The Obamas

by Peter Firstbrook

  With this briefest of calls from a complete stranger, albeit a relative, Barack Obama junior learned of the death of his father—a man whom he recalls meeting only once.

  Young Barack went on to graduate the following summer with a degree in political science with a specialization in international relations before working briefly for a company that provided international business information to corporate clients. In 1985 he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a community organizer and also with a public housing development on the city’s South Side. While in Chicago, Barack Obama junior decided to return to school, this time to Harvard—his father’s alma mater—to study for a degree in law. But one piece of unfinished business remained before the younger Barack could move on with the rest of his life. In the summer of 1987, he made his first visit to Kenya. There he met his extended African family who, until that point, had been only faceless names from the past. He visited K’ogelo, where his stepgrandmother still works the soil made fertile by Onyango’s hard labor. And he sat by the graves of his father and his paternal grandfather and wept. Afterward he felt a calmness wash over him; the circle had finally closed around him. His five-week visit to the home of the Obamas had given him an insight into the person he really was:

  I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of this was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin.22

  Barack Obama junior made two more trips to his African homeland before he became president, and both visits represented key moments in his life. Ten years after the death of his father, he took a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer from Chicago called Michelle Robinson back to K’ogelo and introduced her to Mama Sarah as the woman he intended to marry. Then in 2006 he returned for a third time, this time in a professional capacity. As part of a broad sweep through Africa, Barack Obama—now a senator from Illinois—made a brief visit to Nairobi and then to K’ogelo.

  Now, with the mantle of presidential office weighing heavy on his shoulders, never again will he have the opportunity to travel freely and unrecognized in the land of his forefathers.

  EPILOGUE

  KINDA E TEKO

  Perseverance is strength

  Every time you drive west out of Kisumu to visit K’ogelo, or south to Kendu Bay, you will pass a police roadblock. The checkpoints, spaced at regular intervals along every major road in Kenya, are the bane of every driver in the country. If the police were genuinely checking the roadworthiness of the thousands of trucks on their way to Uganda, Congo, and Tanzania, or scrutinizing the dangerously overloaded matatus (which have fatal accidents almost daily), or even looking for drivers who are not properly licensed and insured to drive their vehicles, then their actions would be laudable. If challenged, the police will claim that this is exactly what they are doing. But if you sit discreetly in a matatu two or three rows behind the driver and watch carefully, then you will see the true purpose of the police check. The driver is flagged down and stops; a policeman will exchange a few words, cast an appraising eye over the passengers in the back, and then wave the driver on. You have to be quick to see the bribe changing hands.

  Sometimes the money is slipped surreptitiously through the window, and at other times a 100 Ksh note ($1.25) is rolled into a tiny ball and dropped outside onto the road, to be collected after the matatu has driven off. A matatu driver often charges only 50 or 100 Ksh for a short trip, so the regular bribes taken by the police can sometimes account for as much as 50 percent of his daily fares. The police target almost all the vehicles—matatus, trucks, and private cars—but whenever my own vehicle was stopped and they realized there was a mzungu inside, they would give me a broad smile and a salute and wish me a good safari (which means “journey” in Swahili).

  Police corruption is a fact of life in Kenya, and it has been going on for decades; little, if anything, is ever done about it. In 2008 a Kenya Television Network (KTN) crew covertly videotaped police roadblocks in and around Nairobi. They calculated that the police were making at least 15,000 to 18,000 Ksh ($190–$225) a day at each roadblock; each of the manned positions had a senior officer in charge who took the bulk of the bribes, and he made 30,000 Ksh ($3,750) a month or more from the scam. Their illicit earnings constituted a huge sum of money in a country where the average income is less than $700 a year. When the report aired, the police authorities and politicians swept the scandal under the carpet; the officers who were recognizable on the KTN video were merely transferred to a remote police post. Yet corruption by people in positions of power is not a simple issue; most policemen in Kenya earn no more than 10,000 Ksh ($125) a month, and there is a tacit expectation that they will supplement their paltry salary by other means, although this is vehemently denied by the authorities.

  And the roadblocks are only a very public display of a problem that goes right to the top of government. In 2004 the government commissioned a confidential report about ex-president Moi’s illegal activities, as part of a commitment by President Kibaki to eradicate high-level corruption following Moi’s twenty-four-year rule. The report, which leaked onto the Internet in 2007, alleged that associates of President Moi were involved in drug dealing, money laundering, and kickbacks; it estimated that Moi’s son Gideon was worth some £550 million ($855 million) in 2002, while his other son Philip was worth about £384 million ($597 million).1 Unfortunately, President Kibaki had a reputation for spinelessness; the joke going around Kenya a few years ago was that he never saw a fence without sitting on it. A government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, called the unauthorized release of the report a “political gimmick” to influence the 2007 elections, claiming: “The government of Kenya believes that the leaking of this report is meant to score political points against Kibaki.” He also asserted that the report was incomplete and inaccurate. Today Daniel arap Moi lives in a vast mansion outside of Eldoret in western Kenya, and although he is generally ignored by the political establishment, his many supporters still venerate him as the grand old man of Kenyan politics.

  The biggest and longest-running case of corruption in Kenya’s history was the Goldenberg International scandal, which occurred between 1991 and 1993. Like many countries, Kenya encourages international trade by granting tax-free status to Kenyan companies who export goods; the government sometimes also subsidizes the exported products. Goldenberg International smuggled gold into Kenya from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), then exported it as Kenyan gold, earning the company a 20 percent subsidy from the government. The huge sums of money involved—at least $600 million—suggest the participation of government officials at the highest level. Almost all of the politicians in Moi’s government were accused of benefiting from the embezzlement and many of them are still in positions of power in the current administration. Senior Kenyan judges were also associated with the scandal; twenty-three resigned after presented with the evidence. The Goldenberg fraud is thought to have cost the country more than 10 percent of its annual gross domestic product, and it almost certainly helped finance the brutal war that raged in the DRC between 1997 and 2002.

  Nor is this high level of corruption a thing of the past. As recently as January 2009 the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission was asked to look into the alleged theft of oil, valued at $98.7 million, from the Kenya Pipeline Company. Today, most Kenyans acknowledge that corruption is one of the biggest problems facing their country: it has been estimated that the average urban Kenyan pays sixteen bribes every month, and that corruption robs local companies of 6 percent of their revenues. Even in Kisumu there are many cases where the ownership of public land and buildings has been transferred to senior local government employees, with the money from the subsequent sales mysteriously disappearing into private bank accounts.

  Kenyans use elaborate euphemisms when they talk about bribery and corruption; they will frequently talk about somebody who “ea
ts” or who “drinks tea.” Another vernacular term is “TKK,” towa kitu kidogo, which means to “take something small” in Swahili, although cynics claim that it means towa kila kitu, which means “take everything.”

  During Barack Obama’s third visit to Kenya in August 2006, as part of a two-week whistle-stop tour around Africa, he spoke at the University of Nairobi. The senator from Illinois opened his speech (titled “An Honest Government, a Hopeful Future”) by describing “the warmth and sense of community that the people of Kenya possess—their sense of hopefulness even in the face of great difficulty.” He also spoke of the difficulties his father had faced when he returned to work in Nairobi, of problems that “put him at odds with the politics of tribe and patronage.” He acknowledged the special hurdles that Kenya faced, along with most other African countries, including the legacy of colonialism and national boundaries that had been drawn decades ago “without regard to the political and tribal alignments of indigenous peoples, and that therefore fed conflict and tribal strife.”

  Then Obama hardened his message, and he became more critical of the path that Kenya was following. He pointed out that when the country gained its independence in the early 1960s, its gross national product was not very different from that of South Korea; yet today, the economy of the Asian country is forty times bigger than Kenya’s. Part of the problem, Obama claimed, was that:

  Kenya is failing in its ability to create a government that is transparent and accountable. One that serves its people and is free from corruption … the reason I speak of the freedom that you fought so hard to win is because today that freedom is in jeopardy. It is being threatened by corruption.… But while corruption is a problem we all share, here in Kenya it is a crisis—a crisis that’s robbing an honest people of the opportunities they have fought for—the opportunity they deserve.

  In his speech, Obama used the word corruption no fewer than twenty times. It was a tough, uncompromising message, but one that had been highlighted before by visiting dignitaries from abroad. Yet hearing it from Obama was different, for many people see him not only as a fellow Kenyan but also, more significantly, as a Luo. At the time, Raila Odinga’s Luo-based Orange Democratic Party was in opposition, and it was proving to be an irritating thorn in the side of President Kibaki’s Kikuyu-dominated government. The Kenyan president’s spokesman, Alfred Mutua, was quick to play the tribalism card, announcing, “It is very clear that the senator has been used as a puppet to perpetuate opposition politics”2—a statement that Mutua has probably since lived to regret.

  Yet tribalism marches hand in hand with corruption—both problems represent an abuse of power by the strong over the weak and defenseless. Many thousands of Kenyans have died in tribe-related violence since 1963. In 1992, for example, the Kalenjin targeted Kikuyus and other “foreigners” in the Rift Valley, and three thousand people were killed or injured; in 1997, Coast province was the scene of more aggression toward “outsiders,” this time against the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, and Kamba people.3 Leaflets that were distributed throughout the region incited tribal hostility: “The time has come for us original inhabitants of the coast to claim what is rightfully ours. We must remove these invaders from our land.”4 Then in the early weeks of 2008, the postelectoral violence resulted in more than a thousand deaths and the displacement of half a million people.

  Richard Richburg is a respected and experienced black American journalist who has been the chief of the Washington Post’s New York bureau since 2007. Between 1991 and 1995 he was the Post’s bureau chief in Nairobi; when he moved on, he wrote a candid book about his experiences called Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, in which he admitted:

  If there was one thing that I learned traveling around Africa, it was that the tribe remains the defining feature of almost every African society. Old tribal mistrusts and stereotypes linger, and the potential for a violent implosion is never very far from the surface.

  Even in the supposedly more sophisticated or developed countries like Kenya, thirty years of independence and “nation building” had still failed to create any real sense of national identity that could transcend the tribe.

  In Kenya, the Kikuyu still think the Luo are inferior and that they, the Kikuyu, have the right to rule. The Luo don’t trust the Kikuyu, who they think look down on them. And both tribes look down on the Luhya. It goes on and on.5

  Although tribalism is rife throughout Africa, it is not universal. On December 19, 1961, the British colony of Tanganyika achieved independence from Britain, and under its first president, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, Tanzania plowed a very different furrow than its northern neighbor. Nyerere was not without his faults, nor Tanzania without its problems. Like his contemporary Kenyatta, Nyerere ran his nation for decades with an iron fist and repressed any political opposition. He called his system of political and social development ujamaa—a dogmatic and inflexible form of socialism. This, together with rampant corruption, left the country impoverished and underdeveloped. Yet as a nation, Tanzania achieved something that has always eluded Kenya: Nyerere was able to mold nearly 130 different ethnic groups and racial minorities into a single, relatively peaceful nation with a distinct national character. Although a rare achievement, it is not unique on the continent. In 1957 the West African state of Ghana achieved independence from Britain under an equally charismatic leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah fought tribalism and regionalism and left Ghana with the enduring legacy of a clear national identity. Yet Ghana is very different from its neighbor Nigeria, another former British colony; in Nigeria, an individual will most likely claim to be Hausa or Fulani before he or she will acknowledge being Nigerian. There are many complex reasons why these African nations have developed differently, but both Tanzania and Ghana have shown that African states can avoid resorting to tribalism after independence.

  When Barack Obama paid his first visit to Africa as president of the United States in July 2009, it was no coincidence that he chose to visit Ghana and not Kenya. The ordinary citizens of Kenya fully understood the intentional snub to their government when an article in the country’s Daily Nation reminded its readers:

  U.S. President Barack Obama has strongly criticized Kenya’s leadership, expressing concern about the country’s political and economic direction.

  Explaining why Ghana was chosen as his first official destination in black Africa, President Obama singled out the slow pace of reforms as a key impediment in Kenya.

  In his most pointed comments on the country of his father’s birth, the U.S. President tore into Kenya’s leadership saying that “political parties do not seem to be moving into a permanent reconciliation that would allow the country to move forward.”6

  In his speech to the Ghanaian parliament in Accra on July 11, Obama came back to his theme of tribalism and corruption:

  In my father’s life, it was partly tribalism and patronage in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is a daily fact of life for far too many.

  Of course, we also know that is not the whole story. Here in Ghana, you show us a face of Africa that is too often overlooked by a world that sees only tragedy or the need for charity. The people of Ghana have worked hard to put democracy on a firmer footing, with peaceful transfers of power even in the wake of closely contested elections.7

  His message was heard very clearly 2,600 miles away in Nairobi.

  The popular image of Africa is all too often shaped by short, two-minute features on the evening television news, or in a few words in a headline on the front page of a newspaper; these snippets of news can so easily distort the true image of a nation. Despite the poverty, corruption, poor governance, and tribal animosity in Kenya, there is also much that the people should celebrate. If you visit any school in the country, you cannot but be impressed with the eagerness and commitment to learning displayed by practically every child. Often they walk barefoot for miles to reach the school, yet they are always immaculately
turned out in their uniforms, well behaved, and eager to work. Often the teacher is without books and the classroom without windows, yet these schoolchildren—most of whom can speak three languages before they are ten—consider themselves blessed to be enrolled in a school, and they are determined to make the most of their good fortune.

  Nor does their eagerness to learn stop when they leave school. In Kenya you should never throw away a newspaper. Since many people cannot spare even a few shillings to buy a paper for themselves, a donated copy will be eagerly read and passed on a dozen times before eventually being used as wrapping or fuel. Surprisingly for a country rife with corruption and poor governance, the press is remarkably free, and every day of the week the papers are full of open and candid criticism of politicians and leaders, from the president and prime minister down to local administrators. Any waiter, street hawker, or taxi driver will eagerly engage you in a discussion about the latest scandal in government. Kenyans always like to keep informed about the news; they may lack power, but they never lack an opinion.

  Nor will Barack Obama ever turn his back on Kenya. Although he is president to the American people and will, quite rightly, always put their interests first, he will always be conscious of his large and extended family back in Kenya, who are subjected daily to all the challenges of a hand-to-mouth existence in Africa. He will continue to remind the people of Kenya of the problems and frustrations, the tribalism and the patronage, that prevented his own father from realizing his true potential. And the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, will continue to speak out against these issues, openly and bluntly on his behalf.

  President Obama seems to have inherited his willingness to be direct, open, and honest from his grandfather Onyango, who, for all his faults, never tolerated deceit or dishonesty. Barack junior is a very different man from his father and his grandfather, but certain family characteristics seem to flow from his African bloodline: intelligence, resourcefulness, motivation, and ambition can all be traced back several generations, perhaps even as far back as the president’s (11) great-grandfather Owiny, who led his people in the second wave of migration into Kenya. Owiny’s son Kisodhi and his grandson Ogelo are also remembered by the Luo as great leaders. Barack Obama’s (3) great-grandfather Obong’o was a pioneer who took a huge gamble by leaving his ancestral homeland in Alego to establish a new Obama settlement in Kendu Bay on the south side of Winam Gulf. The president’s father and grandfather were also intelligent and inspirational men in their own right, whose personalities developed in a different place and at a very different time. Many of their behavioral characteristics would be considered entirely inappropriate by today’s standards, but their conduct should be judged by their standards then and not by our standards now.