The Obamas

by Peter Firstbrook

  Nevertheless, those early years back in Kenya were good for Obama senior; he had a first-rate, well-paid job at the Central Bank, and he was making friends at the very top levels of government. His old college friend from Boston, James Odhiambo Ochieng’, remembers countless nights out on the town:

  Obama did one thing—he would order the drinks. He would say, “When I say drink, drink!” So everybody would drink. But if I say pay! What do you do? He would go and call the waiter: “Take [the bill] to Mboya.” And Mboya would take it very easily. He would not only do it to Mboya, he would do it to Oginga Odinga. And you know, the old man would be sitting here like this, and he would say, “Yes?” and [the waiter] would say, “Obama has given me this.” Oginga Odinga would take it. He couldn’t be angry about it. With Obama? Oh no, no, no. He wouldn’t argue.

  At the same time, Obama’s personal life was not running so smoothly. Soon after Barack married Ruth, Onyango came to Nairobi to see his son. Onyango had opposed the marriage to Ann, and now Barack had returned home with yet another American wife. A traditionalist at heart, Onyango wanted his son to have a Luo wife. So he tried to persuade Barack to set up a second home in Nairobi with Kezia—after all, a Luo always had separate huts for his wives in his compound, so why should the same idea not work in Nairobi?

  Leo Odera explained what happened: “When Obama senior returned with Ruth, Hussein Onyango went to Nairobi physically to plead, because Kezia still had many children. So Hussein said, ‘You are now married to a white lady. Why don’t you rent a house for this wife somewhere on another estate, so that you can visit your children there?’ And Obama is saying no!”

  Ruth too put her foot down and refused to share Barack with another. Despite Barack’s problems with his father, his first few years with Ruth in Nairobi were happy, and she bore him two sons, Mark and David—half brothers to Barack Obama junior back in Honolulu.

  At a national level, Kenyan politics were beginning to deteriorate by the second half of the decade. Oginga Odinga and Kenyatta had always been uncomfortable bedfellows, coming as they did from different tribes. Politically, the two men also disagreed over the direction the country should take, with Oginga Odinga advocating a socialist system, whereas Kenyatta supported a mixed economy. In March 1966 Oginga Odinga quit KANU, resigned from Kenyatta’s government, and formed a new left-wing opposition party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). As a result, Barack Obama senior lost one of his most powerful mentors in government. Oginga Odinga claimed that Kenya was being run by an “invisible government,” and for the next three years the KPU insisted that KANU’s policies of “African socialism” were simply a cover for tribalism and capitalism. Oginga Odinga—a senior Luo politician—had thrown down a gauntlet at the feet of his Kikuyu adversary, setting off a confrontation that would eventually result in arrest, detention, and assassination.

  The first five years after independence defined what type of government Kenya would have for years to come. From its very beginning, Oginga Odinga’s KPU faced enmity from Kenyatta’s government—Kenyatta was not prepared to compromise with or even countenance any opposition. If anything, he became even more entrenched in his own opinions, believing that his opponents were “paid agents of communism whose mission it was to dethrone him.”11 By March 1968—the second anniversary of the founding of the KPU—the government accused the political party of subversion. As a consequence of this very serious charge, KPU members were denied the right to address public meetings, with the government claiming that “the record of KPU members must bring into anxious review the question of the stage at which free speech, as a tool of democracy, may also become a trap into which democracy must fall.”12 Jomo Kenyatta and his close Kikuyu colleagues were determined to tighten their grip on their single-party government.

  In May the following year KANU suffered a severe blow in a parliamentary by-election in the Luo constituency of Gem, in central Nyanza. KANU had won a substantial victory there in the national election four years previously, but in May 1969—less than a year after the KPU had been silenced at public meetings—the KPU overturned that result and won the seat easily. Realizing that many of the Luo in Gem were voting for Oginga Odinga out of tribal loyalty, Kenyatta asked Mboya—who by then had become minister for economic planning and development—to reorganize KANU in preparation for the national elections, which were due the following year. The popular and charismatic Mboya was also considered a potential challenger to Kenyatta for the presidency in those elections.

  Two months later, on a hot, steamy Saturday morning in Nairobi, Barack Obama senior found himself drawn into one of the most momentous events in postindependence Kenya. Tom Mboya, his old friend and drinking companion, had returned the previous day from a meeting in Addis Ababa. As the July heat began to build up on the streets of Nairobi, Mboya arrived at his office in the Treasury Building on Harambee Avenue. At lunchtime he told his driver to go home for the weekend and took his own car to a pharmacy on Government Road (now called Moi Avenue) to buy some lotion for his dry skin. Just before one o’clock, on his way into the shop, he bumped into Obama senior, who casually joked with Mboya, saying that he should be careful, as he had parked his car illegally.13 Minutes after the two friends parted, Tom Mboya came out of the store, having made his purchase, and was confronted by a slight young man wearing a dark suit, holding a briefcase in his left hand; his right hand was in his pocket. Almost immediately two shots were fired, and Mboya fell to the pavement.

  Mohini Sehmi, who was a family friend and who had just served him in the pharmacy, ran out to see what the sudden noise was about. She recalled, “He slumped against me and staggered back almost into the shop. Then he must have staggered again, and we were back in the shop. I saw blood on his shirt, which was red anyway, and I realised then what had happened. He never uttered a word. He fell into my arms and began to fall to the ground.”14

  Dr. Mohamed Rafique, another family friend, arrived soon after the shooting and gave Mboya mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but the young politician was pronounced dead on arrival at Nairobi hospital. The first bullet had severed his aorta, and the second had struck his right shoulder.

  Mboya’s friends and colleagues could not believe what had happened. His bodyguard, Joseph Nisa, collapsed at the hospital, crying, “It’s not true, it’s not true.” The publicity secretary of the KPU arrived in tears and announced, “This is not a political assassination. There is no question of parties here. He belonged to us all.”15 The citizens of Nairobi thought otherwise: within hours of Mboya’s death, a highly charged crowd—mainly Luo—tried to force their way into the hospital against the police cordon that had quickly been thrown around the building. Doors and windows were broken, and the police resorted to tear gas and clubs to disperse the angry crowd. The government mobilized the entire Kenyan police force, who established roadblocks and patrols throughout the city and into the suburbs.

  News of Mboya’s death soon reached Nyanza, where demonstrations quickly degenerated into riots. In Kisumu, mobs of young men roamed the city, stoning shops owned by Kikuyu traders; in nearby Homa Bay, police were obliged to take Kikuyus into protective custody. The following day Mboya’s body was taken to his Nairobi home on Convent Drive; thousands of mourners lined the route and thousands more surrounded his house when the hearse arrived. Mboya’s widow, Pamela, later told Sehmi: “Tom would still have been alive today if he had had a streak of badness in him. They killed him because he was nothing but a good man. He died because they know he was good.”16

  Tom Mboya’s death left a vacuum at the very heart of Kenya’s government: the country had lost its most able government minister and its most astute political strategist. His death, along with the Kenyatta government’s attempts to suppress the KPU, led most Luo to believe that the Kikuyu were determined to deny any Luo a senior position in the country. The government had already sidelined Oginga Odinga, and now, or so the Luo maintained, Kenyatta had dealt permanently with Mboya—the one man most likely to
beat him to the presidency in a popular vote.

  Nor was Mboya’s assassination the only violent death of a senior Luo. A few months before, in January 1969, Chiedo Argwings-Kodhek, the foreign minister in Kenyatta’s government, died in what was initially thought to be a road accident. The subsequent exhumation found evidence that he was actually killed by a single shot fired from a police rifle. Some people claim that this was Jomo Kenyatta’s first political assassination.

  On July 10, five days after Mboya’s murder, a Kikuyu man, Isaac Njenga Njoroge, was arrested and charged with Mboya’s assassination. Njenga Njoroge had once been a youth volunteer in KANU’s Nairobi branch, seemingly confirming Luo suspicions that the murder had been politically motivated.

  By now Barack Obama senior was well known as an outspoken critic of Kenyatta’s government, and he was prepared to testify at the prosecution of Mboya’s killer. It was a brave thing to do, and he later told a friend that not long after the trial, he was hit by a car on a Nairobi street and left for dead. He was convinced that the occupants in the car were the same people who had killed Mboya.17 On September 10, Njenga Njoroge was found guilty in what most people considered to be a tightly controlled showcase trial. But he almost ruined the carefully stage-managed event just before his sentence was announced, when he casually asked: “Why do you pick on me? Why not the big man?” No one has ever conclusively explained to whom Njenga Njoroge was referring, but every Luo politician and historian I have spoken to is sure that Kenyatta ordered Mboya’s assassination. On November 25, 1969, the Kenya Prison Service announced that Njenga Njoroge had been hanged: “The sentence imposed on Njenga has been carried out in accordance with the law, along with those other persons convicted of capital offences.” However, the trial records have since disappeared from the Kenya National Archives, and rumors have persisted that Njenga Njoroge was spirited off after the trial to Ethiopia, where he lived the rest of his life under an assumed identity.

  Throughout the second half of 1969 the relationship between President Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga—and effectively between the Kikuyu and the Luo—continued to decline. Kenyans have a well-known saying in Swahili, Wapiganapo tembo nyasi huumia—when elephants fight, the grass gets hurt—and this is exactly what happened in Kisumu on October 25, 1969.

  That month, Jomo Kenyatta decided to make a tour of the Rift Valley and Nyanza in the run-up to the presidential elections scheduled for December 6; it was his way of showing that he was back in control of the country. On the twenty-fifth he visited Kisumu, ostensibly to open the New Nyanza General Hospital, which had been built by the Soviet Union and is still referred to as the “Russian hospital.” But Kenyatta found that he had strayed into hostile territory. An estimated five thousand people massed outside the hospital that day, and the crowd started to chant the KPU slogan, “Dume, dume” (in this context, it meant “brave man” in Swahili, and referred to Oginga Odinga). When the president rose to make his speech, the crowd started heckling him; perhaps unwisely, Kenyatta was in no mood to mince his words. His attack on the Luo community in general, and the Luo political leadership in particular, was extraordinary and unprecedented. Speaking in Swahili, he opened his speech with the following diatribe:

  Before opening this hospital, I want to say a few words; and I will start with the Kiswahili proverb which states that “The thanks of a donkey are its hind kick.” We have come here to bring you luck, to bring a hospital which is for treating the citizens, and now there are some writhing little insects, little insects of the KPU, who have dared to come here to speak dirty words, dirty words.

  I am very glad to be with my friend Odinga, who is the leader of these people here. And I wish to say, if it were not for the respect I have for our friendship, Odinga, I would have said that you get locked up today … so that we see who rules over these citizens, whether it is KANU, or so many little insects who rule over this country.… On my part I do say this, if these people are dirty, if they bring about nonsense, we shall show them that Kenya has got its government. They dare not play around with us, and you Bwana Odinga as an individual, you know that I do not play around. I have left you free for a long time because you are my friend. Were it not so, you yourself know what I would have done. It is not your business to tell me where to throw you; I personally know where. Maybe you think I cannot throw you into detention in Manyani [previously a British detention camp] because you are my special friend.… And therefore today I am speaking in a very harsh voice, and while I am looking at you directly, and I am telling you the truth in front of all these people.

  Tell these people of yours to desist. If not, they are going to feel my full wrath. And me, I do not play around at all.… They are chanting Dume, Dume—“Bull, Bull.” Your mother’s c**ts! This Dume, Dume … And me, I want to tell you Odinga, while you are looking at me with your two eyes wide open; I have given my orders right now: those creeping insects of yours are to be crushed like flour. They are to be crushed like flour if they play with us. You over there, do not make noise there. I will come over there and crush you myself.18

  With this extraordinary verbal attack on a tribal minority, the nation’s president made the threat to the Luo people crystal clear, the abuse explicit. Obscenities aside, Africans consider it a great insult to be called “writhing little insects,” and the crowd was furious. Full-scale riots soon erupted in Kisumu against Kenyatta’s security entourage; the police opened fire, and forty-three people were reported killed. Never again did Kenyatta set foot in Nyanza, and the Luo province—like many other non-Kikuyu areas—was denied virtually any further economic assistance or development for decades. The effects of this rejection can still be seen in these parts of Kenya today.

  In that year, 1969, tribal politics won, and Kenyan nationalism died along with Mboya, Argwings-Kodhek, and the forty-three victims of Kisumu. The entire Luo community now closed ranks around Oginga Odinga, and they took on a markedly anti-Kikuyu stance that is still felt today. Nor did Jaramogi Oginga Odinga remain free for long after Kenyatta’s public tirade at the Kisumu hospital: within a very short time the president carried out his threat, and Oginga Odinga was arrested and detained for two years. After he was released, he lived in political limbo until after Kenyatta’s death in August 1978; then, following a short period of political rehabilitation, he was again placed under house arrest by President Daniel arap Moi in 1982. In 1992, Oginga Odinga fought for a change in Kenya’s constitution to allow multiparty democracy, and he won his challenge with the support of the British and U.S. governments.

  Oginga Odinga died two years later at the age of eighty-three, but he had created a political dynasty. His son, Raila Amollo Odinga, followed his father into politics; he won his first parliamentary seat in 1992, and after two failed attempts to run for the presidency against Mwai Kibaki, he challenged the incumbent again in 2007. His claim that the election was fraudulent led to the postelection violence in late 2007 and early 2008; in April 2008 Raila Odinga was made prime minister of Kenya on a power-sharing basis with President Mwai Kibaki.

  As the fortunes of the Luo fell during the late 1960s, so too did those of Barack Obama senior. His outspokenness and criticism of Kenyatta were beginning to cause problems at the Central Bank. As a senior Luo civil servant within the Kenyatta government, he was already particularly vulnerable; now that his friend and mentor Tom Mboya was dead, he became even more exposed, as Leo Odera recalls:

  When Barry returned home [in 1965], Mboya was a government minister. When Mboya was assassinated, his protection was uncovered. Because you know, he liked drinking and sometimes not reporting to work. But whilst Mboya was there, nobody would do anything about him. Once Mboya died, he had no protector.

  Obama senior did not heed the warning and he continued to speak openly against the government, even after Mboya’s death. On one occasion, Odera claims, Kenyatta himself called Barack to his offices, to give him a personal warning:

  Barack was outspoken. After getting drunk, he would
say the government killed the best brain. And then I think some intelligence men picked this up and I think this could have reached Kenyatta’s ear. So he was ordered to Kenyatta’s place. Kenyatta told him: “You’ll be on the tarmac looking for another job.” But still he did not shut his mouth.… It is a brave man who talked carelessly about the Kenyatta government in those days.

  James Odhiambo, Barack’s college friend in Boston, had also returned from America to work in Nairobi, and he was a regular visitor to the house that Ruth and Barack shared:

  The problem that Obama senior was having—despite the fact that Ruth was in the house—Obama was still enjoying himself with the ladies. He [liked] the white [women] in Nairobi. This was in ’67, ’68. Obama was, I will use the word, arrogant. Because of his brightness, he actually felt that people like Duncan Ndegwa [the governor of the Central Bank of Kenya] were stupid, and he felt that he should be the governor! “Ndegwa? Who is Ndegwa? Ndegwa was not learned [educated],” according to him.

  On one occasion, according to Odhiambo, governors from several African banks met up in Nairobi for a banking summit. “Obama had evidently spoken to these people who were coming from the central banks of other African countries. When he talked to them, he says, ‘You know, I’m the governor really, you know.’ Oh, Barry!”

  The Luo have a proverb, Kapod in epi to kik iyany nyang’: “Don’t abuse the crocodile when you’re still in the water.” Obama senior, who was up to his neck in the murky waters of the Central Bank, should have heeded these words; the crocodile now turned on the young, outspoken economist, and Obama was fired. People who knew Obama claim that his dismissal was personally sanctioned by Kenyatta. Obama was devastated over the loss of this job, and his drinking became worse. He had always been known as “Mr. Double-Double,” for his habit of ordering two double whiskies at once—he preferred Johnnie Walker Black Label and VAT 69.