The Obamas

by Peter Firstbrook

  He was still writing back home until some friends of Obama’s wrote to him telling that Kezia had been seen in public, at dancing places and whatever, as well as having two children. And later on she conceived a third one [by another man]. He wrote [to me], “She has disappointed me because she is expecting a child.” … It is this that put the final nail in the marriage, and he decided now to look for another.

  Even though Hawaii was unusually racially integrated for the early sixties, the mix was mainly white Americans and Asians. A black man dating a white girl was still considered unusual, though interracial marriage was legal there, unlike in most southern states of the Union. By November 1960, within weeks of meeting Obama senior, Ann was pregnant, and the couple married on the island of Maui three months later, on February 2, 1961. Even by the easygoing Hawaiian standards, Ann was very young to be married, and their relationship raised alarm on both sides of the family. Onyango thought his son was behaving irresponsibly and wrote to Barack to try to persuade him to change his mind; he even threatened to have his student visa revoked. Ann’s parents also had their reservations, but they both supported her in her decision. The only people present at the ceremony, apart from Barack and Ann, were her parents, Stanley and Madelyn. Later that semester Ann dropped out of college. Their son, Barack Hussein Obama, was born at 7:24 p.m. on August 4, 1961, at the Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu. At the time, Obama senior was still legally married to Kezia in Kenya, and he still had not told his new wife. Obama senior was technically a bigamist, and as polygamous marriages are not recognized under U.S. law, their son was technically illegitimate.

  The lack of serious evidence that the younger Barack Obama was born anywhere other than the Kapi’olani Medical Center has not prevented the persistence of rumors and conspiracy theories challenging the legitimacy of his U.S. citizenship. Those who deny that Obama junior was born in Hawaii are often called “birthers,” and they claim that he was actually born in Kenya, or even Indonesia. If the young Obama was not a natural-born citizen of the United States, so the logic goes, then he would not qualify to be a U.S. president. During the 2008 election, the Obama campaign even went to the trouble of releasing a certified copy of his birth certificate, which in this instance was referred to as a “certification of live birth,” clearly stating that Obama junior was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. The birthers, however, claim that the use of the term “certification of live birth” on the document means it is not equivalent to a proper “birth certificate.” These arguments have been debunked many times by media investigations, government officials in Hawaii, and judicial reviews, all of which have concluded that the certificate released by the Obama campaign is indeed official. Even the director of the Hawaiian Department of Health has confirmed that the state “has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.”

  Once Barack Obama was elected in 2008 by a comfortable margin, one might expect the rumors to have died off, but this was not the case. If anything, they intensified. Birthers even ran advertisements in the Chicago Tribune and on television questioning the president-elect’s birth certificate and eligibility for office. One incorrect but commonly reported claim is that Obama junior’s stepgrandmother, Mama Sarah, told a reporter that she was present when Obama was born in Kenya. Even though Sarah clarified later in the interview that “Obama was not born in Mombasa, he was born in America,” the rumor has persisted.

  The birthers claim that Obama senior took his new wife back to Kenya to meet his family before the birth of their son—a scenario that is unlikely for several reasons. First, the couple had no money, and flights to Africa from Hawaii in 1961 were very expensive. Nor had Obama told his young wife that he had another wife and two children back in Kenya, so one imagines that he would have wanted to keep Ann far away from K’ogelo. However, this logic has not diminished the enthusiasm of the conspiracy theorists, who further claim that Ann’s pregnancy was so far advanced that she was not allowed to board her return flight home to Hawaii and had to give birth in Kenya. Most birthers seem to think that the baby was born in Mombasa, and several Kenyan birth certificates have been posted on the Internet, all claiming to be authentic.

  One such forgery is birth certificate number 47044, allegedly issued to Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama by the district of Mombasa in Coast province. However, the form contains several obvious errors, and in this respect it is representative of all the purported Kenyan birth certificates. First, in August 1961 Kenya was still a British protectorate; it did not become a republic until December 1963, meaning the heading on the certificate is incorrect. Looking closely at the certificate number, it appears that the digits are actually 47O44—the middle digit being the letter O rather than the number zero. Obama was forty-seven years old when he became the forty-fourth president of the United States. Is this a coincidence? Perhaps, but unlikely, and the forgery might have been intended not to be taken too seriously. The form does name Obama senior’s place of birth correctly, but Luoland is on the opposite side of the country from Mombasa and there is no valid reason for Obama to have traveled more than five hundred miles by road just so his wife could have their child in a distant region where they had no support and no relatives. Ann could not have been trying to fly home from there either, since the only airport in Mombasa at the time was used exclusively by the military; it did not become an international airport until 1979. Finally, the name of the registrar on the certificate—E. F. Lavender—is coincidentally the name of a modern environmentally friendly liquid laundry detergent; the initials E.F. standing for “Earth Friendly.”

  In Dreams from My Father, President Obama recalls stories of the three years his father spent in Hawaii, related to him by his mother and grandparents, “seamless, burnished smooth from repeated use.” He recalls his mother saying that Obama senior was a terrible driver: “He’d end up on the left-hand side, the way the British drive, and if you said something he’d just huff about silly American rules.”8 But Barack junior found these stories to be generally inadequate to help him understand his father: they were “compact, apocryphal, told in rapid succession in the course of an evening, then packed away for months, sometimes years, in my family’s memory.” For the younger Barack, his father became a distant, mythical figure.

  When Obama senior graduated from the University of Hawaii in the summer of 1962, a reporter interviewed him for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The piece gives a fascinating insight into the character of the twenty-six-year-old:

  He appears guarded and responsible, the model student, the ambassador for his continent. He mildly scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and forcing them to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding—a distraction, he says, from the practical training he seeks. Although he hasn’t experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation and overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups and expresses wry amusement at the fact that “Caucasians” in Hawaii are occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice. But if his assessment is relatively clear-eyed, he is careful to end on a happy note: One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.

  Obama received two scholarship offers from doctorate programs: a full scholarship from the New School in New York City, and a partial one from Harvard. He chose to go to Harvard, but the award was not enough for the family to live together in Massachusetts. Ann stayed behind in Honolulu with their young son and resumed her studies at the university, and Barack flew to Boston in the fall. It was the beginning of the end of their short relationship.

  By 1962 Mboya’s airlift was into its third year and Harvard was now home to some of Kenya’s brightest and most ambitious students. One of them was James Odhiambo Ochieng’, a twenty-one-year-old student who arrived in that
year:

  I went to the States in 1962. I was part of Tom Mboya’s airlift. Tom Mboya was a very good friend of mine—I [later] came to work under him. I met Obama senior in 1963 in Boston, after he had left the lady. At that time, Obama was also staying in Cambridge; we were all brothers. We were staying more or less in the same place, and we liked parties and drinks.

  In America, it is very interesting. America, you see, you go to the grocery store and buy meat there, and you come and cook it the African way. Lots of ladies in America used to like that. We used our hands [to eat], we didn’t use a fork.

  So when I met Obama at that time, Obama used to dance, seriously, and he used to know how to seduce. The women liked this man. Barry had lots of girlfriends.

  Barack Obama senior rented a room in an apartment block just off Central Square in Cambridge and settled down to a bachelor lifestyle. Tom Mboya had heard that Obama had married again, and he wrote to his old friend, warning him not to abandon his new wife and son. Barack stayed true to his word, at least at first. In Dreams from My Father, President Obama remembers only one visit from his father, just before Christmas in 1971, when the young Barack was ten years old. However, James Odhiambo insists that Obama senior went back several times between 1962 and 1964 to see his toddler son in Hawaii: “He told me that he had a brilliant young boy. Even when he was in Boston, he was going [back] to Hawaii. Why do I say so? Because he would talk to us about the boy all that time. He went [to Hawaii] more than once. I am sure, I am certain—three times that I know of.”

  While Barack Obama senior was studying in Hawaii, Kenya was experiencing dramatic changes as the country moved toward independence. The year 1959, when Barack left for America, marked a relaxation of British governance in the colony; the Mau Mau emergency was effectively over, and Jomo Kenyatta was transferred from jail to house arrest. In 1960 Tom Mboya’s People’s Congress Party joined forces with the now underground Kenya African Union and the Kenya Independent Movement to form a new party—the Kenya African National Union (KANU). KANU was meant to transcend tribal politics and serve as a united front in preparation for negotiations with the British Colonial Office. These discussions, which became known as the Lancaster House conferences after the grand neoclassical building in London where they took place, were intended to create an effective constitutional framework for the country, and to smooth the transition to independence. As secretary general of KANU, Mboya headed the Kenyan delegation at the three conferences in Lancaster House.

  The other leading Kenyan politician of the day was another Luo, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, who was born in Bondo, a village close to K’ogelo in central Nyanza. The Luo revered him as ker—their spiritual leader—the position held by their fabled ancestral chief Ramogi Ajwang’, who first brought the Luo to Kenya five centuries previously. As a mark of respect, Oginga Odinga became known as Jaramogi, meaning “son of Ramogi.” However, according to Luo tradition, a ker cannot hold a political position, so Oginga Odinga relinquished his regal status in 1957 and was to represent the central Nyanza constituency in the newly formed Legislative Council. He further consolidated his political position in 1960, when he formed KANU with Mboya. Although they had fundamental political differences—Oginga Odinga was much further to the political left of Mboya—together they gave the Luo a powerful voice in the new Kenyan leadership.

  In February 1961, the very month that Barack Obama senior and Ann Dunham were married in Honolulu, Kenya held its first general election to elect a coalition government in preparation for its forthcoming independence. The two main parties were KANU and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU). KADU had been founded in 1960 with the express aim of defending the interests of other Kenyan tribes against the domination of the Luo and Kikuyu, who accounted for the majority of KANU’s membership. The most dramatically contested seat of the election, in Nairobi East, was considered to be a weather vane in the struggle over leadership of KANU. Five candidates stood for election, but the fight was clearly between two KANU representatives, Tom Mboya and Dr. Munyua Waiyaki, a Kikuyu.9 More than 60 percent of the registered voters in the constituency were Kikuyu or allied tribal partners; the Luo, with just over 10 percent of the vote, were the next largest ethnic group. On the first day of the election, a Sunday, 75 percent of the electorate turned out to vote. The overwhelming majority sported Mboya badges, but some speculated that most of the Kikuyu who wore Mboya’s image in public would vote strictly along tribal lines at the secret ballot box.

  Mboya defied all expectations and won 90 percent of the vote, and there is nothing to suggest that these figures are anything but accurate. The result was a remarkable demonstration of popularity for the young Luo politician, and for the power of national democracy over tribalism. During the nine days of voting across the country, 84 percent of the electorate voted; although some of the campaigns were marred by bribery, corruption, and intimidation, most were conducted openly and honestly. KANU easily emerged as the dominant party, winning about two-thirds of the vote over KADU. In March 1961 nominees from both political parties visited Kenyatta in Lodwar, the small town in northern Kenya where he was being held under house arrest. Kenyatta urged the politicians to unite and work together for full independence. When Kenyatta was released later that year, he called for the two parties to form an interim coalition government and to hold elections before independence.

  The national elections for Kenya’s first autonomous government took place in May 1963. Kenyatta’s KANU party, which called for Kenya to be a unitary state, ran against KADU, which advocated majimbo—a Swahili word meaning “group of regions.” The majimbo system was proposed as a way of minimizing the problem of tribalism, by creating three self-governing regions (Rift Valley, Western, and Coast). This would give the Kikuyu and the Luo their own ethnic regional governments but prevent them from dominating the national government. However, the electorate rejected the concept of majimbo and KANU won the election with 83 of the 124 seats. On June 1, 1963, Jomo Kenyatta became Kenya’s prime minister; the Luo were represented by Tom Mboya, who became minister of justice and constitutional affairs, and Oginga Odinga, who was minister for home affairs. This was an exciting time for the Africans, as they debated and argued about what sort of nation Kenya should become.

  But the rapid transition from Mau Mau rebellion to independent status in no more than four years came as a huge psychological shock to the sixty thousand white Kenyans, who had long considered themselves the last bastion of European rule in British Africa. The white farmers felt they had been abandoned by the politicians in London after sixty years of labor in the White Highlands. In a very public demonstration of this sense of betrayal, one settler threw thirty pieces of silver in front of Michael Blundell, the de facto political leader of the white community, on Blundell’s return to Nairobi from Lancaster House.

  On December 12, 1963, Kenya became a fully independent nation; one year later to the day, the country became a republic—Jamhuri ya Kenya—with Jomo Kenyatta as president and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga as vice president. KADU was dissolved and integrated with KANU, leaving Kenyatta’s first government effectively without an opposition. The resulting centralization of political and economic power around the president thus laid the foundation for corrupt governance.

  In January 1964, Ann Dunham filed for divorce from Barack Obama senior, citing abandonment by her husband. It was clear that the marriage had really never had much chance of success; Obama senior had a succession of girlfriends in Boston, and now he had met a young schoolteacher in her early twenties, Ruth Nidesand. Obama senior soon moved in with Ruth, and they started a serious relationship. The young Kenyan students were also beginning to think less about partying in Boston and more about what was happening in Nairobi.

  The following year, in 1965, Obama senior gave up his doctoral studies and returned to Nairobi—partly from financial hardship, but also because of the new opportunities on offer in Kenya. Following independence, many students who had been studying overseas
returned home to compete for the top government jobs in Nairobi—many of which had been recently vacated by white administrators who decided to leave Kenya. Such was the demand for young, well-educated Kenyans that the government even sent recruitment teams to the United States to persuade the Kenyan students to return home and serve their country. Despite leaving his studies early, Obama senior was later awarded a master’s degree from Harvard, even though he frequently referred to himself as “Dr. Obama” when wanting to make an impression. Ruth followed him out to Nairobi, and although Barack was reluctant at first, they soon married.

  Obama senior’s first job in Kenya was as an economist with Shell, but he soon landed a government post with the Kenya Central Bank. A prize placement for a young man from a small village in Nyanza, it should have been a springboard to greater things. But Obama senior’s tendency for self-destruction was already beginning to reassert itself. In July 1965—the summer he returned to Nairobi—he published an article in the East Africa Journal entitled “Problems Facing Our Socialism.”10 It was essentially a commentary on an influential paper written by his old friend Tom Mboya that had argued for a model of government in Kenya based on African values—what would eventually be called “African socialism.” In his article, Obama strongly criticized the direction the new Kenyatta administration was taking, and its lack of foresight in planning.

  His article might have gone down well with his professors at Harvard, but for someone who was straight out of university, with no experience in government, it was not a very wise thing to write. The paper did, however, impress Mboya (who later gave Obama his government job), and it helped the cabinet minister to press Kenyatta and other members of the cabinet into addressing some of the inequalities of wealth in Kenya. However, it also marked Obama as a member of the Oginga Odinga/Mboya camp of left-wing Luo radicals, and the outspokenness and highly opinionated attitude demonstrated in the paper ultimately would contribute to Obama’s downfall.