan was known as the Battle of Kansas--sometimes the Battle of Wichita. Women like Madelyn Dunham were called on to work long, sometimes double, shifts, to keep the assembly line in Wichita running at the pace that Hap Arnold demanded.
When Stanley Dunham came home from Europe, he briefly tried going to Berkeley on the G.I. Bill, but, as his grandson put it, "the classroom couldn't contain his ambitions, his restlessness." He was nearly as restless as he had been as a teenager riding the rails. He still had a need to keep moving, but now he did it wearing proper clothes and with a wife and daughter in tow. Barack Obama writes about the way Stanley Dunham infected Madelyn, his grandmother, a home-economics major "fresh out of high school and tired of respectability," with "the great peripatetic itch" to escape the "dust-ridden plains, where big plans mean a job as a bank manager and entertainment means an ice-cream soda and a Sunday matinee, where fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams." They moved constantly: from Kansas to Berkeley and Ponca City, Oklahoma; from Wichita Falls, Texas, to El Dorado, Kansas, and, in 1955, to the state of Washington. In Ponca City, Francine Pummill recalled, Madelyn had a miscarriage and a hysterectomy. The Dunhams' daughter remained an only child.
Even as a small girl, Stanley Ann Dunham proved witty and curious. She was unapologetic about her odd name, a relic of her father's initial disappointment at failing to sire a son. During her childhood and adolescence, as the family moved from state to state, she introduced herself to new friends, saying, "Hi, I'm Stanley. My dad wanted a boy." It would take a while before friends started calling her Ann. (I'll do it hereafter, though, to avoid confusion.)
Stan Dunham became a furniture salesman. He enjoyed his job. Friends who worked with him over the years said that as a salesman, he could "charm the legs off a couch." "He was a good salesman, very sharp," Bob Casey, who worked with him at J. G. Paris's furniture store in Ponca City, said. "He was a forward-thinker, one of the first to incorporate room design and a decorating approach to the sale of furniture."
When, in 1955, the family moved to Seattle, Stanley found work selling furniture downtown, first at Standard-Grunbaum at the corner of Second Avenue and Pine Street, and, a few years later, at Doces Majestic Furniture. In the meantime, Madelyn worked as an escrow officer in the nearby town of Bellevue. The post-war Eisenhower-era boom was well under way. Builders were expanding the suburbs, which meant that new homeowners were taking out loans and buying furniture. In their first year in Seattle, the Dunhams lived at an apartment on Thirty-ninth Avenue N.E. and Ann went to eighth grade at the Eckstein Middle School. But the Dunhams decided that they could do better and rented an apartment at the new Shorewood development on Mercer Island, an island in Lake Washington connected to the city by a mile-long floating bridge. Many years later, after the tech boom and the rise of Microsoft, executives built mansions on Mercer Island, but in the fifties it was a middle-class, if expanding, suburb of Seattle. On the island, the Dunhams had a view of the Cascades, and, more important, their apartment was close to a new, and well-regarded, high school where they intended to send their daughter.
The culture at Mercer Island High School was, for most kids, one of sock-hops, basketball games, pep rallies, sleepover parties, Elvis records. But those were not the limits of Ann's frame of reference. An intelligent, even intellectual girl, she had budding bohemian tastes: a love of jazz, an Adlai Stevenson for President button, afternoons at the Encore coffee shop in the University District, foreign films at the Ridgemont theater, on Greenwood Avenue, in Seattle. Ann's crowd was not socially fast, but they were engaged, political, liberal, hungry to read and learn about the world. The first signs of a civil-rights movement, the first discussions about equal rights for women, one of her closest friends, Susan Botkin, said, were what "shaped our values for the future." At school, Ann and her friends took honors courses from a couple of progressive teachers, Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert, who outraged some of the parents by teaching things like the essays of Karl Marx, Margaret Mead's anthropological work on culture and homosexuality, William Whyte's The Organization Man, and David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd. (Ann's friends jokingly dubbed the length of hallway between those two classrooms Anarchy Alley.) Wichterman, especially, drew the wrath of some parents when he had the class talk about God--and theories of His nonexistence. "This was the Eisenhower era--that was really unusual," another friend, Chip Wall, recalled. Wichterman said that when parents came to the school in an effort to fire him, Foubert, and another teacher, Clara Hayward, they referred to the group as The Mothers' March. Ann Dunham, Wichterman recalled, was a studious young woman who was "not your typical high-school student. She just wasn't all that interested in the things high-school students take an interest in, like who's dating whom and things like that."
Ann was getting some ideas about what she would like to do with her life. She told Susan Botkin that she wanted to study anthropology, possibly even make a career of it. "I had to look up what anthropology was in the dictionary when she told me that!" Botkin said.
Although Ann's parents had church-going Republican backgrounds, the atmosphere at home was, by the standards of the time and Mercer Island, liberal and secular. The Dunhams sometimes attended the East Shore Unitarian Church, which was jokingly known around town as "the Little Red Church on the Hill." But religion was hardly paramount in the Dunham household. Ann usually spoke of herself as an atheist.
The family was also in the minority when it came to politics. "There weren't too many families who were Democrats in our community," Marylyn Prosser Pauley, a friend of Ann's, said. "There were a few of us, though, and we felt a kinship about that. Stanley's family and my family were on the Adlai Stevenson side of things."
There was one disturbing local issue--an outgrowth of McCarthyism--that haunted Mercer Island. In 1955, the House Subcommittee on Un-American Activities summoned John Stenhouse, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, to testify. Stenhouse was one of the most popular men in town: friendly, intelligent, civic-minded. In 1951, he had moved to Mercer Island with his family (including a daughter whom Ann came to know well) and gone to work for Prudential Insurance. But, four years later, investigators started showing up at his house, and at his neighbors' houses, to ask questions. "I remember two F.B.I. agents coming to our garden to talk to my mother," Marylyn Prosser Pauley said. "My mother was literally kneeling over her gardening when they came on her. They were polite but they were clearly there to ferret out how bad a Communist Jack Stenhouse must have been. Those were the times."
Stenhouse was born in Chungking, China. His father was a trader, and he worked in the family business until the family left China, for Los Angeles, on the eve of the Second World War. During the war, he became a machinist in a weapons factory. His union was the United Auto Workers. Stenhouse began to join left-wing discussion groups. He signed a Communist Party card, attended a few more meetings, and then quit the Party, in 1946. "The changing time was impressing itself on me," he told Time in 1955, "and I felt those people were going off on entirely the wrong track, excusing the Soviet Union and criticizing the U.S."
But Stenhouse paid a humiliating price for his brief encounter with the Party, becoming the focus of small-town gossip and outrage. When the story of the House investigation broke, three of his four fellow school board members demanded that he resign the chairmanship. A town meeting was called, at the Mercer Crest School, and two hundred and fifty people from town gathered to debate the fate of John Stenhouse.
"Let's rise on our hind legs and throw him out!" one said.
And yet most of the people at the meeting, including the county spokesman for the Young Republicans, said that, while Stenhouse had made a mistake, he had also confessed to it and ought to be allowed to stay on the board. "I realize I made a mistake," he said at the meeting. "I believe we have the power to show people throughout the world that we have a better way than the Communists." "At the time it was a subject that we girls talked about only among our liberal friends," Marylyn Prosser Pauley said. "This was the first time that we all realized that our government wasn't always all for the good. We had been so idealistic about our wonderful government and our wonderful country until then. It was quite a wake-up call."
"There were times when my father really suffered from all of this," Ann's friend Iona Stenhouse recalled. "I applied for the Peace Corps after I graduated from the University of Washington, in 1965, and was accepted, but when I went for training I was delayed. My security clearance hadn't come through and my father knew why."
Ann was liberal, but she was hardly at the ramparts. She wore pleated skirts and twinsets, joined the French and biology clubs, and worked on the high-school yearbook. "She was a rebel in that she made decisions and she played that through and accepted the consequences when she ran afoul of her parents," Susan Botkin said.
"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today: the press is dumbed down, education is dumbed down, people don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world," Ann's classmate Chip Wall, a retired teacher, said. "She was not a standard-issue girl. You don't start out life as a girl with a name like 'Stanley' without some sense you are not ordinary."
"We could see Stanley, with her good grades and intelligence, going to college, but not marrying and having a baby right away," Maxine Box, another friend from Mercer Island, said.
In Ann's senior year of high school, her father announced that he wanted to move the family yet again--this time to the newest and farthest edge of the American imperium, Hawaii. They would move, he said, a few days after Ann's high-school graduation, in June, 1960. He had heard that speculators and contractors were beginning to build apartment buildings and houses in every mossy crenellation of Oahu. Hotels were sprouting, the military bases sprawling; rows of tract houses were going up. It was another land of promise, especially for a furniture salesman.
Ann was not pleased. She wanted to stay on the mainland for college--she had already been accepted at the University of Washington and the University of Chicago--but the Dunhams said no, they would not allow their daughter, their only child, to live thousands of miles away. And so she reluctantly applied to, and was accepted at, the University of Hawaii.
Father and daughter had a complicated relationship by this time. Ann could not abide her father's rough manners and sometimes explosive temper, and Stanley was still intent on reining in his headstrong daughter. Through the prism of time and recollection, Barack, Jr., saw the family's move to Hawaii as part of Stanley's desire to "obliterate the past," to remake the world. Despite the differences between father and daughter, they shared that restlessness--a kind of patrimony.
Most of the eighty-one members of the 1959 airlift class from Kenya came together on a single charter flight from Nairobi to New York, with fuelling stops along the way. Because the plane was full, Obama took a different flight. "But he certainly is considered part of that contingent," Cora Weiss, the executive director of the program, said. "Hawaii was off the beaten path--statehood had just happened--but they took him. And we wrote checks for his tuition, books, and clothes."
Within weeks of arriving in Honolulu, Obama came to see Hawaii as a refuge from Kenya's tensions and hardships, a remote enclave of racial understanding. The local press took a keen interest in the arrival of a black African who had come there to study. Interviewed by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Obama described his background as a Luo growing up in western Kenya and how, as a young man in Nairobi, he had learned about Hawaii's atmosphere of racial tolerance "in an American magazine." (The struggles of native Hawaiians seemed lost on him.) He said that he had enough money to stay for a year and then, after getting a background in business administration, he would return home to help build a stable, independent Kenya.
Obama was welcomed as an emissary from a distant world. He was invited to speak about "the African situation" in front of church groups and other community organizations. Like Tom Mboya, Obama told those audiences that he feared that tribal divisions were the greatest threat to an independent Kenya. He was not always patient with the fact-starved opinions of others. When a Honolulu paper published what he thought was a wrong-headed editorial on the Congo, he wrote a stern letter suggesting that "maybe you needed more first hand information."
And yet Obama was almost always inclined to be the pleasantly surprised new arrival. "When I first came here, I expected to find a lot of Hawaiians all dressed in native clothing and I expected native dancing and that sort of thing," he said, "but I was surprised to find such a mixture of races."
The Hawaiian Islands, which had become the fiftieth American state in August, 1959, had a remarkably various population of native Hawaiians, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Samoans, Okinawans, Portuguese, and whites from the mainland of various origins. There were few blacks in evidence at the University of Hawaii, or anywhere else on the islands. The black population was under one per cent, mostly soldiers and sailors living on various bases.
Coincidentally, with statehood, came the arrival at Honolulu airport of the first passenger jets. Until then, it had been a thirteen-hour flight by propeller plane from Los Angeles or San Francisco--far too tedious and grueling a trip for most tourists. The five-hour flight from the mainland transformed Hawaii into an accessible paradise for Americans and, eventually, Japanese and other Asians. And with the rise of mass tourism came a demand for hotels, resorts, shopping centers, freeways, high-rise apartment buildings. Until statehood, the Republican Party, the party of the white plantation-owning elite, had dominated the Hawaiian territory. But as returning Asian veterans got their education under the G.I. Bill, they moved into the mainstream and built up the Democratic Party.
Obama's cheerful first impressions of multicultural Hawaii were the impressions of many sociologists, too. Since the nineteen-twenties, scholars have been referring to Hawaii as a kind of racial Eden. There were no laws against marriage between the races or ethnic groups as there were in so many American states. (It wasn't until the case of Loving v. Virginia, in 1967, that state mandates criminalizing intermarriage--some of the oldest laws in the history of American jurisprudence--were finally ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.) Scholars could be as misty-eyed as poets or politicians when they envisioned the Hawaiian future. The sociologist Romanzo Adams wrote in The Peoples of Hawaii (1925) that there was "abundant evidence that the peoples of Hawaii are in a process of becoming one people. After a time the terms now commonly used to designate the various groups according to the country of birth or ancestry will be forgotten. There will be no Portuguese, no Chinese, no Japanese--only American." Lawrence Fuchs, writing four decades later, in his social history Hawaii Pono, lauded Hawaii's "revolutionary message of equality." This was 1961. While the American mainland was undergoing a nonviolent revolution against Jim Crow racial laws in the South, Hawaii exuded a forward-looking, laid-back multiculturalism popularized as the "aloha spirit." Sociologists and scholars of race relations, such as Robert Park, Herbert Blumer, and E. Franklin Frazier, attended conferences or went on sabbatical leaves to come to Hawaii to study the racial situation.
Obama lived at a Y.M.C.A. near campus and fell easily into a range of friendships with fellow students and Honolulu bohemians, among them Neil Abercrombie, a native of Buffalo who went to Honolulu as a graduate student in sociology and stayed in Hawaii, eventually becoming a Democratic congressman; Andrew (Pake) Zane, a Chinese-American student and traveler who eventually settled down to run an antiques and collectibles store near Waikiki; and Chet Gorman, who became a prominent anthropologist and archeologist studying Southeast Asia.
In those days, the university was small, the atmosphere casual. You could rent a cottage for fifty dollars a month. Neil Abercrombie, who had come straight from the frozen campus of Union College, in Schenectady, New York, thought he had arrived in heaven. At night, the stars came out, "as if God had hurled them across the sky," and the smell of flowers was so rich as you walked down the street that "you thought the very atmosphere was perfumed."
One day after class, Abercrombie recalled, he headed for lunch to the university snack bar, a simple wooden building with benches, picnic tables, and cheap food, "and as everyone is talking this black guy, a popolo, comes in." Popolo--Hawaiian for the black nightshade, a weed with dark berries--was not quite as bad as "nigger," but, said with a certain intonation, it was bad enough and certainly carried the connotation of separateness, of otherness. "So here was this coal-black guy, and there was this absolutely dynamic aura about him," Abercrombie went on. "A big smile. Easy to meet. Incredibly smart. And he was exotic in the land of the exotic. He was somebody new. In this world of the incredible spectrum of color and eye shapes and physiognomy, he stood out from even that melange. And he had this electric vitality. We were what passed for the academic free-spirit world--drinking beer and eating pizza and talking through the night about politics and ideas. Drugs and marijuana and the Beatles--all that came later. It was jazz artists and folk artists--Jimmy Reed and Leadbelly and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. And so Barack immediately got immersed in this little world of ours. He became part of us, our unlikely crowd."
Obama's new friends knew him as "Bear-ick"--not "Buh-rock"--and they were impressed by the great rumble of his voice, his elegant pipe, his black-rimmed glasses, and the way he held forth, hour after hour, over dollar-fifty pitchers of beer at local dives like George's Inn and the Stardust Lounge. They'd talk sometimes about cultural things, about the Beat poets and Jack Kerouac, about the latest albums they'd heard, but usually Obama steered the conversation to politics, particularly to the anti-colonial wave in Africa. No one minded when he held forth. Everyone found him wonderfully intelligent and spectacularly self-absorbed. "Everything was oratory with him, that huge James Earl Jones voice," Abercrombie said. With enough beer in him, Obama could cross into the slightly insufferable zone. His ego was outsized. And yet he never ceased to fascinate his friends. He was never dull. If he raised the subject of a book, he'd read it, absorbed it.
"He had a lot to say," Pake Zane said. "Barack was an impressive fellow. He was the blackest man I had ever met in my life, with that mesmerizing low voice. He spoke with a Kenyan British accent, with a slight touch of Oxford arrogance. But he was real smart. He liked jazz music, dancing, and drinking beer. I could listen to him for hours. And did."
Obama told his friends that Kenya would soon be independent and that Jomo Kenyatta would be its leader, but he feared the inevitable rise of a coterie of hustlers in the leadership. "He was afraid that Tom Mboya would not be accepted, not only because he was a Luo but also because he was brilliant and eclectic and could talk to white people and was not intimidated by them," Abercrombie recalled. "He told us that Mboya was so self-confident that he didn't need to prove himself the tough black revolutionary. But Barack feared that meant he would be perceived as a rival. He knew there was trouble ahead."
Obama also informed his new friends that he had much to offer his country--and that everyone back home would surely recognize that. "Beneath the braggadocio," Abercrombie said, "he feared that he would be overlooked, ignored. He couldn't bring himself to finesse people. He had to tell them exactly what he thought and what he thought of them. He had to offend them. When he got back to Kenya, he behaved in the exact opposite way his son would one day. Maybe it's not fair to be an armchair psychoanalyst, but it's not outrageous to think that a lot of the way Barack, the son, is today--cool, rooted, polite, always listening--is a way of not being like his father."
In that first year of his studies at Hawaii, Obama took a Russian-language course and met a younger student, an intelligent girl, slightly plump, with large brown eyes, a pointed chin, and chalk-white skin. ("She was no beach bunny, that's for sure," Abercrombie recalled. "Ann was Kansas white.") Ann Dunham was seventeen. They struck up an acquaintance. One day Obama asked her to meet him at one o'clock in the afternoon near the main library. She agreed. She waited awhile and, because it was a sunny day, she lay down on one of the benches. "An hour later," she told her son, "he shows up with a couple of his friends. I woke up and the three of them were standing over me, and I heard your father saying, serious as can be, 'You see, gentlemen, I told you that she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.'"
Not long afterward, Ann wrote to her friend Susan Botkin, telling her that she was adjusting well to Hawaii, enjoying her classes, and dating a Kenyan man whom she'd met in her Russian class. At first, Botkin said, "I was more interested that she was taking Russian than dating a Kenyan, to tell you the truth."
Obama began bringing Ann to his evenings out with Neil Abercrombie and his other friends, though she was shy about talking in front of the others. Obama didn't seem to care much, as he tended to dominate any discussion and treated women in a way that one could politely call traditional. "She was so young and quiet, almost ephemeral in those days," Abercrombie said. "But he was the dominant voice in every conversation he was in. She was a girl. He was the center of the universe. She was listening and learning."
As a grown man, Barack Obama, Jr., wrote skeptically not only about his father but about his mother's youthful romanticism. He is not entirely easy on his teenaged mother, but ultimately reconciled to her innocence and good intentions--and her love for him. Ann was a romantic idealist about nearly everything, including race and her own possibilities. She "was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father's attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents' lives," he wrote. "The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs, but it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that's how any love begins." A fascinating moment of a son judging his mother in her youth as he imagines it, struggling to see her clearly: until the final phrase, he is part censorious, part sympathetic.
Ann's lover was not so guileless. He failed to tell her that he had a wife in Kenya with a son and another child on the way. (Nor did he tell his friends.) He lied to Ann, telling her he was divorced. In the years that followed, he carried on overlapping relationships and marriages. If Obama felt any guilt about his cavalier attitude toward his wives and children, he concealed it. Kezia told a Kenyan reporter that she did not object to her husband taking a second wife, that it was not out of keeping with Luo customs, and that "he used to send me gifts, money, and clothes through the post office. Many people envied me."
By December, Ann was pregnant, and, in early February, telling no one, she and Barack flew to the island of Maui and got married.
"At Christmastime, she said she was in love with the African, and that her folks were dealing with it reasonably well," Susan Botkin recalled. "In the spring, she said she was married to the African and expecting a baby, and that her parents were coping reasonably well." Until then, Ann had seemed more interested in almost anything other than having, and rearing, a child. "It was such a surprise to me, because I had little brothers, and she would look at them and say, 'Aren't they cute--won't they go away?'" Botkin said. "She was never particularly interested in them. It was fascinating to me that she opted for matrimony and motherhood early in life. She was head over heels in love with this man."
Ann's parents found Obama smooth, smart, even charming, but not entirely familiar or trustworthy. (Toward the end of her life, Madelyn Dunham said of Obama, Sr., "He was straaaaange.") Although the Dunhams thought of themselves as tolerant, they had a hard time adjusting to the thought of their daughter married so young to anyone, much less to an African with a murky past and an uncertain future. "Stan worked hard at accepting Barack, Sr.," Abercrombie said, "and he had an instinctive reaction that life would be hard for Barack, Jr. But he came to adore that child like nothing else."
"Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Stanley Kramer's popular film about the marriage of a brilliant black doctor to an idealistic young white woman and the reaction of the girl's parents, did not come out until 1967. But, after it did, Stanley Dunham had no compunction about likening his initial reaction to his new son-in-law to Spencer Tracy's shock at encountering Sidney Poitier. He was suspicious, angry, confused, protective, and bewildered by the difference between what he thought he believed about race and what he actually felt. Stanley Dunham, who died in 1992, did not live to enjoy the prescience of one particular detail of Kramer's film. In one scene, Tracy wonders how the young couple plan to rear their biracial children. Poitier says of his fiancee, "She feels that every single one of our children will be President of the United States. And they'll have colorful administrations." As for himself: "Frankly, I think your daughter is a bit optimistic. I'd settle for Secretary of State."
It sounds very much like the boundless idealism and sense of promise that Ann Dunham carried around in her head. It was a racial idealism uncomplicated by all the trials and historical turns to come--the assassinations, the rise of Black Power, the lure of separatism. "She was very much of the early Dr. King era," her son has said. "She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong, and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals."
The family news from Kenya was not particularly welcoming, either. Hussein Onyango Obama wrote a barbed letter to his son saying that he deeply disapproved of the marriage, not because it meant a second wife but because a mzungu, a white woman, would sully the Obama bloodlines. "What can you say when your son announces he's going to marry a mzungu?" Sarah Ogwel recalled.
Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., was born at 7:24 P.M. on August 4, 1961, at Kapi'olani Medical Center, in Honolulu, not far from Waikiki. On the birth certificate, the mother's race is listed as "Caucasian," the father's as "African."
Ann dropped out of school to care for her infant son. She never expected to be in such a traditionally domestic spot so soon: home alone with Barack, Jr., while Barack, Sr., was in classes, studying at the library, out drinking with his friends. Yet her friends don't recall her being resentful or depressed. As a young mother, and later, too, when she matured into an accomplished anthropologist, based in Indonesia and other countries, she was a take-life-as-it-comes optimist. The last thing on her mind was what people might say as they saw her, a white woman, walking down the street holding a black child. Alice Dewey, an anthropologist at the university who became Ann's academic mentor and one of her closest friends, said, "They say she was so 'unusual,' but growing up in Hawaii it doesn't seem that unusual that she would have married an African. It's not breaking the rules in Hawaii. It didn't seem totally strange. If she had been growing up in Kansas, it would have been mind-boggling. In Hawaii, there's that mixture, a meeting point of different cultures."
In June, 1962, Obama, Sr., graduated from the University of Hawaii Phi Beta Kappa. He had a choice between staying in Hawaii for graduate school, going to graduate school at the New School, in New York, on a full scholarship, with a stipend capable of supporting the three of them--or going to Harvard. For him, the choice was easy: "How can I refuse the best education?" Ambition always came before anything else, particularly women and children. He informed Ann that he was going to Cambridge to be a graduate student in econometrics. The Honolulu Advertiser marked his departure, in late June, without mentioning Ann or Barack, Jr. Obama promised his wife that he would retrieve the family when the time was right, but he was no more truthful about that than he had been about his first marriage.
"Stanley was disappointed that Barack had left his daughter, but not too disappointed," Neil Abercrombie said. "He figured that the marriage was going to fail sooner or later and so it might as well not go on so long that it would hurt Little Barry, as he always called him. If he was going to play the father figure in the boy's life, he felt, he might as well start."
That fall, Ann went with the baby to Cambridge briefly to visit her husband, but the trip was a failure and she returned to Hawaii. Barack, Sr., did not see Ann or their son again for nearly a decade and he did not advertise the fact that he had a family in Hawaii. He used to meet Frederick Okatcha, a friend from the airlift, in New York, at the West End bar, near Columbia, and they talked about almost everything--politics, economics, tribal problems, and nepotism in Kenya, and the way they would help shape the new Nairobi when they returned. "The one thing Obama never talked about was his family," Okatcha, who was studying psychology at Yale, said. "I didn't even know he had married. I never knew he had a son. Not then, anyway."
Ann Dunham was twenty years old, and a single mother. All the early promises of adventure now seemed unlikely. "It was sad to me when her marriage disintegrated," her old friend Susan Botkin said. "I was so impressed by how relaxed and calm she was when she had Barack--she was excited about going to Africa--and how in love she was, how her husband was going to take a serious role in government. It was a great disappointment to her that Barack, Sr.,'s father wrote and said, Don't bring your white wife and your half-breed child, they will not be welcome. There were Mau Mau uprisings, they were beheading white women, and doing unspeakable things. Ann's parents were very worried when they heard that."
According to the registrar at the University of Washington, Ann registered for an extension course in the winter of 1961 and enrolled as a regular student in the spring of 1962. She moved to Seattle with Barack, Jr., rented an apartment at the Villa Ria development in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and reconnected with some of her old high-school friends. One thing Ann's friends noticed was that she was not at all reluctant to show off her baby. When she wasn't studying, she pushed Barack around the streets of Seattle in a stroller--a somewhat startling sight for some. "It was very different at that time for a black man and a white woman to marry," Ann's friend Maxine Box said. "She was not shy about the fact that she'd married a black man at all."
But trying to keep up with her studies and taking care of Barack was difficult, and, after a year, she decided to return to Honolulu, move in with her parents, and go to the University of Hawaii. To help make this work, she applied for, and received, food stamps for several months.
There was little word from Cambridge. Barack, Sr., was studying econometrics, drinking with a new set of friends, and soon had a girlfriend to add to his two marriages. "But by then Ann was under no illusions," Neil Abercrombie said. "He was a man of his time from a very patriarchal society."
Stanley Dunham, who had struggled with the idea of his daughter marrying so young and to such a complicated man, now became a doting grandfather, taking the boy to the beach, playing with him in the park. "Stanley loved that boy," Abercrombie recalled. "In the absence of his father, there was not a kinder, more understanding man than Stanley Dunham. He was loving and generous."
In January, 1964, Ann filed for divorce, citing "grievous mental suffering." In Cambridge, Obama signed the papers without protest.
Ann may have been wounded by Barack's abandonment, but she certainly had no hesitation about, once again, dating a man of color. A couple of years after Obama left for Harvard and then returned home to Kenya (with yet another woman, an American teacher named Ruth Nidesand, whom he had met in Cambridge), she began dating an Indonesian geologist, Lolo Soetoro, who was studying at the University of Hawaii. Lolo was a more modest, less aggressively ambitious man than Obama, and Ann's parents were far more at ease with him.
Soetoro, born in the city of Bandung, had grown up in a landscape of violence and upheaval--Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, revolution---and his family had not escaped the worst. His father and eldest brother were killed during Indonesia's revolt in the late nineteen-forties against the Dutch, who were vainly trying to repossess the country. The Dutch burned the Soetoros' house to the ground and the family fled to the countryside to wait out the conflict. To survive, Lolo's mother sold off her jewelry, one piece at a time, until the war finally ended. Eventually the family resettled near their old home and Soetoro got his undergraduate degree in geology at Gadjah Mada University, a prestigious school in Yogyakarta in central Java.
In Hawaii, Soetoro pursued his master's degree--and Ann Dunham--at a time when his country was enduring a horrific civil war. After Lolo and Ann married, in 1965, the Indonesian government called on all students studying abroad, Soetoro included, to return home to prove their loyalty and help "repair the country."
In 1967, Ann and Barry, who was now six years old and ready for first grade, flew to Japan, where they stayed for a few days to see the sights in Tokyo and Kamakura, and then went on to Jakarta to live with Lolo, who had taken a job as an army geologist, surveying roads and tunnels. Arriving in Indonesia in 1967 was like arriving on a battlefield where the ground was still strewn with the detritus of war and with fresh graves. For two decades, from 1945 to 1967, Sukarno was Indonesia's post-colonial ruler, its Father of the Nation, the great dalang, the puppet-master, manipulating factions and challengers, crushing or co-opting enemies, shifting from nationalism to "guided democracy" to autocratic rule as he deemed necessary. He had been master of the most complex of nations: seventeen thousand five hundred islands; three hundred languages; a culture shaped by Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Dutch, and the British. He managed by forging a delicate alliance drawn from the military, Communists, nationalists, and Islamists.
On the night of September 30, 1965, a group of Sukarno's generals were murdered by rival officers, a faction called the 30 September Movement. Within days, Major General Suharto forced Sukarno to yield effective power. The conflict came in a period of economic crisis--hyperinflation and, in many regions, famine. Suharto claimed that the violence had been initiated by leftists and he went about crushing the Indonesian Communist Party, the P.K.I., giving rise to a prolonged period of political imprisonments, purges, and suppression of the political left. In the months that followed, hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
For decades after the bloody events of the mid-sixties, Indonesians debated who was to blame for the violence. The growth of the P.K.I. under the Sukarno government had infuriated the military and the United States. Sukarno had also angered Western investors by nationalizing major industries, including oil. Most historians agree that one of Suharto's essential allies in the overthrow of Sukarno was the C.I.A.
The Soetoros lived in a crowded middle-class neighborhood, in a stucco house on Haji Ramli Street, a dirt lane that turned to mud in the rainy season. Ann's and Barry's early impressions of Jakarta were of heat and glare, poverty in the streets, beggars, the smell of diesel fuel, the din of traffic and hawkers. Thanks to his stepfather's playful munificence, Barry had a backyard menagerie: chickens and roosters pecking around a coop, crocodiles, birds of paradise, a cockatoo, and an ape from New Guinea named Tata. One day, Lolo mentioned that one of the crocodiles had escaped, crawled into a neighboring rice field and eaten the owner's ducks. Just as Ann was Barry's teacher in high-minded matters--liberal, humanist values; the need to remember that they, and not the Indonesians, were the "foreigners"; the beauty of Mahalia Jackson's singing and Martin Luther King's preaching--Lolo was his instructor in the rude and practical skills of middle-class Indonesian life. Lolo taught him how farm animals were killed for eating; how to box and defend himself, just in case; how to treat servants; how to ignore street beggars and keep enough for yourself; how the weak perish and the strong survive.
Before they left for Indonesia, Madelyn Dunham had called the State Department, asking about the perils of Jakarta--the political struggles, the strange foods. She could do nothing about the politics, but she did pack a couple of trunks of American packaged foods. "You never know what these people will eat," she said. She was right; soon, Barry sampled dog, snake, and roasted grasshopper. He took part in competitive battles with Indonesian kites, chased crickets, gaped at the poor in the streets--some of them missing a limb, an eye, a nose--and befriended all kinds of kids in the neighborhood: the children of government bureaucrats, the children of workers and farmers.
At home, Soetoro, who had always been cheerful back in Hawaii, wrestling and playing with Barry, was moodier, harder to talk to. In Hawaii, he had seemed liberated; in Jakarta, Obama recalled him "wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets."
Ann also sensed the hauntedness of Jakarta. On one of her expeditions near the city, she came across a field of unmarked graves. She tentatively asked Lolo what had happened with the coup and the counter-coup, the scouring of the countryside for suspected Communists and the innumerable killings, the mass arrests, but most Indonesians, Lolo included, were extremely reluctant to talk about the horrors of the mid-sixties.
In 1970, Ann gave birth to a daughter named Maya. Maya developed a keen sense of her mother's attachment to the country. "There is a phrase in Indonesian, diam dalam seribu bahasa, that means 'to be silent in a thousand languages.' It's a very fitting phrase for the country," Maya said. "There are so many ways to be silent. Sometimes it's in the constant cheerfulness or the space between words. Indonesia became more interesting to her. And it was a challenge. I'm sure this girl from Kansas, having to navigate through this complex culture that was so remote from what she grew up with, accepted it gracefully and with great strength and affability. She didn't ever feel afraid or alone. She simply made friends with those she encountered and worked to understand their lives as best she could."
One friend, Julia Suryakusuma, a well-known feminist and journalist, recalled that when Ann arrived in Indonesia she was "ensnared and enchanted" by the culture. "You know, Ann was really, really white," she said, "even though she told me she had some Cherokee blood in her. I think she just loved people of a different skin color, brown people."
Barry was doing his best to fit in at school. As an African-American, of course, he stood out. "At first, everybody felt it was weird to have him here," said one of his teachers at St. Francis, Israella Dharmawan. "But also they were curious about him, so wherever he went, the kids were following him." Kids at school often called him "Negro," which they didn't consider a slur, though it certainly upset Barry.
Obama was the one foreign child in his immediate neighborhood, and the only one enrolled in St. Francis. Most of the children in the area were Betawis, tribal Jakaratans, and traditional Muslims. Cecilia Sugini Hananto, who taught Obama in second grade, told the Chicago Tribune that some of the Betawi kids threw rocks at the open windows of the Catholic classrooms. Barry learned a lot of Indonesian quickly. He was never fluent, but he more than managed to navigate school. He'd yell "Curang! Curang!"--Cheater! Cheater!--when he was teased. Zulfan Adi, one of those who teased him, recalled a time when Barack followed his gang to a swamp: "They held his hands and feet and said, 'One, two, three,' and threw him in the swamp. Luckily, he could swim. They only did it to Barry." Obama, though, was husky and not easy to intimidate. "He was built like a bull, so we'd get three kids together to fight him," a former classmate, Yunaldi Askiar, said. "But it was only playing."
After Maya was born, the Soetoros moved three miles west, into a better neighborhood, where the old Dutch elite lived. Lolo now worked as a liaison with the government for Union Oil. With the new job came new acquaintances and colleagues; some were the sort of foreigners who complained about the "locals" and the servants. The Soetoros were surrounded by diplomats and Indonesian businessmen who lived in gated houses. Barry's new school, Model Primary School Menteng I, was, like almost all schools in Indonesia, mainly Muslim. Israella Dharmawan inadvertently helped feed a campaign sensation--mainly on the Internet and cable news--when she told the Los Angeles Times, in March, 2007, that "Barry was a Muslim.... He was registered as a Muslim because his father, Lolo Soetoro, was Muslim." A third-grade teacher named Effendi and the vice-principal, Tine Hahiyari, also told the Times that Barry was registered as a Muslim. No matter what the registry said, this was untrue. Ann remained a religious skeptic and did not consider herself or her son a Muslim. Lolo was not a practicing Muslim. "My father saw Islam as a way to connect with the community," Maya said. "He never went to prayer services except for big communal events."
Obama doesn't remember taking the religious component of either school in Indonesia very seriously. "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies," he writes. "My mother wasn't overly concerned. 'Be respectful,' she'd said. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words."
Ann and Lolo had a comfortable life in Jakarta: because of the cheap price of labor, they had someone to market and cook, someone to tend the house. But Ann still couldn't afford to send Barry to the international school. Although she spent a full day teaching English at the American Embassy, she woke Barry at 4 A.M. every weekday in order to deepen his knowledge of English, history, and other subjects. It was something he resented--what young boy wouldn't?--but she was preparing him for the moment when he would go back to America to continue his education.
Ann was thriving, immersing herself in the local arts and handicrafts, learning the language, acquainting herself with the way people lived, traveling to Bali and villages in central Java. At the same time, Lolo was becoming more like his oilmen friends at the office. He played golf at Union Oil's club, and, what was worse as far as Ann was concerned, he talked about golf. He seemed so eager to assimilate into the world of his employers. "Step by step, Lolo became an American oilman and Ann was--O.K., to an extent--becoming a Javanese villager," Ann's close friend Alice Dewey said. "He was playing golf and tennis with the oil people and Ann was riding on the back of motorcycles in villages, learning."
Maya Soetoro (now Soetoro-Ng) had been born when Barry was nine. Ann surrounded her with dolls of all ethnicities: black, Inuit, Dutch. "It was like the United Nations," she says. Not long after Maya's birth Ann and Lolo could feel the marriage really begin to unravel. "She started feeling competent, perhaps," Maya Soetoro-Ng says. "She acquired numerous languages after that. Not just Indonesian but her professional language and her feminist language. And I think she really got a voice. So it's perfectly natural that she started to demand more of those who were near her, including my father. And suddenly his sweetness wasn't enough to satisfy her needs."
Barack Obama, Sr., wrote occasional letters to Ann and Barry, but for the most part he was out of sight. The disappointments of his life were barely known to them. The story of his return to Africa was one of bitter decline. When he arrived in Nairobi from Harvard in 1965 with his master's degree in economics, Obama split his personal life between his third wife and his first, between Ruth Nidesand and Kezia Obama. He would have two more children with Kezia (for a total of four) and two with Ruth, before she ended the marriage.
"Like many men of his generation who had the chance to go abroad for an education, Obama suffered the schizophrenia of one who is both a Luo man and a Western man," his friend Olara Otunnu said. "He absorbed the mindset and framework both of his home and of the West and he was always wrestling with trying to reconcile them. So when he marries several women and tries to keep them separate and fails miserably to do so, this is a symptom of the schizophrenia."
Obama's "schizophrenia"--the schizophrenia of the "been-to" generation of African elites who studied in the West in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and then returned home--is described by the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah in his novel Why Are We So Blest? Armah, who was sent abroad to study at Groton and Harvard, depicts the disillusion and downfall of a young man named Modin Dofu, who has left Harvard and winds up back in Africa, a destroyed man.
Obama, Jr., has called his father a "womanizer." The reality was grimmer. Obama, Sr., not only married four times and had many affairs; he didn't seem to care with any consistency about any of his wives or children. Philip Ochieng, a prominent Luo journalist and a friend of Obama, Sr.,'s, wrote a lighthearted article in the Daily Nation saying that the Luo "shared with the ancient Hellenes the habit of waylaying foreign women and literally pulling them into bed as wives":
So for Senior to grab wives from as far away as Hawaii and Massachusetts--and Caucasian ones to boot--was no big deal. Given time, he might even have grabbed an Afghan, a Cherokee, an Eskimo, a Fijian, an Iraqi, a Lithuanian, a Mongolian, a Pole, a Shona, a Vietnamese, a Wolof, a Yoruba, and a Zaramo--not to mention hundreds from Luoland, apart from Kezia. The Luo would have noted his "he-man-ship" with complete approval.
"Where Obama comes from, a man can have many wives," Ochieng said. "If you have only one wife, like I do, you are not yet a man! The deeper question was how he treated the family."
For the affected family members, Obama's wandering and his indifference were painful. When Barack, Jr., visited Nairobi as a U.S. senator, he said of his father that "he related to women as his father had, expecting them to obey him no matter what he did." But there was more to it than cultural differences. Obama had been a miserable husband. Mark Ndesandjo, Obama's son by Ruth Nidesand, says that Obama beat him and his mother. "You just don't do that," he said. "I shut those thoughts in the back of my mind for many years.... I remember times in my house when I would hear the screams, and I would hear my mother's pain. I was a child ... I could not protect her." Ndesandjo dropped his father's name and, since 2001, he has lived in Shenzhen, China, and has worked in the export trade. "At a certain point, I made the decision not to think about who my real father was," he said. "He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife and children. That was enough."
Obama, Sr.,'s political mentor, Tom Mboya, made sure that he had decent jobs--as an economist for BP/Shell and then for both the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development and the Ministry of Tourism. From the moment of his return from America, Obama, Sr., was dissatisfied with the direction the government was taking. Little more than a year after independence, in July, 1965, he published an article in the East Africa Journal entitled "Problems Facing Our Socialism." The article was a critique of the government's working development plan known as "Sessional Paper No. 10," which had been issued in April, 1965.
The lead author of Sessional Paper No. 10 was Tom Mboya, who had been called on by the Kenyatta government to answer the Soviet-oriented development plans conceived at the Lumumba Institute by leading leftist politicians like Oginga Odinga. As an ideologist of Kenyan independence, Mboya was a moderate; he considered himself a "Socialist at heart and a believer in democracy." "The Kenya Question: An African Answer," a pamphlet he wrote in 1956, before independence, when he was just twenty-six, was an important document in the anti-colonial movement--so important in its call for representative democracy and the development of strong trade unions that the white Nairobi government banned it from certain Kenyan bookstores. Indeed, Mboya's paper was instrumental in spreading his reputation in the United States among politicians and labor leaders; as a result it helped win support for the airlift. Sessional Paper No. 10 is a far different sort of document, a more technical and prescriptive plan for Kenyan economic development. Unlike the Lumumba Institute plan, it was extremely wary of the nationalization of industries.
Even though Obama himself had likely had a hand in the conception of the paper and was an ally of Mboya, he did not hesitate to criticize it under his own name. Obama's article cautions against a national policy that ignores poverty and inequality and is based on outsized expectations of rapid economic growth. It poses a central question of a country exiting a colonial system and entering independence: "How are we going to remove the disparities in our country, such as the concentration of economic power in Asian and European hands, while not destroying what has already been achieved?" Post-colonial Kenya, Obama argued, must not re-create yet another economic scheme that produces a small, super-wealthy ruling class and a mass of poor--in other words, a repetition of the old system, without a white ruling and bureaucratic class. Obama supported the redistribution of land to both individuals and tribes. One Kenya scholar, David William Cohen, of the University of Michigan, calls it an "improbable yet extraordinary rehearsal" of the best critiques of "unregulated capital" that came only a quarter of a century later. It navigates the differences among the leading figures in Kenyan politics--Kenyatta, who was pro-Western, and his left-wing vice-president, a Luo, Oginga Odinga, and Mboya, who was also a Luo but ideologically closer to Kenyatta. "It was very much like Obama to feel free to critique aspects of a paper he'd been part of," Olara Otunnu said. "He was a rarity in Kenya. Most people in the political class were respectful, to a fault, of the leadership. Not Obama. He felt free to speak his mind, and loudly." In his article, Obama made a case for progressive taxation and the regulation of private investment. The article warns against the dangers of continued foreign ownership and excessive privatization of commonly held resources and goods. Obama wrote:
One need not be a Kenyan to note that nearly all commercial enterprises from small shops in River Road to big shops in Government Road and industries in the Industrial Areas of Nairobi are mostly owned by Asians and Europeans.... For whom do we want to grow? Is it the African who owns this country? ... It is mainly in this country that one finds almost everything owned by the non-indigenous populace.
In all, Mboya was pleased with Obama's paper and hired him at the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. But what came next in Kenya was political chaos--a chaos that engulfed Barack Obama, Sr.
In 1966, Odinga resigned from Kenyatta's government and established a left-wing opposition party. At first, this seemed a purely ideological divide between Odinga, who pressed for Kenya to lean closer to the Eastern Bloc and a socialist economic system, and Kenyatta, who was more oriented toward the United States and Western Europe. But, in the months to come, the divide, especially among their followers, took on an ugly tribal cast.
In 1967, Pake Zane and Neil Abercrombie set off on a trip around the world that eventually brought them to the doorstep of their old friend in Nairobi. By then, Obama was living in a pleasant government-owned cottage with a small lawn, but he was hardly taking care of himself. He chain-smoked--local brands, 555s and Rex--and, calling beer "a child's drink," he now drank quadruple shots of Vat 69 or Johnnie Walker.
"He was aloof toward his family," Abercrombie said. "He wasn't quite a complete mess yet. That would come later. But I remember thinking, They are never going to give him a chance. He was just so discouraged.... When I saw him there, I thought, This is hopeless. Daniel Arap Moi was already on the scene"--Arap Moi was Kenyatta's vice-president and, in 1978, became President and was known for corruption and human-rights abuses. "Arap Moi was a power-mongering bastard, a thief. And Arap Moi was every fear that Barack had ever had come true." At the Ministry, Obama constantly got in fights with his superiors and embarrassed them by trying to expose instances of bribery and fraud.
Obama's decline, his old friends say now, was at least partly related to the disappointed belief that the best would rise to the top. He would never be able to overcome tribalism, cronyism, and corruption. "To that extent, he was naive," Peter Aringo, a friend and a member of parliament from Obama's village, said. "He thought he could fight the system from outside. He thought he could bring it down."
"Obama, Sr., was very concerned about corruption at home, which still stands in the way of development," Frederick Okatcha, a professor of educational psychology at Kenyatta University, said. "He so much wanted to do good for his people, but, after being in America, we had learned new values and ways of speaking and behaving, and we saw corruption, nepotism. It is hard when you see that your bosses don't have half the education you do. You could see how frustrated he was. He was very brilliant and now he had to report to people who knew so much less than he did. That would drive anyone to the bottle."
Obama's most perilous habit was his tendency to drink and drive. "You remember the character Mr. Toad from The Wind and the Willows? He was a crazy driver, and Obama was like Mr. Toad," the journalist Philip Ochieng said. "He once drove me from Nairobi to Kisumu, and it was very scary. Terrifying! And he wasn't even drinking."
In 1965, Obama was behind the wheel when he had an accident that killed a passenger, a postal worker from his home town. The accident left Obama with a terrible limp. "Barack never really recovered from that," a friend of his, Leo Odera Omolo, told Edmund Sanders of the Los Angeles Times. His outspokenness and arrogance had lost their charm. He had become melancholy, argumentative, and convinced, with good reason, of his own marginalization. He was drinking more and more, introducing himself as "Dr. Obama" when he had not, in fact, completed a doctorate. A man who had been one of Kenya's most promising young minds was now a source of gossip and derision. Walgio Orwa, a professor at Great Lakes University, in Kisumu, said, "Before, he was everyone's role model. With that big beautiful voice, we all wanted to be like him. Later, everybody was asking what happened."
On July 5, 1969, a quiet Saturday afternoon, Tom Mboya returned from an official trip to Ethiopia and, at around 1 P.M., stopped by a pharmacy on Government Road. As he came out of the pharmacy, a young Kikuyu named Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, pulled a revolver out of his pocket. He fired twice, hitting Mboya both times in the chest. He died almost immediately.
As news of Mboya's death spread, there were large demonstrations of outrage in both Nairobi and the cities and villages of Luoland, in western Kenya. Luos had seen the government crush the leftist Oginga Odinga; now they suspected that Kenyatta's inner circle was behind the death of the most popular Luo politician of all. The government conducted an investigation that was anything but transparent. The gunman, Njenga, was known around Nairobi for shaking down businesses and threatening them with his connections to high-ranking government officials. He was locked up in Kamiti prison and was tried in September. Only a few journalists loyal to the government were allowed to attend the ten-day trial, and the national archives do not possess a decent record of the proceedings. Police said they found Njenga's gun on the roof of his house, at Ofafa Jericho Estate. According to Njenga's lawyer, Samuel Njoroge Waruhiu, his client did not protest his innocence and appeared serene about his fate, seeming confident that eventually he would be spirited to safety in a far-off country. "It was hard dealing with him," Waruhiu said. "Here I was, trying to get information so that I could arm myself with a tangible defense. But here was a client who was keen to hide as much as possible." Njenga told his lawyer that Mboya had got what he deserved for "selling us to the Americans."
Njenga did not give a final statement in court and was condemned to death. According to a government announcement, he was executed by hanging on November 8th. He was reported to have said earlier, "Why do you pick on me? Why not the big man?" He declined, however, to say who "the big man" was, and his enigmatic question lingered on in the Kenyan political imagination for decades to come.
"There is pretty convincing talk that the execution was never carried out," David William Cohen says. "The Kenyatta government announced that he was executed and yet there were reports that the condemned man was seen in Bulgaria, Ethiopia, and Kenya. A lot of people believe that it was all part of a plot to do the killing, and then the powers that be set him free and let him leave the country."
According to Pake Zane, who visited Obama in 1968 and 1974, Obama claimed that he knew the inside story of Mboya's assassination and even claimed to have seen Mboya on the morning of the killing. The Mboya assassination remains an abiding mystery of Kenyan political history. Most people who are not in the government power elite say they are sure that the killer acted at the behest of one of Mboya's opponents--people around Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi. No one has offered conclusive evidence. But the suspicions about Kenyatta and his circle persist, particularly in Luoland. When Kenyatta came to campaign for re-election in Kisumu, a Luo city close to where Barack Obama grew up, the local people jeered, saying, "Where's Tom? Where's Tom?"
Obama, for his part, was enraged about the murder and vocal about it. He demanded an explanation for the killing. ("I was with Tom only last week. Can the Government tell me where he is?") Mboya's execution was the effective end of Obama's public life. He had lost the one real mentor and benefactor he had ever had. They had not agreed on everything--Obama's views on development were more to the left--but Mboya had looked out for him, provided jobs for him in the state bureaucracy, kept him connected to the Nairobi political class. He was fired from the government and never returned.
Three months after Mboya's murder, the tension in Kenya deepened. In late October, 1969, Kenyatta went to Kisumu to dedicate a hospital for which Odinga had arranged Soviet funding. Hundreds of Luo men heckled Kenyatta. The President was not prepared to be shamed. He declared that Odinga's party, the Kenya People's Union, "is only engaged in dirty divisive words. Odinga is my friend, but he has been misled and he in turn continues to mislead the people of this area." Then he warned Odinga and his followers, "We are going to crush you into flour. Anybody who toys with our progress will be crushed like locusts. Do not say later that I did not warn you publicly." Kenyatta's car left Kisumu under a hail of stones, and the police turned their guns on the crowd, killing at least nine people and wounding seventy.
Two days later, Kenyatta made good on his ominous warning, arresting Odinga and most of the leadership of the K.P.U., charging them with trying to overthrow the government. Odinga remained in prison for two years and every Luo intellectual and civil servant felt the pressure.
After the events of 1969, Obama began drinking himself into a stupor nearly every night and driving, perilously, home. "He would pass out on the doorstep," Leo Odera Omolo said. Sebastian Peter Okoda, a former senior government official who shared his apartment with Obama in the mid-seventies, recalled that Obama kept drinking the best whiskies at hangouts like the Serena Hotel and the Hotel Boulevard. He complained to Okoda, "Pesa michula en pesa ma ahingo": "I'm being paid peanuts."
In 1974, Pake Zane and his wife came through Nairobi. They were camping at Nairobi City Park. "At one point Barack came out and said, 'Come stay with me.' There was a problem with gangs. So we went to stay with Barack, and he was drinking more heavily and he was limping. I asked him what happened, and at that time I heard the story, 'They tried to kill me.' He told me the story of being a witness. He said he knew who [Mboya's] assassins were, and 'I do know, they will kill me.' He got very drunk and very angry those nights--angry at life. Here he was, a very smart man, and he was prevented from revealing who the assassin was. He said there was no real work for him in Kenya. These things added up to a frustrated, angry young man.
"It got real scary after a while, he was so angry, so arrogant, and getting dangerous, calling out against the government to whoever would listen," Zane went on.
In his sober moments, Obama could recognize his own disappointments, the unraveling of his ambition, and he would say, "I want to do my things to the best of my ability. Even when death comes, I want to die thoroughly."