In this maelstrom of uncertainty both at home and abroad, Barack Obama senior was moving from rebellious adolescence into adulthood. Obama had decided that he needed to leave Maseno school, fearing that he might be linked to the anonymous letter sent to the principal. Furious and disappointed, Hussein Onyango banished his son to make his own way in Mombasa, where he started working for an Arab trader. However, the relationship did not flourish, and Barack left his employer without even asking to be paid. After working briefly as a clerk in another office in Mombasa, Barack moved to Nairobi, where he found a temporary job working for the Kenya Railway. These years were a time of real tension between Barack and his father; Onyango had only recently suffered the indignity and pain of internment, and now he watched as his son seemed to fritter his life away. Onyango, who put such a high priority on education and hard work, thought that Barack was wasting his opportunities and bringing shame to his family.
When Barack arrived in Nairobi in 1955, the Mau Mau emergency was at its height, and Nairobi was a hotbed of political action. Nineteen-year-old Barack began to take an interest in politics, and one evening the following year he was attending a Kenya African Union meeting when it was raided by the police. Using its emergency powers, the colonial government had declared the KAU illegal in 1953, and Barack was among those arrested and charged with violating the meeting law. Onyango was again furious with his son, and refused to pay his bail. According to Obama’s friend Leo Odera, the British colonial police briefly detained Barack, but released him after his white employer in Nairobi gave the authorities reassurance that the young man’s social and political activities were unconnected with the Mau Mau.
While he was living in Nairobi, Barack Obama senior became a regular visitor to Kendu Bay. With his father angry with him and considering him a failure, it was best not to be around K’ogelo too much. Also, even today, K’ogelo is a quiet and remote village—so in the early 1950s it must have seemed like the end of the world for a restless teenager with an eye for the girls.
Leo Odera recalls how Barack senior met his first wife: “In Nairobi, Barack Obama senior became a frequent visitor to his Kanyadhiang roots, and here is when he came into contact with two young girls, whom he had known while learning at the SDA Gendia Mission [primary school]. One of the girls was called Mical Anyango, daughter of Mr. Joram Osano, a local pastor. The other girl was the seventeen-year-old Kezia Nyandega.”
Today, Kezia is a sixty-eight-year-old grandmother living in a modest semidetached house in Bracknell, a commuter town fifteen miles west of central London. She remembers clearly the place and day of her first dance with Obama senior: the local hall in the Obama family compound in Kendu Bay, Christmas Day 1956. “Barack was there on holiday with his family. I went to the dance hall with my cousin William and I saw Barack enter the room. I thought, ‘Ohhh, wow!’ He was so lovely with his dancing. So handsome and so smart. We danced together and then the next day my cousin came to our house and told me that Barack liked me.”2
Kezia’s older sister, Mwanaisha Atieno Amani, confirmed the story of their meeting. “Barack was a very good dancer. It was at Onyango’s [old] home, there was a dance there.… He took Kezia dancing, they were number one. Number one!”
What the family will not tell you (but Leo Odera will) is that Kezia and her rival Mical had an argument over the attentions of Barack Obama senior, which soon turned into a bit of a brawl: “Kezia was very young at the time. Kezia fought with the other girlfriend, who gave up after fighting on the dance floor in Onyango’s small hall. That is where they fought, and Kezia became the winner.”
Even though Kezia and Barack had known each other at primary school in the SDA Gendia mission in Kendu Bay, they had inevitably lost contact after Barack moved to K’ogelo with his family at age nine. Now their attraction was instantaneous, and Barack quickly proved to be just as impetuous as his father when it came to a pretty young girl. Throughout late December and into early January, Barack and Kezia’s cousin William stopped by her house to talk to her, to try to convince her to run off to Nairobi with Barack. Kezia’s sister still remembers just how persistent Barack senior was in pursuit of Kezia: “Barack came back again and again. And in their meetings, the relationship began, and they informed his father. Then Barack said, ‘My dad, Onyango, will go and talk to Nehemia [Kezia’s father].’ ”
When Barack senior went to the railway station in Kisumu to catch the train back to Nairobi in early January 1957, Kezia went with her cousin William to see him off—except that Barack’s smooth talking persuaded Kezia to stay with him. The two lovers eloped to Nairobi, where Kezia moved into Barack’s apartment in Jericho, a suburb of Nairobi specially created for government employees. She recalls that her father was furious over what had happened: “He did not like Obama. My father and brothers came to Nairobi to bring me back. They said I had to go back to school. When I wouldn’t, they said they would never speak to me again.”3
For his part, Barack was worried about what Hussein Onyango’s reaction would be. In the previous four years Barack had left Maseno school under a cloud, walked out of two jobs in Mombasa, and been arrested and jailed by the authorities on suspicion of being a political activist. Now he had eloped with a young girl to Nairobi, where he had only a menial job as a clerk working for the railway company. This was not the life that Hussein Onyango had planned for his fiercely intelligent, capable son.
Nevertheless, according to Kezia’s sister Mwanaisha, Onyango agreed to the wedding: “So Hussein met with my father, who told Hussein, ‘I want sixteen head of cattle. That is when you can take her as Barack’s wife.’ Then Onyango said, ‘I am willing to pay anything, even if you want twenty of them. This is my eldest son, and if he wants a woman, and that is the woman he wants, I will not stand in his way.’ ”
Kenya has three different forms of marriage, and all of them are recognized as being legally binding. Today, as in 1957, a couple can choose to have a civil wedding, a church wedding, or a traditional tribal wedding. Civil and church weddings are very similar to ceremonies in Europe and North America, but a tribal wedding is significantly different; in all cases, a bride-price is still paid in the traditional way. In Kezia’s case, Onyango paid her family sixteen cows. Barack Obama senior went on to marry another three women (including two Americans), but he never divorced Kezia. In Kenya, polygamy was (and still is) legal, and there is no limit to the number of wives a man can have. Muslims usually consider five wives to be a maximum, but it is not unusual for a Kenyan—Muslim or Christian—to take many more. (Ancentus Akuku is an infamous ninety-year-old Luo living in nearby Homa Bay and known locally as “Akuku Danger”; he has 130 wives, and jokes that “I am still very strong, though I am now worn out.”)
While Barack senior was living in Nairobi and becoming more involved in African politics he met Tom Mboya. Mboya (no relation to Paul Mboya from Kendu Bay) was six years older than Obama senior and a typical Luo: charming, charismatic, intelligent, and ambitious. He was also a leading trade unionist and a rising political star in Kenya, and Barack became his friend and protégé—often referring to Mboya as his “godfather,” even though Mboya was not much older. When Jomo Kenyatta was arrested in 1952 during the Mau Mau emergency, Mboya stepped into the political vacuum by accepting the position of treasurer in Kenyatta’s party, the KAU. In 1953, with support from the British Labour Party, Mboya brought Kenya’s five most prominent labor unions together to form the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL). When the KAU was banned later that year, the KFL became the largest officially recognized African political organization in Kenya. This made Mboya, at the age of just twenty-three, one of the most powerful and influential Africans in the country. He was seen—both within Kenya and also in the West—to be one of the rising stars in a new generation of moderate, well-informed, democratic African leaders. Mboya organized protests against the detention camps and secret trials of the emergency, while managing to stay free of arrest himself. In 1955 the British Labour Party a
rranged a year’s scholarship for him to study industrial management at Ruskin College in Oxford. By the time he returned to Kenya a year later, the Mau Mau rebellion had been effectively quashed. Mboya, who had become a leading Luo politician and enthusiastic champion of national unity by the late 1950s, turned to campaigning for Kenyatta’s liberation. When the Kikuyu leader was released on August 21, 1961, Mboya stepped aside to allow the older and more experienced Kenyatta to take over the leadership of Kenya’s struggle for independence.
With visionary foresight, Tom Mboya sought to plan and prepare for Kenya to manage its own affairs once it gained autonomy from Britain. During the 1950s, university education for Africans remained out of reach for all but the highly elite, and Mboya knew that this had to change in preparation for independence. In the middle of 1959 he returned from an extensive tour of the United States to announce that he had secured scores of privately funded scholarships for young Kenyans to study on American campuses. (Although this was at the height of the Cold War, and despite an alarming number of Kenyan students being offered lucrative scholarships in the Soviet Union, the student airlift to the United States was organized without the support of the U.S. State Department.) Some of Mboya’s early supporters in America included the African American baseball legend Jackie Robinson and the actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. Mboya’s enterprise became known as the “Airlift Africa” project, and in its first year it gave eighty-one Kenyan students the opportunity to study at top universities in the United States. The American scholarships were offered annually through the mid-1960s, by which time more than eight hundred East African students had had the opportunity to study at some of America’s most prestigious universities.4
Barack Obama senior has often been considered part of this first wave of Kenyan students to come to the United States. President Obama himself implied that his father was part of the airlift that was partially funded by the Kennedys, suggesting in a 2007 campaign speech that his “very existence” was due to the generosity of the Kennedy family. In his March 4, 2007, address to civil rights activists in Selma, Alabama, Senator Obama said:
What happened in Selma, Alabama, and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House who said, “You know, we’re battling Communism. How are we going to win hearts and minds all across the world? If right here in our own country, John, we’re not observing the ideals set forth in our Constitution, we might be accused of being hypocrites.” So the Kennedys decided we’re going to do an airlift. We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama [senior] got one of those tickets and came over to this country.5
The “Camelot connection” became part of the mythology surrounding Obama’s bid for the nomination, but the Kennedy family was not, in fact, involved in the first airlift in 1959. (The Kennedy Foundation did contribute $100,000 toward the second airlift in 1960, and a spokesperson for Senator Obama soon corrected the error.) Neither was Barack senior on Mboya’s first student airlift in 1959. It was a simple assumption to make, as Obama senior and Mboya were good friends in Nairobi, but the true story of how Barack senior got to the University of Hawaii is much more interesting—and very much reflects the “Obama way” of using his charm.
During his time in Nairobi in the mid-1950s, Obama watched as his old school friends from Maseno graduated and went on to study at university in Uganda and even London. Barack considered these students to be less gifted than he was, and he became depressed—Sarah Obama says even desperate—at the thought of becoming trapped in a menial administrative job. Sarah claims that two American women befriended him and helped him take a correspondence course, which would give him the school certificate he needed to move on to higher education. For several months Obama used every opportunity to study for his Cambridge A-level examinations—the recognized British high school certificate. He took his exams at the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, and after several months of nervous waiting he finally received word that he had passed with excellent scores.
In his early twenties John Ndalo had moved to Nairobi and found work in some of the city’s big hotels, with help from Onyango. He was still living in Nairobi in the late 1950s when Barack senior made his breakthrough, and recalled:
At the time, Hussein worked for the U.S. ambassador in Nairobi—this was around 1956 or 1957. I remember Onyango got involved with these people who got Barack a scholarship abroad. One woman at the embassy liked Barack a lot—I can’t remember her name. Barack loved education, he was hardworking and presentable. He caught the eye of these people, and they supported Barack going to the U.S. They said, “This young man has the potential to become a leader.”
One of the women who helped Barack secure his scholarship was Helen Roberts from Palo Alto, California, who was living in Nairobi at the time. Another was Jane Kiano, the American wife of the first Kenyan to gain a U.S. doctorate, Dr. Julius Gikonyo Kiano. A Stanford alumnus, Dr. Kiano played an important political role in the years running up to Kenyan independence, and helped Mboya significantly in organizing the student airlifts to the United States.
In 1958 and 1959, these women helped Obama to apply for scholarships. He applied to more than thirty colleges in the States before being accepted at the University of Hawaii. One hundred forty East African students submitted serious applications for eighty-one places on Mboya’s 1959 chartered aircraft, and Obama did not make the final selection. Instead, Roberts and another American woman, Miss Mooney, paid for his flight to Honolulu and gave him a partial scholarship. The records of Barack’s move to the United States are incomplete, but it seems that he also received some funding from Jackie Robinson.
In 1959, when the president’s father left Nairobi, the long flight to Honolulu took several days. Kezia, three months pregnant with her second child, Auma, came to the airport for a tearful parting. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the world, Hawaii became the fiftieth state of the Union on August 21 amid an explosion of cannon fire, marching bands, and parades. When Barack arrived at the campus at Manoa in the summer of 1959 he was just twenty-three years old. The campus is spread along the beautiful Manoa Valley outside of Honolulu, and the rich vegetation and subtropical atmosphere must have made Obama feel comfortably at home. As the first black African student at the university, he inevitably became the focus of great curiosity, and within a short period he had gathered a group of supportive friends around him. He had long ago renounced Islam and now declared himself to be an atheist, claiming that all religion was nothing more than superstition. As he started his classes in mathematics and economics in September, he must have reflected how far he had come from a mud hut in K’ogelo.
In Russian-language class the following year, Barack met Ann Dunham, the eighteen-year-old freshman who would become the mother of the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. Ann was born on November 29, 1942, in Wichita, Kansas, the only child of Madelyn Payne and Stanley Armour Dunham. Her birth name was Stanley Ann, after her father, who had really wanted a boy, and she was constantly teased about it at school. After the war, her parents moved regularly in search of work and a more prosperous life—first to Ponca City, Oklahoma, then to Vernon, Texas, and then back to Kansas, to El Dorado. In 1955 the family resettled in Seattle, Washington, and then a year later in Mercer Island, a suburb of Seattle, because her parents wanted her to attend the new high school there. Finally, Ann’s parents moved to Hawaii, hoping to cash in on new business opportunities in the fledgling state. Her father was a furniture salesman, and judging by the family’s frequent moves, he was a restless man—a characteristic Ann seems to have inherited.
In many ways, Ann Dunham was an enigma. When she graduated from high school in June 1960 she was accepted by the University of Chicago. Her father, however, refused to allow her to go because he thought she was too young to live away from home—she w
ould not turn eighteen until November. So instead, the teenager enrolled at the University of Hawaii, where for the first time, she began calling herself Ann rather than Stanley. Yet despite her youth and innocence, one of her high school teachers, Jim Wichterman, recalls that she exhibited a natural skepticism and curiosity: “As much as a high-school student can, she’d question anything: ‘What’s so good about democracy? What’s so good about capitalism? What’s wrong with communism? What’s good about communism?’ She had what I call an inquiring mind.”6
President Obama too recalls a woman who always seemed to challenge orthodoxy. “When I think about my mother,” he said, “I think that there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn’t comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box.”7
Within a very short time of meeting Ann in September 1960, Obama senior was dating her—although he did not tell her about Kezia back in Nairobi, nor about his son and newborn daughter. His friend Leo Odera claims that Obama senior had been getting reports that Kezia had been seen out and about, partying in a manner that did not suit a married woman and mother:
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