The Obamas

by Peter Firstbrook

  On the other side of his family, President Obama’s mother studied for a doctorate as a mature student, so she too was clearly both determined and motivated. In America, Barack junior grew up as a young black man in a predominantly white society, and he understands what it is like to be different. Between the ages of six and ten he lived in Indonesia, a foreign, predominantly non-Christian society; even though he was young, these were formative years for him, and the opportunity gave him an insight into other cultures at an early age, which no other U.S. president has experienced.

  As the world’s most powerful statesman, his actions and decisions during his time in office will ultimately affect everybody on the planet. Certainly in the land of his forefathers, people have a huge expectation that he will deliver something special for them; when one speaks to Kenyans about Barack Obama, they seem sometimes to forget that he is the president of the United States and not of Kenya. Obama will continue to raise the issue of corruption and tribalism, but perhaps the other contribution that he can make is simply to be his father’s son. The Luo of Kenya can identify with him because they are Luo; all the other tribal groups in the country can only claim him as their own by being Kenyan. Perhaps this, more than anything else, will help the ordinary citizens of Kenya to believe in themselves as a single nation.

  As the Luo, who of course have a proverb for everything, might say: Kinda e teko—perseverance is strength.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  LING’ CHICKO IT EN OHALA

  The good listener learns many new things

  Over the course of several months from November 2008 and throughout 2009, I crisscrossed Kenya as part of my research for this book. It is impossible to spend this amount of time in a foreign country without relying on the wisdom and support of many people. First, my gratitude has to go to the many members of the Obama family who opened their doors and welcomed me into their homes. In K’ogelo, I watched Mama Sarah, stepgrandmother to President Obama, greet literally busloads of people who came to pay their respects to her; I would wait my turn to see her, and she always greeted me with kindness, patience, and good humor. In Oyugis, Hawa Auma, President Obama’s aunt, was always ready to stop her work to spend time with me—and she was always ready to kill a chicken and cook me a meal. Kendu Bay is home to most of the Obama family, and Charles Oluoch, Elly Yonga Adhiambo, John Ndalo Aguk, and Laban Opiyo were all very generous with both their time and their insight into the history of the Obamas. My thanks also go to Imam Saidi Aghmani, who introduced me to the Islamic community in Kendu Bay. In Kisumu, Wilson Obama and his wife, Karen, were always generous with their support, as were Aloyce Achayo and Leo Omolo Odera. Sam Dhillon from Nairobi was also very helpful and supportive during my early research. This list cannot do justice to the many other Kenyans I interviewed for the book, but their contribution is recognized within the body of the text.

  In the United States, my old friend Thom Beers was very supportive at a crucial early stage of my research, and in London I have special thanks for my agent, Sheila Ableman, who encouraged me to write a book rather than make a film. At Preface, my editor, Trevor Dolby, offered his constant encouragement and support during both gestation and delivery, and gently nudged me at the right times to tease the most from my material. In New York, my executive editor at Crown, Rachel Klayman, together with Stephanie Chan, were a great help with preparing the manuscript for an American audience.

  In Kenya, Roy Samo acted as my researcher and translator; he was always on hand, and without his unceasing help it would not have been possible to write this book. And in London, my wife, Paula, has balanced being both my fiercest critic and at the same time my strongest supporter.

  I thank them all.

  NOTES ON METHODOLOGY

  CHIEN KIYANY’

  The past is never despised

  When I set out to research this book, my intention was to weave a triple narrative: I wanted to trace President Obama’s family history back as far as possible; to set this against the fascinating story of the migration of the Luo people from southern Sudan; and to place both of these stories within a greater context of the history of Kenya as it emerged from the chrysalis of a British colony and spread its wings to become an independent nation. The history of Kenya was by far the easiest story to write. While I have drawn on a wide variety of sources, for the most part I have tried to present the history from the perspective of the Kenyan. We are each molded into the person we are by our upbringing, our schooling, and the greater world around us; for my part, I inevitably carry with me the baggage of a white European born into a country still coming to terms with its own decline as a major global power. However, I have worked for much of my life in the developing world, and I have spent many years trying to understand the world from the perspective of others. During the research for this book I have talked and listened to dozens of Kenyans, and I have relied extensively on the academic writings of many Kenyan historians. It would be audacious and impudent of me to claim to represent the African perspective, but I have tried to present the history of Kenya in a fair and neutral fashion.

  The challenge of trying to unravel the history of the Luo people in general, and the Obama family in particular, places different demands on a writer. There are two main sources of information available: first is the academic literature from historians and archeologists, which, by its very nature, is conservative and cautious; the second is oral history, which is so often colorful, exciting, and enthralling, but which is not governed by the same rules of precision and accuracy as the former. Academic sources might sometimes suffer from being overly dry and guarded in their conclusions, but oral history—despite its appealing flamboyancy—can often be confusing, contradictory, or simply incorrect.1 Inevitably, there is tension in trying to merge academic sources with oral tradition, and academics will caution you against taking many of these ancestral tales too literally.

  Many African historians, including the eminent professor Bethwell Ogot, consider that the early historical figures such as Jok, Podho, and other great Luo ancestors were not real individuals but mythical people whose names were attached to clan genealogies.2 In support of this theory, he points out that jok, for example, means “god” or “spirit” in the early Nilotic language, and that pohi means “the land of” in Shilluk.3 He is right, as an academic, to question the veracity of some of these individuals, but if you talk to Luo elders today, they will tell you with absolute conviction that these people were very real. When I visited William Onyango in Gangu, for example, he had a wealth of information about his ancestors and the life they lived more than four centuries ago in Got Ramogi. As the Luo say, chien kiyany’—the past is never despised. But like oral histories throughout the world, none of this information has ever been written down; instead, it has been passed down the generations from grandfather to grandson in stories and songs. In this “personalized history” of their families, every clan and every lineage has tales and traditions that can sometimes contradict those of their neighbors.

  Such are the challenges of trying to marry academic history with oral history. What is not disputed, however, is that a Nilotic people left their cradleland in southern Sudan more than six hundred years ago in one of the greatest migrations in the history of Africa. Over a period of a dozen generations or more, they moved south through Uganda and east into Kenya, to form the Luo of western Kenya and northern Tanzania. Whether their leaders were actually called Ringruok and Nayo, Jok and Podho, becomes secondary to the greater story; nobody doubts that these people had leaders who guided them through their great exodus, and at the very least these names usefully represent people who must have lived hundreds of years ago.

  Another critical piece of information involving the migration is the date that the Luo first arrived in western Kenya. Ogot gives a date of between AD 1490 and 1517, but with an accuracy of only ±fifty-two years.4 The American historian David Cohen suggests that the Luo reached Nyanza sometime around AD 1500 to 1550.5 The Obama ancestry
on this page suggests that Ramogi Ajwang’ was probably born around 1500; therefore his arrival in western Kenya is in keeping with a date of between 1530 and 1550.

  Trying to unravel the Obama family’s oral history brings new challenges. A clear schism can be traced back to the early nineteenth century, when Obong’o, the great-great-great-grandfather to President Obama, left the ancestral lands in K’ogelo as part of a wider movement of the Luo from the overcrowded region of Alego. He moved south across the Winam Gulf and established a new settlement near Kendu Bay, where the Obamas flourished. The name Obama can be traced back to the corruption of the name Onyango Mobam, belonging to President Obama’s (6) great-grandfather. However, the first evidence of the Obama name seems to arise four generations later, when Obong’o named his eldest son Obama—the older brother of Opiyo, President Obama’s great-great-grandfather. It is quite possible that the name was used earlier within the family for an individual who was not recorded within the family’s oral history.

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, missionaries came to Kendu Bay and the Obamas were baptized into the Church of the Seventh-Day Adventists. The one exception was Onyango Obama, grandfather to the president, who elected to convert to Islam, taking the name Hussein. He insisted that all his wives become Muslims, and likewise his children. When Hussein Onyango resettled in K’ogelo around 1943, the division in the family only widened further, for now they were separated not only by religion but also by distance. Inevitably, the recollections of past generations of Obamas on opposite sides of Winam Gulf differ, at least in some of the detail.

  The only hope of reaching a definitive agreement over the family history was to bring a group of historians and family elders together in one room and to let them argue it out among themselves. So one morning in June 2009 I invited a dozen family members and Luo elders to Kisumu to formalize the Obama family history (see below for the full list of participants). After several hours of discussion, there was a remarkably close consensus, which has allowed us to trace President Obama’s lineage back more than twenty generations. However, the group was not unanimous; the one sticking point was whether Ochuo or Otondi was the (4) great-grandfather of President Obama. The choice does not affect the earlier family lineage, but despite many hours of debate, those elders living in Alego could not completely reconcile their oral tradition with that of the elders living in south Nyanza.

  The last part of the ancestry jigsaw was to place approximate dates on past generations. Archeologists can use carbon-14 dating and other techniques for absolute dating, or stratification to give relative dates. However, it is difficult to relate these dates to a history based primarily on oral sources. Therefore the logical approach was to work back from the oldest reliable date in the Obama family: the birth year of Hussein Onyango. From this year all the earlier generations of the family can be traced, although unfortunately even this approach is not that straightforward.

  Most sources give Hussein Onyango’s year of birth as 1895 and the year of his death as 1975, although in Dreams from My Father President Obama claims 1979 to be the date of his grandfather’s death.6 From talking to people who knew Hussein Onyango and who went to his funeral, he was clearly an old man when he died, probably in his eighties. Yet the brass plaque on his grave in Sarah Obama’s compound in K’ogelo reads Mzee Hussein Onyango Obama, 1870–1975. I asked Sarah about the date, and she was absolutely certain that the plaque was correct: “The dates you find there are the right ones, and they were written by Barack senior.” If this figure is correct, then Onyango Obama was 105 years old when he died—not an impossible age, but unlikely. If he was born in 1870, he would have been forty-four years old when he joined the King’s African Rifles during the First World War, and he would have been seventy when he was in Addis Ababa working as a cook for a British army officer during the Second World War. This alone suggests that Onyango could not have been born as early as 1870, and other circumstantial evidence exists to help substantiate the correct birth date.

  Onyango married Sarah, his fifth wife, in 1943. If Onyango had been born in 1870, then he would have been seventy-three when he married. Onyango went on to father four children with Sarah—this would have been quite an achievement for a man in his seventies. Had he been born in 1895, a date I have always thought to be the correct one, then he would have been forty-eight years old when he married for the fifth time—still a middle-aged man, but not an unreasonable age for a Luo to take another wife. Based on all this evidence, as well as discussions with people who knew him, his birth date is much more likely to be 1895 than 1870, and 1895 is therefore the date that I have used as the basis for fixing earlier dates in the family ancestry.

  The next challenge was to work out exactly when Obama’s ancestors were born. In the West, our written history allows us the luxury of using precise dates: we know, for example, that King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, that the Spanish launched their great armada to invade England in 1588, and that the Boston Tea Party occurred in 1773. We are used to hanging our history on exact dates. But African oral history, which generally relies on listing early generations in the correct genealogical order, rarely makes reference to actual dates. Therefore, in order to work back from Hussein Obama’s birth year in 1895 to give approximate birth dates to earlier generations, it is necessary to define a patrilineal generation—the average age gap between the birth of a male baby and the birth of his firstborn surviving son.

  In discussion with African historians, I learned that this patrilineal generation can vary between twenty-six and thirty-three years. Professor Ogot wrote his doctoral thesis on the southern Luo of Kenya, and he found that in a traditional society living on the Uganda/Kenya border, the first child in a family was usually born when the father was between twenty-five and twenty-eight years old, with a mean generation of twenty-seven years.7 However, he accepted that this figure might, if anything, be an underestimate, and he quotes Archdeacon W. E. Owen, who believed that the generation gap for the Luo could not be less than thirty years.8 There are good reasons to suppose that the length of a typical generation should be longer than twenty-seven years. For example, girls are not usually recorded in a family’s ancestral history, so their births would extend the date between the births of male babies. Nor does Ogot’s system take into account infant mortality; in the past it was not unusual for one baby in every three or four to die before it reached the age of five, which would extend the generation gap. Luo men also had to prove themselves as warriors and fearless hunters before they earned the right to marry, and this too would have reduced the number of young men who reached the age of taking a wife, thereby stretching the generation gap still further.

  Taking all this into account, I have used a patrilineal generation of twenty-nine years in preparing the Obama ancestry that appears at the front of this volume. Usually children are born to a fertile mother at regular intervals of two years, and this average figure can be used to estimate the birth year of later siblings; for example, the third child can be assumed to be born roughly four years after the first. Professor Roland Oliver, who worked extensively in Uganda, calculated that plus or minus two years should be allowed as a margin of error for each generation, or approximately seven years a century.9 So by combining these two systems, it is possible to work back from the earliest known birth date in the Obama family—that of 1895 for Onyango Hussein—and calculate, for example, that President Obama’s (15) great-grandfather Podho II was born in the mid-fifteenth century, plus or minus thirty years. It is a crude system with inevitable flaws. For example, it cannot allow for the complexities of a man fathering children from several wives, nor does it allow for infertility or low fertility, which might extend the interval between births. So even taking a patrilineal generation as twenty-nine years might still be an underestimate. Nevertheless, no matter however rudimentary this method might be, it does at least give an indication of the likely period in which these ancestors lived, and these patrilineal generation age
s do seem to correspond closely with the few independent dates that have been established by archeologists using other techniques such as carbon dating and excavation.

  Those attending the Obama ancestry meeting in Kisumu, June 2009, were:

  Aloyce Achayo—retired teacher, respected cultural historian, and a good friend of Obama senior

  Elly Yonga Adhiambo (of Kendu Bay)—distant cousin of Obama senior

  James Ojwang’ Adhoch (of Ojuando-K’ogelo)—Alego elder and historian and friend of Mama Sarah

  Jackob Ramogi Amolo (of Ndere-K’ogelo)—respected Luo cultural historian and close friend of Mama Sarah; frequently consulted on Luo cultural issues

  Joseph Okoth Amolo (of Alego-K’ogelo)—Luo elder

  Peter Omondi Amolo (of Ndere-K’ogelo)—Luo elder