The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  What he discovered on his Kenya sojourn was that Barack Senior was a man fundamentally flawed by his own inner demons and undone by his own fears, much like his own father, Hussein Onyango, before him. If he had been so inclined, the younger Obama might have gone one step further and discovered a curious reflection of himself, another “foggy mirror.” After all, the two men have much in common. Both Baracks grew to be men of keen intellect and analytic ability. A boldness of ambition enabled each of them to imagine a life for themselves far beyond the proscribed circumstances of their birth. Each man exhibited hubris, some would call it arrogance, that enabled them to dream large—and they did so despite the fact that they had each been orphaned by a parent, left to explain that empty space as best they could. As it happened, the two of them came of age at a time when the currents of change revealed before them a life once thought impossible.

  And each of them walked toward that opportunity without hesitation.

  Barack Obama Sr. believed he had failed in his life, but the full scope of his existence was unknown to him. Had he been aware of the events to come a generation later, he might have appraised himself somewhat differently. For what greater success could a man aspire to than to have produced a child who would become the first black president of the United States, the person who stands at the helm of the world? One wonders what he might he have said if he had known of his own filial legacy. Neil Abercrombie, governor of Hawaii who was a student with Obama Sr. at the University of Hawaii, grasped his essence better than most. “If someone had come up to him and said, ‘You know, your son might be the president one day,’ he would have said, ‘Well, of course. He’s my son.’”19

  2

  WINYO PINY KIBORNE

  “For a bird, the world is never too far.”

  The tribal prophet Kimnyole arap Turukat foretold its coming long before the white man knew of it himself. It would rear from the vast lake to the east, a lethal iron snake belching smoke and fire and uncoil across tribal lands before at last quenching its thirst in the waters to the west. The beast would bear with it a kind of foreigner never seen before, a “red stranger” who would one day rule the land. Kimnyole was right.

  The white man called it the Uganda Railway, a 582-mile steel corridor that would link the coastal city of Mombasa to the shores of Lake Victoria and the dark heart of the African interior beyond. Launched by the imperial British government in 1896, it was the one of the largest engineering efforts in the empire’s history. It was also a colossal financial disaster, costing more than double its original price tag of £2.2 million and requiring the importation of more than thirty thousand Indian laborers, many of whom were devoured by lions. As the beleaguered railroad inched across the arid African plain, the British press dubbed it the “Lunatic Line.” But when it was complete, it dramatically altered the land that would become Kenya, propelling the nation into the twentieth century at a dizzying pace.

  On December 21, 1901, the Times of London exultantly reported that the final rail plate had been laid at the terminal of Port Florence and the interior of East Africa was at last open to the world.1 There was still a great deal to be done. Spurs and branch lines needed to be constructed. A fleet of steamers that could ferry passengers to the other side of the lake and return laden with the Ugandan riches of ivory, skins, and horns had yet to be assembled. And then there were the Africans. Since the iron snake’s arrival, Kimnyole’s people, fierce warriors called the Nandi, battled the beast as best they could, raiding the British outposts and stealing precious steel, wires, and supplies. But the imperial machine churned steadily forward, and many of the Nandi were slaughtered in a hail of British bullets.2

  Word of the white man’s coming traveled fast across the grassy plains of the Kavirondo region that sweeps down to the lake’s edge, the home of what was then Kenya’s third largest ethnic group, the Luo. Few had ever seen a white man but for the occasional missionary or Arab trader who came laden with sugar and cloth. They called the newcomer the “red stranger” for his curious skin tone, which seemed alternately pale or flushed, depending on how long he was in the sun. It was said that if you touched his skin, it would come off in your hand because it was so soft.3 He had flat hair and his body was covered from neck to knee with clothing, whereas the Luo wore only a stretch of animal skin or loosely draped cloth. Many of the newcomers carried deadly metal sticks that erupted with fire.

  In a small village fifty miles south of the railhead, the elders discussed these developments among themselves. It seemed best to stay away from the foreigners for the time being until their purpose could be understood. But at least one young man, a tall boy with curly dark hair, did not heed the elders’ advice. His name was Onyango Obama, and he was the second of eight brothers born to Obama Opiyo in 1895, the same year that the British proclaimed the territory its East Africa Protectorate. He would be one of the first from his village to learn English and Swahili.

  From the beginning Onyango was not like the other boys. He was solemn and rarely played with the other children in the village, preferring instead solitary pursuits of his own. He never sat still for more than a few minutes, and some laughed that he had “ants up his anus.”4 But he was intensely curious about many things and would often sit at the feet of the elders as they discussed the medicinal values of plants. In this way he learned the herbalist’s secrets—useful knowledge in a land where magic and religion are entwined and spirits called night runners, or jajuok, streak through the darkness emitting chilling sounds.

  Onyango was also curious about the white man and resolved to learn about him. One day, as a young teenager, he headed on foot to Port Florence, which would be renamed Kisumu, and was not heard from for many months. On his return, he seemed a different person. He wore the pants and shirt of the white man, and his feet, unbelievably, were clad in shoes. When asked why he was wearing such strange skins, Onyango said nothing. His father concluded that Onyango’s odd clothing was intended to conceal the fact that he had been circumcised, a grave violation of Luo custom, or was suffering from an outbreak of sores. Obama advised his other sons, “Don’t go near this brother of yours. He is unclean.”5 Onyango returned to the provincial capital of Kisumu, where he would work alongside the white man for many years. His life would turn out to be a vivid chronicle of the repressive colonial years and Kenya’s tumultuous drive for independence.

  It was Onyango who would usher the family from the wilds of the African bush to the elegant parlors of Nairobi’s finest homes, where he worked as a cook, a critical step in a long migration that had begun many generations earlier. The Obama family’s ancestral journey was launched nearly a thousand miles northwest of Nairobi on the broad savannah grasslands of the Bahr-el-Ghazal Province in Sudan at the edge of the churning waters of the White Nile.6 It was there that a nomadic people known as the River Lake Nilotes, believed to be the earliest ancestors of the Obama clan, lived for hundreds of years tending the cattle that were their lifeblood. At some point in the fifteenth century the Nilotes began to drift toward Uganda, apparently prompted by overcrowding from the east, in search of a less populated home. Their fitful migration continued for more than one hundred years, moving through northern Uganda and on into western Kenya, where they arrived sometime between 1500 and 1550.7

  Historians believe there were four migrational surges into the Nyzanza Province that embraces Lake Victoria and was once known as Kavirondo, a stream of assorted clans and subclans that would eventually make up Kenya’s Luo people.8 The second surge was known as the Jok’ Owiny, or the people of Owiny the Great, a fierce warrior who is President Obama’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and the first of his ancestors to live in Kenya.9 On their arrival in Alego, where Onyango’s widow, Sarah Ogwel, and other Obama relatives continue to live today, they encountered some hostile Bantu-speaking tribes. After lengthy combat, however, Owiny’s descendants emerged victorious. Many of the Bantu remained and married into the Luo f
amilies, with whom the Bantu shared farming techniques and local knowledge of the land.

  By the early 1800s Alego too had grown crowded, prompting fighting among the Luo, so some began to migrate again, this time drifting further south along Lake Victoria’s eastern edge. Owiny’s descendant, Obong’o, was one of them. As a young man he moved to the southeastern shores of the Winam Gulf, where he was able to make a living fishing the abundant tilapia and helping other men to clear their land.10 Perhaps overwhelmed by the burden of his relocation and the huge amount of work it entailed, Obong’o died at a young age, but one of his sons later fathered a boy named Obama Opiyo. This grandson was the one who oversaw the building of the scores of homesteads that remain in Kanyadhiang today and fathered the president’s own grandfather, Onyango Obama, with one of his five wives.11

  The arrival of the British shortly after Onyango’s birth marked a crucial juncture in Kenya’s history, one that would usher in sweeping changes that radically altered the traditional African way of life. Sanctioned by the Congress of Berlin in 1884, which had brutally divided the African continent among the European powers with total disregard for indigenous peoples or topography, the British monarchy made its move into East Africa, propelled by a host of ambitions. At the top of the list was protecting the precious headwaters of the Nile in neighboring Uganda from Germany and other predators at all costs. Furthermore, the British railroad could serve to stem the continuing slave trade once and for all while also opening up trade routes that had previously operated over dirt tracks fraught with wild animals and hostile tribes. The British also believed firmly that Christianity and the white man’s ways could help to illuminate the soul of Africa and bring civilization to the “heathen masses.”

  Inspired by their goal of both economic and human conquest, British administrators marched into rural Africa with their clipboards and their cherished Maxim machine guns in hand. The Uganda Railroad had already cost the British government far more than it had ever intended to spend, and the Tory leaders were adamant that the new protectorate was going to pay for itself just as the other colonies in its far-flung empire were required to do.12 And so one of the first things the administrators did was to impose a system of taxation on its new subjects. Never mind that the Luo had long operated under a barter system and had no actual money—that would come soon enough.

  Oginga Odinga, Luoland’s political luminary and the country’s preeminent opposition leader in the years after independence, was a young boy living in Central Nyanza in the formative years of British control. He recalls in his biography, Not Yet Uhuru, that Africans associated white people with five things: inoculations, forced labor, clothes, schools, and taxes. When government clerks came to the village, he wrote, the children, “watched them take a papyrus reed from the roof of each hut and cut it neatly in two. When the reeds were tied in neat bundles they represented the registration of that boma.”13 In this form of double accounting, one bundle of reeds was given to the chief and the clerk kept the other bundle. The tax collectors who accompanied the white man did not speak the Luo language of Dholuo and were not people of the tribe. They were called okoche.

  Taxes were only the beginning. In the years leading up to World War I, Kenya was transformed from a loose association of clans and disparate ethnic groups into an administrative operation run by force and coercion. The machinery the British established to achieve that organizational structure brought an abrupt end to the Luo migration and disrupted many cultural patterns. Tribal chiefs, or ruodhi, were induced to be a part of the process and charged with keeping order and collecting taxes on behalf of the colonial government. Not only did this undermine the traditional authority of tribal elders, but the chiefs themselves were often prone to bribery and nepotism, which caused many Luos to lose faith in their leaders.14

  But the more devastating and far-reaching changes had to do with land. In a parallel effort to finance the protectorate, the British launched a campaign to encourage European settlers to come to Kenya and grow crops that could be sold on the world market. They ran advertisements in newspapers extolling the region’s fertile soil, ample sunshine, and abundant low-cost labor supply. One poster for the railway proclaimed that its observation cars “pass through the Greatest Natural GAME PRESERVE in the WORLD” and referred to the highlands as “a winter home for aristocrats.” 15 Lured by the prospect of an untrammeled “White Man’s Country,” as author Elspeth Huxley dubbed the new colony, settlers came in a steady stream. The first to arrive were the white immigrants from South Africa, followed by the aristocratic stock from some of London’s most notable families and later veterans of the world wars, all consumed by a vision of adventure and opportunity. Their hedonistic lifestyle and decadent ways cultivated in a region that came to be known as “Happy Valley,” where drugs and multiple sex partners were de rigueur would become the subject of many a film and book.

  For these agricultural settlers, the colonial government had targeted the protectorate’s most luscious land, the fertile highlands in Central Province north of Nairobi that generations of the Masai and Kikuyu people had occupied. As the white settlers bought up the fertile tracts, the Africans were provided specially designated “native reserves,” defined geographic areas that had been proscribed for each of Kenya’s ethnic groups. For the Kikuyu, who ultimately lost over sixty thousand acres to the settlers in southern Kiambu, the displacement would have devastating consequences both materially and psychologically. As Caroline Elkins wrote in Imperial Reckoning, “To be a man or a woman—to move from childhood to adulthood—a Kikuyu had to have access to land.... A Kikuyu could not be a Kikuyu without land.”16 The reserves were soon crowded and lacked adequate space for the Kikuyu to grow enough food to be self-sufficient, thus forcing some to work for the settlers on the very land on which they had once lived. Called “squatters,” they were initially free to grow crops and graze their animals, but they soon found themselves subject to draconian restrictions.

  Once the settlers had committed to the White Man’s Country, the colonial government had to make good on its promise of cheap labor. A hut tax was imposed on each dwelling, forcing the occupants to work off the debt through physical labor or to earn wages that could retire the debt. The deeply despised tax marked the beginning of a cash economy that had wide-ranging impact. When voluntary labor was insufficient for the settlers’ needs, chiefs and headmen served as labor recruiters and scoured their areas for able-bodied men who were then forced into low-paying work contracts. With the halt to migratory patterns that traditionally enabled the Luo to move as they needed so as to secure additional fertile land, many in Nyanza were forced to work outside the reserves in order to earn cash. As Odinga wrote in his biography, “The toll that White rule exacted from Nyanza was labour, not land. Our province became the country’s largest labor reserve.”17

  To ensure that workers traveling to their jobs remained manageable and pliant, the British devised a compulsory registration system that by 1920 required all African males over age sixteen to carry an identification pass called a kipande when not on their reserve. The pass contained not only identifying information such as a person’s name and fingerprint but also an employer’s evaluation of the individual’s work performance. By 1928 the number of Kenyans carrying the kipande had reached 675,000.18 The small dog-eared cards were easily the most reviled tentacle in the colonial government’s elaborate web of far-reaching controls.

  As a house servant in Nairobi, Onyango Obama was also required to register with the government. Onyango was given a small rust-colored book the size of a passport that, like the kipande, contained a range of detailed personal information. Each book contained a stern warning reminding those who failed to carry their books at all times that they would be, “liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred shillings or to imprisonment not exceeding six months or to both.” Onyango’s personal details follow, penned in an elegant script.19

  Native Registration Ordinance No.: Rwl A NBI 0976717. Ra
ce or Tribe: Ja’Luo

  Usual Place of Residence When not Employed: Kisumu.

  Sex: M

  Age: 35

  Height and Build: 6’0” Medium.

  Complexion: Dark.

  Nose: Flat.

  Mouth: Large.

  Hair: Curly.

  Teeth: Six missing.

  Scars, Tribal Markings or Other Peculiarities: None.

  At the back of the book, several of Onyango’s employers wrote assessments of their servant, which were largely positive. Onyango held a series of jobs for which he was paid about 60 East African Shillings a month, equal to about $145 today.20 Capt. C. Harford of Nairobi’s Government House wrote that Onyango “performed his duties as personal boy with admirable diligence.” Mr. A. G. Dickson gushed that “he can read and write English and follows any recipes . . . apart from other things his pastries are excellent.” But he lamented that he would no longer need Onyango because “I am no longer on Safari.” But Mr. Arthur W. H. Cole of the East Africa Survey Group was distinctly unhappy with his houseboy after one week on the job and declared that Onyango “was found to be unsuitable and certainly not worth 60 shillings per month.”21

  Although he lived much of the time in Nairobi, Onyango regularly returned to Kendu Bay, the larger township near Kanyadhiang, walking the entire 220-mile journey on foot. Onyango had carefully saved his money and built himself a home not far from those of his brothers. However, he lived in a manner that was so different from his siblings, so unlike that of any other villager, that he became the object of great curiosity and conversation. In leaving the confines of the village and adopting some of the white man’s ways, Onyango had begun to hold himself apart from some of his own people, thus becoming alien to their ways. At times he was no longer at ease with his neighbors, and his stratification between the two cultures was a foreshadowing of the kind of dislocation that his son would experience in an even more extreme way.