The Obamas
Page 28
Jan. 1964 Ann Obama files for divorce from Barack senior in Honolulu
Jul. 2, 1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the United States makes racial discrimination and segregation illegal
Dec. 12, 1964 Kenya becomes a republic with Jomo Kenyatta as president and Oginga Odinga as vice president
Mid-1965 Barack Obama senior returns to Kenya and is followed by Ruth Nidesand; Obama first works for Kenya Shell
Jul. 1965 Barack Obama senior writes articles for East Africa Journal, criticize the government’s approach to economic planning
Late 1965 Barack Obama senior joins Kenya Central Bank as an economist
1966 Oginga Odinga leaves KANU after an ideological split and forms the rival Kenya People’s Union (KPU)
1967 Ann Dunham marries Lolo Soetoro and the couple move to Jakarta, Indonesia; Barack Obama junior is six years old
1968 Rumors that President Kenyatta has suffered a heart attack; Barack Obama senior gets a new job at the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development; Kezia Obama bears Abo, her third child and second son
Apr. 4, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee
Jun. 6, 1968 U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, California
Jul. 5, 1969 Tom Mboya assassinated in Nairobi, which sparks ethnic unrest and riots
Oct. 25, 1969 Jomo Kenyatta makes a speech in Kisumu that results in riots, and forty-three people are killed by police
Nov. 25, 1969 The Kenya Prison Service announces that Tom Mboya’s killer, Isaac Njenga Njoroge, has been hanged
1970 Bernard born, Kezia Obama’s fourth child and third son
Aug. 15, 1970 Barack Obama junior’s half sister, Maya Kassandra Soetoro-Ng, is born in Jakarta; Ann Dunham’s second marriage begins to disintegrate
1970? Barack Obama senior fired from his government job; takes job at the Kenya Tourist Development Corporation
1971 Ann Dunham sends Barack Obama junior back to Honolulu to live with his white grandparents, where he gets a scholarship to Punahou, a prestigious prep school
Dec. 1971 Barack Obama senior makes a pre-Christmas visit to see his son in Hawaii
1972? Barack Obama senior loses his job at the Kenya Tourist Development Corporation
1972 Ann Dunham leaves her husband, Lolo Soetoro, and returns from Indonesia to Hawaii with two-year-old Maya to join Barack, now eleven; she studies for a Ph.D. in anthropology
1974 Kenyatta reelected president of Kenya
1975? Barack Obama senior is given a job in the Kenyan Treasury
1978 Barack Obama junior begins his first year at Occidental College in Los Angeles; at the end of his second year he transfers to Columbia University in New York
Aug. 22, 1978 Jomo Kenyatta dies in Mombasa, age eighty-nine, and is succeeded by his vice president, Daniel arap Moi
1980 Ann Dunham files for divorce from her second husband, Lolo Soetoro
1981 Barack Obama senior marries Jael Otieno, his fourth wife
Mid-1982 Kenya is officially declared a one-party state by the National Assembly; Jael gives birth to a son, George, who is Obama senior’s eighth child; a coup by the Kenyan Air Force is suppressed and the leaders executed
Nov. 24, 1982 Barack Obama senior dies in a car crash in Nairobi; Barack Obama junior, now twenty-one, is told about his father’s death by telephone when he is living in New York
1983 Barack Obama junior graduates from Columbia University and works for a year at the Business International Corporation, a small newsletter-publishing company that printed features relating to global business; he later works for the New York Public Interest Research Group
1985 Barack Obama junior takes a job with a Chicago-based group called Developing Communities Project, where he begins working to improve conditions in a public housing project
1987 Opposition groups in Kenya are suppressed and there is international criticism of political arrests and human rights abuses in Moi’s government; Barack Obama junior is accepted to Harvard Law School, but he first visits his father’s family in Kenya
1989 Political prisoners in Kenya are freed
1990 Foreign minister Robert Ouko is brutally assassinated, which leads to increased dissent against government
Feb. 5, 1990 Barack Obama junior becomes the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review
1991 Barack Obama junior graduates from Harvard with a J.D., magna cum laude, and signs with a publisher to write his autobiography, Dreams from My Father
Dec. 1991 A special conference of KANU agrees to introduce a multiparty political system in Kenya
1992 Approximately two thousand people killed in tribal conflict in western Kenya
1992 Barack Obama junior returns to Chicago to work as a junior lawyer with Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard; he visits his family in K’ogelo with his girlfriend, Michelle Robinson, to seek his stepgrandmother’s approval before getting married
Oct. 10, 1992 Barack Obama junior and Michelle Robinson are married
1995 Barack Obama junior’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, is published to positive reviews
Nov. 7, 1995 Barack Obama junior’s mother, Ann, dies of ovarian cancer, age fifty-three
1996 Barack Obama junior is elected to the Illinois State Senate
1998 Barack and Michelle Obama’s first daughter is born, and is named Malia Ann
Dec. 1999 Daniel arap Moi wins a further presidential term in an election that is widely criticized; his main opponents are former vice president Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga, son of Oginga Odinga
2001 Barack and Michelle’s second daughter is born, and is named Natasha (often called Sasha)
Dec. 2001 Ethnic tensions continue and thousands of people flee Nairobi’s Kibera slum over rent battles between Nubian and Luo communities
Dec. 2002 Daniel arap Moi’s twenty-four-year rule ends when opposition candidate Mwai Kibaki wins a landslide victory over KANU rival Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo
Dec. 2003 The government grants former president Daniel arap Moi immunity from prosecution on corruption charges
Jul. 7, 2004 Barack Obama junior is chosen to deliver the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston; the speech is viewed as a defining moment in his political career and earns him worldwide recognition
Nov. 2, 2004 Barack Obama junior, now forty-three, is elected to the U.S. Senate with an unprecedented 70 percent of the vote
Jan. 4, 2005 Barack Obama junior is sworn in as a U.S. senator
Aug. 2006 Barack Obama junior visits Kenya and gives a speech at the University of Nairobi that is critical of the government
Feb. 10, 2007 Barack Obama junior announces his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election
Dec. 2007 President Kibaki claims victory and a second term in office; the opposition claims the polls were rigged, and more than fifteen hundred die in the postelection violence
Feb. 2008 Former UN chief Kofi Annan brokers talks between President Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, which lead to a power-sharing agreement
Apr. 2008 President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga agree on a forty-member cabinet; it is Kenya’s biggest and costliest ever
Nov. 3, 2008 Barack Obama junior’s grandmother Madelyn Dunham dies of cancer at the age of eighty-six
Nov. 5, 2008 Democratic senator Barack Hussein Obama is elected president of the United States of America
Jan. 20, 2009 Barack Obama is sworn in as the forty-forth president of the United States, the country’s first black president
Jul. 2009 The Kenyan government announces that it will not establish a special tribunal to examine the postelection violence but will use the local courts instead
Aug. 2009 U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Kenya and criticizes the government for failing to investigate the violence that followed the 2007 election
NOTES
Prologue
1. Barack Obama, Dreams from My F
ather (Three Rivers, 1995), 429–30.
2. Ibid., 302.
3. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (Three Rivers Press, 2006), 10.
4. Ibid., 3.
Chapter 1: Two Elections, Two Presidents
1. Korwa G. Adar and Isaac M. Munyae, “Human Rights Abuse in Kenya Under Daniel arap Moi, 1978–2001,” African Studies Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1 (2001).
2. Amnesty International, “Kenya,” 2000.
3. International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, World Duty Free Company Ltd. v. Kenya, October 4, 2006.
4. CIA World Factbook, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ke.html.
5. World Health Organization, “Male Circumcision: Africa’s Unprecedented Opportunity,” August 2007.
6. “Strange Reversal in Kogelo,” East African, January 23, 2009.
7. United Nation Children’s Fund, “The State of Africa’s Children,” May 2008, 12.
Chapter 2: Meet the Ancestors
1. W. R. Ochieng’, A History of Kenya (Macmillan, 1985), 17.
2. Andrew Goudie, Environmental Change, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1992).
3. Roland A. Oliver and Anthony Atmore, Medieval Africa, 1250–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 137.
4. Ibid., 140.
5. Ibid., 127.
6. J. Crazzolara, The Lwoo, part I (Verona, 1950), 47.
7. Oliver and Atmore, Medieval Africa, 143.
8. Ibid., 144.
9. Ibid., 141.
10. Okumba Miruka, Oral Literature of the Luo (East African Educational Publishers, 2001).
11. Ibid.
12. D. W. Cohen, “The River-Lake Nilotes from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in B. A. Ogot (ed.), Zamani: A Survey of East African History (East African Publishing House, 1968), 144.
13. Oliver and Atmore, Medieval Africa, 148.
14. D. W. Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape, Eastern African Studies (James Currey, 1989).
15. Cohen, “The River-Lake Nilotes,” 144.
16. Ibid., 148.
17. B. A. Ogot, A History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples of Eastern Africa, 519.
18. Ibid., 519.
Chapter 3: The Life and Death of Opiyo Obama
1. Okumba Miruka, Oral Literature of the Luo (East African Educational Publishers, 2001).
2. S. H. Ominde, The Luo Girl: From Infancy to Marriage (Macmillan, 1952).
Chapter 4: The Wazungu Arrive
1. Louis Levather, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (Oxford University Press, 1997).
2. Ibid., 382–87.
3. Johannes Rebmann, The Church Missionary Intelligencer, vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1849).
4. Arnold Talbot Wilson, The Suez Canal: Its Past, Present and Future (Oxford University Press, 1933).
5. Harry H. Johnston, “Livingstone as an Explorer,” Geographical Journal, vol. 41, no. 5 (May 1913): 423–46.
6. Richard Hall, Empires of the Monsoon (Harper Collins, 1996), 15.
7. Elikia M’Bokolo, “The Impact of the Slave Trade on Africa,” Le Monde diplomatique (English ed.), April 1998.
8. C. Magbaily Fyle, Introduction to the History of African Civilization: Precolonial Africa (University Press of America, 1999), 146.
9. Assa Okoth, A History of Africa, vol. 1: African Societies and the Establishment of Colonial Rule, 1800–1914 (East African Educational Publishers, 2006), 58.
10. H. M. Stanley, New York Herald, July 15, 1872.
11. H. M. Stanley, “The Search for Livingstone,” New York Times, July 2, 1872.
12. H. M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, vol. 1 (Dover, 1988).
13. Ibid., 63.
14. Ibid., 217.
15. H. M. Stanley, My Kalulu, Prince, King, and Slave: A Story of Central Africa (Sampson Low, 1873).
16. W. Johnson, My African Reminiscences (London, 1898), 126.
17. Okoth, A History of Africa, 1:118.
18. Ibid., 96.
Chapter 5: The New Imperialism
1. W. O. Henderson, Studies in German Colonial History (Routledge, 1962), 13.
2. Ibid., 4.
3. Ibid., 13.
4. Okoth, A History of Africa, 1:124.
5. Kolonial-Politische Korrespondenz (Colonial-Political Correspondence), 1st Year, Berlin, May 16, 1885.
6. Henderson, Studies in German Colonial History, 87.
7. Okoth, A History of Africa, 1:138.
8. C. W. Hobley, Kenya: From Chartered Company to Crown Colony (Witherby, 1929), 24–25.
9. Okoth, A History of Africa, 1:138.
10. Times, September 28, 1891, 60.
11. Lawrence H. Officer, “What Were the UK Earnings and Prices Then?” MeasuringWorth, 2009, www.measuringworth.org/ukearncpi.
12. “Uganda Railway (Cost of Construction),” Hansard, House of Commons Debates, October 19, 1909, vol. 12, cols. 123–24.
13. Okoth, A History of Africa, 1:351.
14. Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Area, 1860–1920 (University of California Press, 2008), 188.
15. Joseph Thomson, Through Masai Land (Sampson Low, 1885), 72–73.
16. Bruce D. Patterson, The Lions of Tsavo: Exploring the Legacy of Africa’s Notorious Man-Eaters (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
17. “Murder That Shaped the Future of Kenya,” East African, December 5, 2008.
18. William Ochieng’, A History of Kenya (Macmillan, 1985), 94.
19. David Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson, Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History (James Currey, 1995), 188.
20. Oscar Baumann, Durch Massailand zur Nilquelle [Through the lands of the Maasai to the source of the Nile] (Dietrich Reimer, 1894).
21. B. A. Ogot, A History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples of Eastern Africa (Anyange Press, 2009), 645.
22. Hobley, Kenya: From Chartered Company to Crown Colony, 217–18.
23. Luise White, Stephen E. Miescher, and David William Cohen (eds.), African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Indiana University Press, 2001), 37.
24. Ogot, A History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples of Eastern Africa, 670.
25. Ibid., 666
26. Osaak A. Olumwullah, Dis-ease in the Colonial State (Praeger, 2002), 131.
27. B. A. Ogot and W. R. Ochieng’, Decolonization and Independence in Kenya, 1940–93 (Ohio University Press, 1995), 10.
28. Ochieng’, A History of Kenya, 103.
29. Ogot, A History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples of Eastern Africa, 678.
30. Neil Sobania, Culture and Customs of Kenya (Greenwood, 2003), 19.
31. Okoth, A History of Africa, 353.
32. Philip Wayland Porter and Eric S. Sheppard, A World of Difference: Society, Nature, Development (Guildford, 1998), 357.
33. Ibid.
34. Seventh-Day Adventist Encyclopedia (Review and Herald Publishing Association, 1976).
35. Jack Mahon, “What Happened in 1906?” The Messenger, vol. 111 (1996): 8.
36. Richard Gethin, Private Memoirs, 35–36, quoted in Ogot, A History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples of Eastern Africa, 683.
37. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 397–98.
38. Ogot, A History of the Luo-Speaking Peoples of Eastern Africa, 678.
39. Brett L. Shadle, “Patronage, Millennialism and the Serpent God Mumbo in South-West Kenya, 1912–34,” Africa, vol. 72, no. 1 (2002): 29–54.
40. George F. Pickens, African Christian God-Talk (University Press of America, 2004), 134.
41. B. A. Ogot, “Kenya Under the British, 1895 to 1963,” in B. A. Ogot (ed.), Zamani: A Survey of East African History (East African Publishing House, 1968), 264.
42. C. S. Nicholls, Red Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya (Timewell, 2005), 119.
Chapter 6: Five Wives and Two World Wars
1. H. S. Hatton, “The Search for an Anglo-German Understanding Through Africa, 1912–1
4,” European Studies Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (1971): 125.
2. John Iliffe, Honour in African History, African Studies no. 107 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 235.
3. A. Davis and H. J. Robertson, Chronicles of Kenya (Cecil Palmer, 1928), 97–98.
4. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 115, no. 5 (May 1915): 714.
5. Iliffe, Honour in Africa, 234.
6. Edward Paice, Tip and Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa (Phoenix, 2007), 159.
7. Robert O. Collins and James McDonald Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 278.
8. Hans Poeschel, The Voice of German East Africa (August Scherl, 1919), 27.
9. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 400.
10. John Dawson Ainsworth and F. H. Goldsmith. John Ainsworth—Pioneer Kenya Administrator, 1864–1946 (Macmillan, 1955), 94.
11. Sir Phillip Mitchell, African Afterthoughts (Hutchinson, 1954), 40.
12. Ibid., 34.
13. John Buchan, A History of the Great War (Houghton Mifflin, 1922), 1:429.
14. Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, My Reminiscences of East Africa (Battery Press, 1990), 318.
15. Brian Digre, Imperialism’s New Clothes: The Repartition of Tropical Africa 1914–1919 (Peter Lang, 1990), 156.
16. League of Nations Covenant, Article 22, para. 1.
17. Digre, Imperialism’s New Clothes.
18. Anthony Clayton and Donald C. Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya 1895–1963 (Routledge, 1974), 88.
19. H. R. A. Philp, A New Day in Kenya (World Dominion Press, 1936), 32–33.
20. Harry Thuku, An Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1970).
21. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 403.
22. Clayton and Savage, Government and Labour in Kenya 1895–1963, 125.
23. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 425–26.
24. Iliffe, Honour in Africa, 230.
25. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 411.
26. Ibid., 370–71.
Chapter 7: A State of Emergency
1. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 415.