Dreams from My Father

by Barack Obama

  “If some animal ate you out there,” she said, “I’d never forgive myself.”

  And so, at seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, we watched a sturdily built Kikuyu driver named Francis load our bags onto the roof of a white minivan. With us were a spindly cook named Rafael, a dark-haired Italian named Mauro, and a British couple in their early forties, the Wilkersons.

  We drove out of Nairobi at a modest pace, passing soon into countryside, green hills and red dirt paths and small shambas surrounded by plots of wilting, widely spaced corn. Nobody spoke, a discomfiting silence that reminded me of similar moments back in the States, the pause that would sometimes accompany my personal integration of a bar or hotel. It made me think about Auma and Mark, my grandparents back in Hawaii, my mother still in Indonesia, and the things Zeituni had told me.

  If everyone is family, then no one is family.

  Was Zeituni right? I’d come to Kenya thinking that I could somehow force my many worlds into a single, harmonious whole. Instead, the divisions seemed only to have become more multiplied, popping up in the midst of even the simplest chores. I thought back to the previous morning, when Auma and I had gone to book our tickets. The travel agency was owned by Asians; most small businesses in Nairobi were owned by Asians. Right away, Auma had tensed up.

  “You see how arrogant they are?” she had whispered as we watched a young Indian woman order her black clerks to and fro. “They call themselves Kenyans, but they want nothing to do with us. As soon as they make their money, they send it off to London or Bombay.”

  Her attitude had touched a nerve. “How can you blame Asians for sending their money out of the country,” I had asked her, “after what happened in Uganda?” I had gone on to tell her about the close Indian and Pakistani friends I had back in the States, friends who had supported black causes, friends who had lent me money when I was tight and taken me into their homes when I’d had no place to stay. Auma had been unmoved.

  “Ah, Barack,” she had said. “Sometimes you’re so naive.”

  I looked at Auma now, her face turned toward the window. What had I expected my little lecture to accomplish? My simple formulas for Third World solidarity had little application in Kenya. Here, persons of Indian extraction were like the Chinese in Indonesia, the Koreans in the South Side of Chicago, outsiders who knew how to trade and kept to themselves, working the margins of a racial caste system, more visible and so more vulnerable to resentment. It was nobody’s fault necessarily. It was just a matter of history, an unfortunate fact of life.

  Anyway, the divisions in Kenya didn’t stop there; there were always finer lines to draw. Between the country’s forty black tribes, for example. They, too, were a fact of life. You didn’t notice the tribalism so much among Auma’s friends, younger university-educated Kenyans who’d been schooled in the idea of nation and race; tribe was an issue with them only when they were considering a mate, or when they got older and saw it help or hinder careers. But they were the exceptions. Most Kenyans still worked with older maps of identity, more ancient loyalties. Even Jane or Zeituni could say things that surprised me. “The Luo are intelligent but lazy,” they would say. Or “The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious.” Or “The Kalenjins—well, you can see what’s happened to the country since they took over.”

  Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways. “It’s thinking like that that holds us back,” I would say. “We’re all part of one tribe. The black tribe. The human tribe. Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia.”

  And Jane would say, “Ah, those West Africans are all crazy anyway. You know they used to be cannibals, don’t you?”

  And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry. He also had such ideas about people.”

  Meaning he, too, was naive; he, too, liked to argue with history. Look what happened to him….

  The van suddenly came to a stop, shaking me out of my reverie. We were in front of a small shamba, and our driver, Francis, asked us all to stay put. A few minutes later, he emerged from the house with a young African girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, who was dressed in jeans and a neatly pressed blouse and carried a small duffel bag. Francis helped her into the back and pointed to the seat next to Auma.

  “Is this your daughter?” Auma asked, scooting over to make room for the girl.

  “No,” Francis said. “My sister’s. She likes to see the animals and is always nagging me to take her along. Nobody minds, I hope.”

  Everyone shook their heads and smiled at the girl, who suffered bravely under the attention.

  “What is your name?” the British woman, Mrs. Wilkerson, asked.

  “Elizabeth,” the girl whispered.

  “Well, Elizabeth, you can share my tent if you like,” Auma said. “My brother, I think he snores.”

  I made a face. “Don’t listen to her,” I said, and held out a package of biscuits. Elizabeth took one and nibbled neatly around its edges. Auma reached for the bag and turned to Mauro.

  “Want some?” she asked.

  The Italian smiled and took one, before Auma passed them around to the others.

  We followed the road into cooler hills, where women walked barefoot carrying firewood and water and small boys switched at donkeys from their rickety carts. Gradually the shambas became less frequent, replaced by tangled bush and forest, until the trees on our left dropped away without warning and all we could see was the wide-open sky.

  “The Great Rift Valley,” Francis announced.

  We piled out of the van and stood at the edge of the escarpment looking out toward the western horizon. Hundreds of feet below, stone and savannah grass stretched out in a flat and endless plain, before it met the sky and carried the eye back through a series of high white clouds. To the right, a solitary mountain rose like an island in a silent sea; beyond that, a row of worn and shadowed ridges. Only two signs of man’s presence were visible—a slender road leading west, and a satellite station, its massive white dish cupped upward toward the sky.

  A few miles north, we turned off the main highway onto a road of pulverized tarmac. It was slow going: at certain points the potholes yawned across the road’s entire width, and every so often trucks would approach from the opposite direction, forcing Francis to drive onto embankments. Eventually, we arrived at the road we’d seen from above and began to make our way across the valley floor. The landscape was dry, mostly bush grass and scruffy thorn trees, gravel and patches of hard dark stone. We began to pass small herds of gazelle; a solitary wildebeest feeding at the base of a tree; zebra and a giraffe, barely visible in the distance. For almost an hour we saw no other person, until a solitary Masai herdsman appeared in the distance, his figure as lean and straight as the staff that he carried, leading a herd of long-horned cattle across an empty flat.

  I hadn’t met many Masai in Nairobi, although I’d read quite a bit about them. I knew that their pastoral ways and fierceness in war had earned them a grudging respect from the British, so that even as treaties had been broken and the Masai had been restricted to reservations, the tribe had become mythologized in its defeat, like the Cherokee or Apache, the noble savage of picture postcards and coffee table books. I also knew that this Western infatuation with the Masai infuriated other Kenyans, who thought their ways something of an embarrassment, and who hankered after Masai land. The government had tried to impose compulsory education on Masai children, and a system of land title among the adults. The black man’s burden, officials explained: to civilize our less fortunate brethren.

  I wondered, as we drove deeper into their country, how long the Masai could hold out. In Narok, a small trading town where we stopped for gas and lunch, a group of children dressed in khaki shorts and old T-shirts surrounded our van with the aggressive enthusiasm of their Nairobi counterparts, peddling cheap jewelry and snacks. Two hours later, when we arrived at the adobe gate leading into the preserve, a tall Masai man in a Yan
kees cap and smelling of beer leaned through the window of our van and suggested we take a tour of a traditional Masai boma.

  “Only forty shillings,” the man said with a smile. “Pictures extra.”

  While Francis attended to some business in the game warden’s office, the rest of us got out and followed the Masai man into a large circular compound walled in by thornbrush. Along the perimeter were small mud-and-dung huts; in the center of the compound, several cattle and a few naked toddlers stood side by side in the dirt. A group of women waved us over to look at their bead-covered gourds, and one of them, a lovely young mother with a baby slung on her back, showed me a U.S. quarter that someone had foisted on her. I agreed to exchange it for Kenya shillings, and in return she invited me into her hut. It was a cramped, pitch-black space with a five-foot-high ceiling. The woman told me her family cooked, slept, and kept newborn calves in it. The smoke was blinding, and after a minute I had to leave, fighting the urge to brush away the flies that formed two solid rings around the baby’s puffed eyes.

  Francis was waiting for us when we returned to the van. We drove through the gate, following the road up a small, barren rise. And there, on the other side of the rise, I saw as beautiful a land as I’d ever seen. It swept out forever, flat plains undulating into gentle hills, dun-colored and as supple as a lion’s back, creased by long gallery forests and dotted with thorn trees. To our left, a huge herd of zebra, ridiculously symmetrical in their stripes, harvested the wheat-colored grass; to our right, a troop of gazelle leaped into bush. And in the center, thousands of wildebeest, with mournful heads and humped shoulders that seemed too much for their slender legs to carry. Francis began to inch the van through the herd, and the animals parted before us, then merged in our wake like a school of fish, their hoofs beating against the earth like a wave against the shore.

  I looked over at Auma. She had her arm around Elizabeth, and the two of them were wearing the same wordless smile.

  We set up camp above the banks of a winding brown stream, beneath a big fig tree filled with noisy blue starlings. It was getting late, but after setting up our tents and gathering firewood, we had time for a short drive to a nearby watering hole where topi and gazelle had gathered to drink. A fire was going when we got back, and as we sat down to feed on Rafael’s stew, Francis began telling us a little bit about himself He had a wife and six children, he said, living on his homestead in Kikuyuland. They tended an acre of coffee and corn; on his days off, he did the heavier work of hoeing and planting. He said he enjoyed his work with the travel agency but disliked being away from his family. “If I could, I might prefer farming full-time,” he said, “but the KCU makes it impossible.”

  “What’s the KCU?” I asked.

  “The Kenyan Coffee Union. They are thieves. They regulate what we can plant and when we can plant it. I can only sell my coffee to them, and they sell it overseas. They say to us that prices are dropping, but I know they still get one hundred times what they pay to me. The rest goes where?” Francis shook his head with disgust. “It’s a terrible thing when the government steals from its own people.”

  “You speak very freely,” Auma said.

  Francis shrugged. “If more people spoke up, perhaps things might change. Look at the road that we traveled this morning coming into the valley. You know, that road was supposed to have been repaired only last year. But they used only loose gravel, so it washed out in the first rains. The money that was saved probably went into building some big man’s house.”

  Francis looked into the fire, combing his mustache with his fingers. “I suppose it is not only the government’s fault,” he said after a while. “Even when things are done properly, we Kenyans don’t like to pay taxes. We don’t trust the idea of giving our money to someone. The poor man, he has good reason for this suspicion. But the big men who own the trucks that use the roads, they also refuse to pay their share. They would rather have their equipment break down all the time than give up some of their profits. This is how we like to think, you see. Somebody else’s problem.”

  I tossed a stick into the fire. “Attitudes aren’t so different in America,” I told Francis.

  “You are probably right,” he said. “But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”

  At that moment, two Masai approached the fire. Francis welcomed them, and as they sat down on one of the benches, he explained that they would provide security during the night. They were quiet, handsome men, their high cheekbones accentuated by the fire, their lean limbs jutting out of their blood-red shukas, their spears stuck into the ground before them, casting long shadows toward the trees. One of them, who said his name was Wilson, spoke Swahili, and he told us that he lived in a boma a few miles to the east. His silent companion began to pan the darkness with the beam of his flashlight, and Auma asked if the camp had ever been attacked by animals. Wilson grinned.

  “Nothing serious,” he said. “But if you have to go to the bathroom at night, you should call one of us to go with you.”

  Francis began to question the men about the movement of various animals, and I drifted away from the fire to glance up at the stars. It had been years since I’d seen them like this; away from the lights of the city, they were thick and round and bright as jewels. I noticed a patch of haze in the otherwise clear sky and stepped farther away from the fire, thinking perhaps it was the smoke, then deciding that it must be a cloud. I was wondering why the cloud hadn’t moved when I heard the sound of footsteps behind me.

  “I believe that’s the Milky Way,” Mr. Wilkerson said, looking up at the sky.

  “No kidding.”

  He held up his hand and traced out the constellations for me, the points of the Southern Cross. He was a slight, soft-spoken man with round glasses and pasty blond hair. Initially I had guessed he spent his life indoors, an accountant or professor. I noticed, though, as the day had passed, that he possessed all sorts of practical knowledge, the kinds of things I had never got around to knowing but wished that I had. He could talk at length with Francis about Land Rover engines, had his tent up before I drove in my first stake, and seemed to know the name of every bird and every tree that we saw.

  I wasn’t surprised, then, when he told me that he had spent his childhood in Kenya, on a tea plantation in the White Highlands. He seemed reluctant to talk about the past; he said only that his family had sold the land after independence and had moved back to England, to settle in a quiet suburb of London. He had gone to medical school, then practiced with the National Health Service in Liverpool, where he had met his wife, a psychiatrist. After a few years, he had convinced her to return with him to Africa. They had decided against living in Kenya, where there was a surplus of doctors relative to the rest of the continent, and instead settled on Malawi, where they both had worked under government contract for the past five years.

  “I oversee eight doctors for a region with a population of half a million,” he told me now. “We never have enough supplies—at least half of what the government purchases ends up on the black market. So we can only focus on the basic, which in Africa is really what’s needed anyway. People die from all sorts of preventable disease. Dysentery. Chicken pox. And now AIDS—the infection rate in some villages has reached fifty percent. It can be quite maddening.”

  The stories were grim, but as he continued to tell me the tasks of his life—digging wells, training outreach workers to inoculate children, distributing condoms—he seemed neither cynical nor sentimental. I asked him why he thought he had come back to Africa and he answered without a pause, as if he’d heard the question many times.

  “It’s my home, I suppose. The people, the land…” He took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “It’s funny, you know. Once you’ve lived here for a time, the life in England seems terribly cramped. The British have so much more, but seem to enjoy things less. I felt a foreigner there.”

  He put his glasses back on and shrugged. “Of course, I know t
hat in the long run I need to be replaced. That’s part of my job—making myself unnecessary. The Malawian doctors I work with are excellent, really. Competent. Dedicated. If we could just build a training hospital, some decent facilities, we could triple their number in no time. And then…”

  “And then?”

  He turned toward the campfire, and I thought his voice began to waver. “Perhaps I can never call this place home,” he said. “Sins of the father, you know. I’ve learned to accept that.” He paused for a moment, then looked at me.

  “I do love this place, though,” he said before walking back to his tent.

  Dawn. To the east, the sky lightens above a black grove of trees, deep blue, then orange, then creamy yellow. The clouds lose their purple tint slowly, then dissipate, leaving behind a single star. As we pull out of camp, we see a caravan of giraffe, their long necks at a common slant, seemingly black before the rising red sun, strange markings against an ancient sky.

  It was like that for the rest of the day, as if I were seeing as a child once again, the world a pop-up book, a fable, a painting by Rousseau. A pride of lions, yawning in the broken grass. Buffalo in the marshes, their horns like cheap wigs, tick birds scavenging off their mudcrusted backs. Hippos in the shallow riverbeds, pink eyes and nostrils like marbles bobbing on the water’s surface. Elephants fanning their vegetable ears.

  And most of all the stillness, a silence to match the elements. At twilight, not far from our camp, we came upon a tribe of hyenas feeding on the carcass of a wildebeest. In the dying orange light they looked like demon dogs, their eyes like clumps of black coal, their chins dripping with blood. Beside them, a row of vultures waited with stern, patient gazes, hopping away like hunchbacks whenever one of the hyenas got too close. It was a savage scene, and we stayed there for a long time, watching life feed on itself, the silence interrupted only by the crack of bone or the rush of wind, or the hard thump of a vulture’s wings as it strained to lift itself into the current, until it finally found the higher air and those long and graceful wings became motionless and still like the rest. And I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like. The same stillness, the same crunching of bone. There in the dusk, over that hill, I imagined the first man stepping forward, naked and rough-skinned, grasping a chunk of flint in his clumsy hand, no words yet for the fear, the anticipation, the awe he feels at the sky, the glimmering knowledge of his own death. If only we could remember that first common step, that first common word—that time before Babel.