by Sally Jacobs
LATE ON A NOVEMBER evening in 1982, Obama was driving home when he rammed his white pickup truck headlong into the high stump of a eucalyptus tree at the side of the road and died instantly. He was fortysix. Obama’s eight children, some of whom had not seen him for years, largely closed the door on the subject of their father. For better or worse, the Old Man was gone.
A quarter-century later another Barack Obama emerged, this one a cerebral U.S. Senator from Chicago who was angling, quixotically it seemed, for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency. As that heavily laden name dominated the headlines and the nightly news, it triggered a flood of complex emotions among some of the elder Obama’s children. They were struck at how oddly the younger Barack’s name was pronounced. The Old Man had also been called Barack, but his was a working man’s name, with the emphasis on the first syllable. The American pronunciation was heavy on the second syllable, giving the name a more formal, somewhat aristocratic cast. This particularly amused the elder Barack’s three surviving wives—not that they were talking to each other.
Reporters scoured the younger Obama’s background, and questions invariably arose about his namesake and the Kenyan family he had met on a handful of occasions. The phenomenon of Obama’s candidacy and the worldwide prominence that his name achieved after he became America’s first African American president prompted some of the children to begin rethinking their relationship with the Old Man and to grow curious about the elements of his chaotic life. Somehow they were all bound by that restless, bespectacled onslaught of a man who was their father and now to this gentler but no less intense version of him on the front pages of America’s newspapers.
The questions led to more questions. Who was their father? And who, for that matter, were really his children? To get to the truth of the man, how could any of them penetrate the skein of lies and half-truths he had woven? Even the makeup of his immediate family was a confounding jumble. Three years after his death some of his children and wives became embroiled in a legal brawl aimed at establishing exactly who his legitimate heirs were and to which of his “wives” had he actually been married.
The colorful legal drama, which went on for years, pitted the first wife against the fourth, the eldest son against the youngest, and generally divided the family into two warring camps. At the heart of the matter was a claim by Obama’s first wife, Grace Kezia Aoko Obama, that she had never divorced her husband and remained married to him at the time of his death.2 If that were true, then none of his subsequent three marriages—including the one with the president’s mother—would have been legitimate. A host of family members who took sides on the issue provided conflicting affidavits peppered with name-calling and insults. Even Obama’s sixty-seven-year-old mother, frail and heartbroken over her first son’s death, weighed in and declared that Grace had long ago divorced her son.3 The Nairobi High Court judge considering the dizzying squabble apparently believed Obama’s mother: In 1989 Judge J. F. Shields ruled that not only had Grace divorced her husband but also that two of the four children she claimed he had fathered with her were not his sons at all.4 And that was just the first phase of the battle.
The name of Barack Hussein Obama II, the second son, crops up only incidentally in the bulging pink case files in Nairobi’s High Court. No one in the case ever challenged the legitimacy of his paternity. But in July 1997 Barack Hussein Obama of Chicago, Illinois, deftly extracted himself from the matter with a brief letter to the court disavowing any claim he might have on the estate, which was worth about 410,500 Kenyan shillings, or $57,500, at the time his father died. He wrote the letter six months after he was sworn in to serve his first term in the Illinois Senate representing the 13th district.
Nearly a decade earlier, in the summer of 1988, Obama had launched his own effort to uncover the father about whom he had often wondered. At the time, his father had been dead for six years and he had just completed work as a community organizer in Chicago and was preparing to enter Harvard Law School. During a five-week visit to Kenya, Obama met many members of his sprawling clan for the first time and listened to their stories of his father’s political frustrations and domestic travails. He also found that many of his relatives had no greater command of his father’s essence than he had gleaned from his mother’s recollections. The elder Obama seemed a baffling mystery to many with whom he had lived and worked, including his disparate tribe of children.
Although he was a master of the verbal parrying and one-upmanship that are the Luos’ stock in trade and was famous for his legendary black velvet baritone, the elder Obama confided in virtually no one, not even those in his wide circle of drinking comrades. Talk of personal matters, and certainly of children, he considered to be a show of weakness. He mentioned the son he had fathered while in Hawaii to only a handful of his closest friends and family members, even though he kept a photograph of that little boy, riding a tricycle with a small cap perched jauntily on his head, on his bureau. Taken a couple of years after he had left his small family in Hawaii, the picture always followed him through his many moves and dislocations.5
His children may have understood him least of all. As Auma Obama, President Obama’s half-sister, says in Dreams from My Father, “I can’t say I really knew him, Barack. Maybe nobody did ... not really. His life was so scattered. People only knew scraps and pieces, even his own children.”6
Some of his children have pored over the letters and papers their father left behind, trying to pull all those inconclusive scraps and pieces together. Four of the five children indisputably fathered by Barack Obama have written books that are at least in part a rumination of the Old Man and his impact on their lives. Like Dreams from My Father, each of the works is a yearning of sorts, an effort to make some sense of their father’s character and complex legacy.
Only his firstborn son, Abong’o Malik Obama, a volatile fifty-three-year-old who lives with his three wives near the family’s compound in western Kenya, has not written a book about his father—at least not yet. Malik recently made headlines of his own when he took a nineteen-year-old schoolgirl as his third wife. He has also irritated some Obama family members when he built a small mosque on his property that the steady parade of tourists heading to the Obama compound pass daily. Some Obamas worry that such a glaring symbol of the family’s Muslim faith will negatively impact the Obama presidency. Malik has accused others of trying to profit from his father’s life and says that he intends eventually to write the definitive biography of his father himself.7
Auma Obama, Obama’s only daughter and the second of his children born to his first wife, Grace Kezia, has painful recollections of a distant father who rarely spoke to her and often returned home from work drunk and irritable.8 But as she read some of the newspaper accounts of his life, she found she wanted to understand more about the forces that shaped his experience and left him so embittered. She called Peter Oloo Aringo, a longtime friend of Obama’s and then a member of Kenya’s Parliament representing the Alego district where he spent his childhood, who recalled that Auma was “very troubled about [her father’s] life. She had spent more time with him than most of the children, but she felt she had not known him at all. She wanted to know how we had gotten along, how we had been friends, that kind of thing. But mostly she wanted to understand what had led to his downfall.”
Two months before the 2010 midterm elections in the United States, Auma published a memoir in the language of her adopted Germany, called Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen, or “Life Always Comes In Between.” Her book is a deeply felt lamentation for a father so preoccupied with his own ambition, so riven by his own insecurity, that he barely sees the lonely little girl gazing up at him. When at last he reaches out for her toward the end of his life, she yearns for him but does not absolve him. “I simply could not forgive my father,” Auma writes. “So much had gone wrong while we were together and in my eyes, then and now, it was his fault.... He never had time to listen but acted as if everything was alright. He ha
d never asked us, and maybe himself, how we children were actually doing.”9
Few were as profoundly affected by the Old Man as Mark Ndesandjo, the oldest of two boys born in Kenya to Obama Sr. and his third wife. By that time in his life, Obama Sr. was, according to Mark and his mother, a profoundly abusive husband who cheated on his mother repeatedly and often beat her. Deeply traumatized by his childhood years, Mark left Kenya to attend college in the United States in the 1980s and resolved to have nothing more to do with the hated Obama name.10 When he met his half-brother Barack for the first time on a visit home to Kenya, Mark told him, “At a certain point I made a decision not to think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.”11 Determined that he would be nothing like the cold and loveless man who haunted his childhood, Mark had blocked all memory of him.
By the time the presidential cavalcade came two decades later, Mark was a forty-three-year-old international marketing consultant living in Shenzhen, China, with a BA in physics from Brown University and master’s degrees from Stanford and Emory Universities. At least once during the campaign he met with the half-brother he resembles markedly in both stature and expression. Obama describes his brother’s appearance as though he were “looking into a foggy mirror.” Like his siblings, Mark found himself propelled by his half-brother’s inspiring success to reexamine the family’s turbulent history and open doors he had long thought firmly closed behind him. He spent months reading the diaries that his mother kept during the seven years she was married to his father and began to ply her with questions he had never wanted to ask before.12
Years earlier Mark had begun work on a book that explored many of the same issues that Barack Obama wrestled with in Dreams from My Father. Mark was likewise struggling with questions about his own mixed-race identity, his relationship to his father, and his search for rootedness. Obama’s election in November of 2008 is what moved him to complete his manuscript, and at the end of 2009 he wrote an autobiographical novel called Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East under the name Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo. The world’s embrace of the Obama name had at last enabled him to take ownership of it as well.
In his book the father figure is a menacing and dangerous presence. His son—David in the book—remembers him as “the hulking man whose breath reeked of cheap Pilsner beer who had often beaten his mother. He had long searched for good memories of his father but had found none.”13 One night, the father turns violently on his wife while their six-year-old son cowers in the next bedroom listening in horror. “His mother’s voice was screaming as if terrified,” Mark wrote. “The child almost didn’t recognize it. And then there were some thumps as of someone falling. His father’s angry voice raised itself as if in a duet with the unrecognizable voice. . . . His mother was being attacked and he couldn’t protect her.”14
Nor did his conversations with his mother trigger particularly happy memories of his father. “I do not remember him ever smiling. Except when he drank,” Mark said in an interview.
Yet, as with his older brother’s memoir, even Mark found a resolution of sorts through his writing. In revisiting his experiences, he began to reflect on his own father’s life and the hardships he too had endured. “I knew that my father had been through some traumatic experiences as a child and I began to realize that there must have been an emotional hardening in him that was not his fault,” Mark explained. “When love is absent or you are physically abused as he was you develop a hard emotional skin. And that made me think differently about him.”
Next in line is George Hussein Onyango, the youngest of the sibling tribe, now twenty-nine, who lives in the sprawling Nairobi slum of Huruma on the city’s east side. In the final months of his life Obama Sr. moved in with a young woman less than half his age, named Jael Atieno Onyango. George, their only child, was born six months before Obama died and had little contact with other Obama family members until his political half-brother came on the stage. His mother’s claim as an heir is what triggered the legal battle over the question of who was Barack Obama’s wife at the time of his death.
George too has grappled with his enigmatic father. A year after Obama’s election George wrote a memoir called Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival. For George, the absence of his father initially propelled him downward, not up. But his tale is one of resurrection. It begins with a grim depiction of his youth: School expulsion is followed by the drinking of the alcoholic brew known as chang’aa and the smoking of weed which culminates in a prison stay on robbery charges that are ultimately dismissed. Confronted with Obama’s inspirational Senate victory in 2004, however, George managed to bring an end to his ghetto lifestyle and recast himself as an advocate for Huruma’s poor and dispossessed. Now, soccer is his passion.
Obama Sr. wafts through his book like the ghost that he was to his youngest son, materializing briefly in often heroic proportions. Family members describe him as famously generous, readily paying the school fees for a host of nieces and nephews and doling out fistfuls of cash on his visits back home. A man of abiding principle, Obama Sr. burned with a passionate faith in his country and a willingness to challenge its increasingly corrupt political leaders at a profound personal cost. He may not have always shown it—he was an African man, after all—but he felt deeply. As George flounders through his early teenage years in the book, family members are forever reminding him of the brilliant economist who was his father and urging him to follow in his father’s footsteps. He quotes his mother as saying that Obama Sr. “would have been a role model for me if he were still alive.... She remarked what a tragic loss his death had been for her and the wider family, if not the country as a whole.”15
Despite the sometimes brash tone of his book, in person George is a shy young man who seems a bit bewildered by the juggernaut of his American brother’s success, not to mention the trail of international reporters who began to journey down the rutted dirt road to his shack in 2008, marveling in their stories at the disparity between his life and that of the president. The comparison was jarring on both ends, as each Obama son was cast at the radical end of an astonishingly unlikely spectrum.
Although George has mourned the lack of his father, the absence of much of his immediate family occupies him even more as he sits under a string of drying laundry in the makeshift tin shack in which he lives with several cousins. In fact, only when Obama visited Kenya in 2006 did George meet some of his relatives on his father’s side for the first time and visit the home of his step-grandmother, known globally as Mama Sarah.16 Jael has remarried and lives with her new family in an Atlanta, Georgia, suburb, though she has tried repeatedly without success to get him a visa to come to the United States.
In the churning alleys of Huruma, however, an Obama is still an Obama, and many in Kenya assume that must mean a link to the White House and all its power and riches. George is often accompanied by a heavy-set young man with blood-shot eyes whom he half-jokingly calls “my security man.” But the truth is that George has little more access to the president than the tattered beggars who live next door to him in Huruma. George has met Barack Jr. on two occasions—once when Obama dropped in on his school when he was a five-year-old and again when he visited as a U.S. Senator.
George is hopeful that eventually he will get to talk to President Obama about their father. For when George himself wanted to learn about the Old Man, it was to Dreams that he turned. “I still have a lot of questions,” George shrugs. “I’d like to know who my brothers are and I’d like to know who my father was. I’m proud of him. I think.”
A YEAR AFTER HIS FATHER’S DEATH, Obama met him one night in his sleep, “in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams,” he wrote in his memoir. He found his father locked in the cell alone, dressed only in a cloth wrapped around his waist, his face ashen and thin. The elder Obama appraised his son and told him how much he loved him. Bu
t when the son tried to depart with his father and insisted that they leave the cell together, Obama the father refused. Obama awoke weeping at the loss of his father but realized also that “even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint.” 17 Obama resolved then and there to search for his father, to somehow come to know him.
While still in his twenties, in the course of a search for his own identity that he chronicled in his memoir, Obama Jr. spent years inquiring about the father he met only once in his life. In talking with family members in Kenya, he made the painful discovery that his father had not been the towering success that he had been led to believe as a child. Although he gained a radically new perception of his father, Obama acknowledged in the end that “I still didn’t know the man my father had been. What had happened to all his vigor, his promise? What had shaped his ambitions?”18 Like many of his half-siblings on his father’s side, ultimately Obama was unable to comprehend the forces that created and shaped the Old Man.
The person in the world best positioned to uncover the story of the first Barack Hussein Obama is, of course, the president of the United States. With infinite resources and manpower at his disposal, he could presumably assign a team of investigators to the task and have a comprehensive profile for his eyes only in short order. Family members who have presented sanitized narratives to the media or even refused to talk at all would likely be more inclined to share their blunter perceptions with one of their own. But, apparently, he has not done so. Despite the research he completed as he prepared to write Dreams, his old man remains a thinly understood character in his book, a brooding specter. Obama seems ambivalent about just how far he wants to go in probing his father’s soul. There are many places he has not gone.