The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  Onyango had learned a great deal more from his mzungu employers than how to bake scones or on which side of a plate setting to put the knife or fork. Onyango was now a clean man, one nearly obsessed with hygiene and orderliness. He washed himself constantly and demanded that people rinse their feet before they enter his hut. His home, too, was immaculate, and he demanded that things be returned to their proper place. Whereas the villagers regularly ate ugali, a staple porridge of maize and water, or sukuma wiki, a plate of cooked greens, Onyango prepared for himself aromatic breads and scrambled eggs in butter. He did not allow cows anywhere near his hut because he felt the flies that accompanied them were unsanitary.

  A man of few words, Onyango had an elaborate set of rules governing how things should be done. Charles Oluoch, a village elder whose grandfather was one of Onyango’s seven brothers, recalls that at mealtimes Onyango insisted that others wait to wash their hands until after he had washed his own. He would then eat his meal alone, “and no one could sit down at the table until he was done,” explained Oluoch, fifty-six and still living in Kanyadhiang.a When Onyango visited the homes of his brothers, he instructed their wives on how to cook their food and demanded that only a single measure of water ever be put in a pot, with no additional liquid allowed.22 He did not like people visiting his home. And if a person wished to see him, he required that they make an appointment. And when they arrived at the arranged time, if he consented to see them at all, they had better have something specific to address, or beware.

  “You would fear facing him,” recalled Arthur Reuben Owino, seventynine, who attended school with Barack, Onyango’s son. “You would think very carefully what you wanted to say to him. He was a very frank person and if he didn’t like what you were saying he would tell you point blank. He liked to argue. He’d say, ‘No, no no. It’s not like that,’ or, ‘It’s not done that way.’ Even if it was your way of doing it. You had to do it his way. That was the right way.”

  With his impressive city job and fluency in English and Swahili, Onyango was a man of significant stature in the village. But his manner instilled more fear than respect. The two words that people invariably use to describe him are kwiny, meaning harsh, or ger, which means about the same but in a different dialect. Onyango could not bear the sound of a crying child, and if a mother failed to keep her baby quiet, he would promptly strike her with his cane. Likewise, a woman who did not answer his summons on the first call would feel the weight of his cane or, worse, the fourlashed whip made of stiff hippopotamus hide that he kept at the ready beside his door. Hawa Auma, one of his nine children, remembers that when women in the household heard his voice as he approached the house, they would hide behind large pots, or dak, so he could not see them. “My dad was very harsh,” Hawa Auma declared in Swahili. “If he was caning one of his children and someone happened to ask him why he was doing so, he would turn around and cane them senselessly, too.”

  Obama Madoho remembers the sting of the dreaded whip all too well. Seventy-three and curved with age, Madoho was eleven years old when he made the mistake of allowing his cows—and their attendant flies—to stray too near to Onyango’s hut. He recalls his age because he had just begun to wear clothes for the first time. “The whip had four straps to it, so when he hit you, it was like he was hitting you four times at once,” explained Madoho, who lives next door to the Obama compound in Alego. “I can tell you I was never so foolish as to take the cows near to him again.”

  Nor was Onyango like most other Kenyan men in another significant aspect: his religion. During his childhood in the early 1900s Christian missionaries were just beginning to set up the schools that would provide an education for many Kenyan schoolchildren, including Onyango himself. At the time many were eager to learn the ways of the white man and therefore readily converted to Christianity, which is now the dominant religion in Luoland.

  But the mission teachers also taught a submissiveness bred of Christian doctrine, one that colonial administrators wholly endorsed. A good and forgiving Christian was to “turn the other cheek” and “forgive your enemies.” The missionary teachers also declared un-Christian many African practices of which they disapproved, such as polygamy and witchcraft, and insisted these practices be abandoned immediately. The Africans, who had traditionally regarded multiple wives as a status symbol reflecting a man’s wealth, were made to feel ashamed of their behavior and uncertain about their own beliefs. Christian doctrine reinforced that sense of inferiority by proscribing that Africans accept their lot in life as ordained by the Almighty and bend to the fate that befell them. Passivity was the mantra, and the colonial administrators were glad of it. As the esteemed Kenyan historian Bethwell A. Ogot put it, “Thus both the Government and the Missionaries aimed at producing obedient and meek Africans who believed that the white man was always right because he was morally superior.”23

  But Onyango was not buying it. Although he respected the white man’s discipline and organizational strength, he considered many of the mzungu’s practices unjust and their cultural affectations foolish. To him, such Christian homilies had never rung true. Who was a Jesus who could wash away a man’s sins? Only a fool would show mercy toward an enemy.

  Like some 165,000 other Africans,24 Onyango was enlisted to aid the British when they battled the neighboring Germans in East Africa during World War I. For nearly four years Onyango worked with road crews in Tanganyika, the German protectorate, which included Rwanda, Burundi, and almost all of Tanzania, before winding up on the island of Zanzibar, which was also under British control. There he discovered the Islamic faith, a set of beliefs that appealed to him far more than Christianity or Nyasaye, the god and ubiquitous spiritual force that many Luos traditionally revered.

  Onyango was so drawn to Islam’s goal of religious and moral perfection as well as its highly disciplined practices that he converted and took the name Hussein. In doing so, he became part of a religious minority that many Luos regarded with suspicion. Although Muslim traders began arriving on the coast of East Africa in the eighth century, not until after the railroad reached the Lake Victoria region in the early 1900s did Islam gain a foothold inland. When Onyango returned from the war, there were still only about twenty Muslim families in the district, representing a tiny fraction of the local population.25 Although Islam would become more common in the area in coming decades due to widespread Muslim proselytizing in the later part of the 1920s, it had to overcome some significant cultural hurdles. One of the main impediments among Luos was the requirement that Muslim males be circumcised, a practice Luos traditionally do not believe in. And so it was that on his return home, Hussein Onyango, as he now called himself, was seen as stranger more than ever before.

  By then Onyango was in his mid-twenties and it was beyond time for him to marry. Given his demanding ways and eccentric habits, finding a wife was not going to be easy. That Onyango had taken to wearing a long red kanzu, a traditional robe worn by Arab men, did not help the matter. Onyango paid the traditional dowry of a dozen cows or more for several young women, but when he beat them for falling short of his rigid housekeeping standards, they fled back to their parents’ homes. One girl, who the senior members of the Obama clan only dimly recalled, did become his wife, but soon she too fled. Finally, late in the 1920s Onyango found a docile young woman named Helima who was able to endure his harsh ways and moved in with him. But when she was unable to have children after a few years, he was on the prowl again.26

  One day while walking in the woods, he spotted a beautiful young woman with broad cheeks and deep-set brown eyes carrying a basket of fish. Although another man had already claimed her, Onyango managed to talk her father into rejecting the other man’s offer and accepting a dowry offer of fifteen cattle. The following day he captured the girl on her way to the market and dragged her back to his hut. Her name was Akumu Njoga. Onyango soon persuaded her to convert to Islam and she took the name of Habiba, a variation of the Arabic name for “loved one.” But Akumu nev
er forgave Onyango for abducting her, and their marriage was tempestuous from the start.

  Their first child was a girl, Sarah Nyaoke. Then, blessedly, three years later the first boy arrived in June of 1936.27 In the Luo patrilineal culture, ancestry is defined through the father’s family line, and the birth of a son is a much-celebrated event. Males are generally more highly valued than females, and in many family trees the names of a man’s wives are not even recorded. Male babies, for example, would be kept indoors for four days before being taken outdoors, whereas female babies could go outside after only three days.28 Firstborn sons in particular were prized and anointed with weighty responsibilities. Referred to as kadier ng’eya, meaning “my back” in Dholuo, a first son was to literally watch his father’s back both in terms of protecting him and also learning from him. He would be the custodian of the family’s cultural knowledge and their interrelationships with other clans. The family’s general well-being would be his responsibility for as long as he lived.

  Onyango’s baby son was gifted with his mother’s attractive features. His face was broad like hers, and his brown eyes were so deep that his mother was fond of saying they were “entered in” his face. His parents named him Baraka, meaning “blessing” in Arabic.

  As the firstborn son, Baraka was bound to partake in certain rituals with his father, designated just for the two of them. When a new home was built, for example, the eldest son was designated to go to the site with his father and prepare it for their home. The father would carry a cock, symbolizing male power or polygamy, and the son carried a new axe on a new handle, signifying his growing autonomy. The first wife brought fire.29 When the first son eventually had a family of his own and built his own house, he was given a location of some honor set to the right of the father’s homestead. The second son’s home would be positioned farther out from the father’s house but to the left. The third son went to the right and so on in a physical manifestation of the family tree.30 On this sacred familial land, which the members of an extended clan held collectively subject to shifting seasonal claims, both the placentas of newborns and the bodies of the dead would ultimately be buried.

  Even the curmudgeonly Onyango was taken with the wide-eyed little Baraka. On his return from work in Nairobi, he brought him special fabric for clothes and mosquito netting for his crib. When Onyango and his son traveled outside the village, he dressed the boy in a white kanzu like his own with a matching white cap. Keenly aware of the benefits an education could bring, he taught his son to read at an early age and told him stories of his far-flung travels. As the family grew with the addition of a third child, Hawa Auma, Onyango took to addressing only his son Baraka and would often refuse to talk to his daughters. The girls, after all, would soon move on with husbands of their own. “He would talk only to Barack because he was the boy,” recalled Joseph Akello, a childhood friend of Barack’s. “He would say to the girls, ‘Ladies, you are all going to go away from this home. You are going to get married and not stay in this place.’ And so then he would not talk to them.”

  Hawa Auma, the third child born to Onyango and Akumu and the only one still alive, lives in the village of Oyugis about an hour’s rough drive from Kendu Bay. As she remembers it, Barack was treated like dhahabu ya nyota, or “the gold of the stars” in Swahili. But she, too, adored her older brother. A widow, she spends most of her days sitting at the edge of the dirt road next to a pile of charcoal stubs that she sells for about 30 Ksh for a tin of two kilograms, or about forty cents, if she’s lucky. Flashing her broad toothless smile, she delights in showing a visitor the interior of her tiny dark house where a photograph of President Obama, her nephew, and his family hang next to a row of dirt-encrusted axes. One of her prized possessions is a set of six water glasses that bear the seal of the U.S. Senate, which she says then-senator Obama presented to her along with 10,000 Kenyan shillings, or about $140, when he visited Alego in 2006. She wonders aloud if he will pay to get her teeth fixed one of these days.

  Like all of Onyango’s children and many of his grandchildren, Hawa Auma was raised as a Muslim. The front of her small house bears the painted black crescent and star featured on many Islamic flags along with the name of her dead husband. She speaks reverently of a recent trip she made to Mecca with several other family members, although she is more interested in discussing the airplane they took than the Holy City of Islam. “That plane was all white and so beautiful,” she declared. “There was a toilet, a bed, just like a hotel. And all the time, tea with milk.”

  Her brother Baraka, as she recalls, converted to Christianity when he was about six years old and changed his name to the more Christiansounding Barack because the Christian missionaries at the early schools he attended insisted that he do so. They were not discriminating against his faith in particular; rather, the missionaries required all non-Christians to leave their rival faith at the door and embrace Christianity if they hoped to go to school. Many young Kenyans who were baptized during the early twentieth century were given both African and Christian names, and the latter were often heavily Biblical ones such as Obadiah or Ezra. Later in life many of them abandoned those Christian names, considering them relics of an oppressive past.

  Furious at the church’s requirement but determined that his son be educated, Onyango did not openly challenge the missionaries. For his daughters, the situation was much simpler. Because they, like many girls, did not attend school, they did not have to trouble themselves with changing their names or renouncing the family faith. Barack, as Hawa Auma tells it, did not particularly care what religion he was ascribed; instead, he cared about not being different from the other children, and he cared enough about that to stand up to their bullish father. “Our father would say, ‘You are a Muslim. Why do you say you are something else?’” says Hawa Auma. “But Barack was very bold and he stood up to him. He would say, ‘I do not see anyone like that in the school where I am learning. I see only Christians.’”

  Excluding matters of faith, Barack and his two sisters were raised largely according to longstanding Luo custom and tradition much as their parents had been. Although Barack would live as an urban man of the twentieth century when he became an adult, the tribal habits that defined rural Africa of the century past shaped his earliest years.

  The Obama family lived in a typical Luo homestead composed of a collection of round, thatched dwellings arranged in a circular formation. Each of the structures had a designated function. Onyango occupied the central house, called a duol, although he was more often with one of his wives than in his own hut. Although second in number, Helima acted as a first wife, who is called a mikayi, and lived in a larger hut in the middle of the compound. It was she who oversaw the running of affairs, no matter how many other wives might be added to the family. The man of a family would routinely have two or more wives, and their huts were positioned in descending hierarchal order in front of the first wife’s house, just as the sons’ homes were laid out before the father’s hut.31 When Onyango married Habiba, she became his third wife, or reru, and lived in a separate hut of her own. She and Helima together cared for Sarah and Barack when they were born.

  Girls generally slept in their own mother’s homes until they reached puberty and then moved into a home with their grandmother called a siwindhe where they remained until they married. Boys moved into a bachelor house called a samba when they reached their teenage years. Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, boys would undergo the ritual removal of their six lower teeth, signifying their entry into adulthood. Although, fortunately for Barack, the practice began to die out around the time he was born, as did many customs of which the missionaries disapproved, many older men in Luoland still bear the telltale dental gap. Today, death remains one of the Luos’ primary cultural expressions, marked by several days of elaborate ritual and the burial of the corpse. The body goes to the left of the door to the main dwelling in the case of a female and to the right in the case of the male. When a married man dies, the woo
den pole extending from the roof of the main dwelling called an osuri is broken in a signal of his passing. One of his brothers will then “inherit” his widow, or if there are no brothers, another male in the family will do so.

  Elaborate protocols continue to govern relations among Luo men and women, particularly those between a man and his mother-in-law. A wife’s mother, for example, is to keep her distance from her daughter’s spouse. She is not to hug him closely or even to cook food for him in her daughter’s home. And she is never, ever to spend the night in her son-in-law’s home. If she does, the young couple will be afflicted by a chira disease, an illness triggered by the breaking of cultural norms and marked by progressive wasting. When Michelle Obama’s mother, Marian Robinson, moved into the White House to help take care of her granddaughters not long after the 2009 inauguration, many Luos around Lake Victoria grumbled in disapproval and predicted that disaster would surely follow.

  Barack was teethed on the varied musical forms that echo in Luoland at an early age. By the early 1940s Kendu Bay had become known as a musical center featuring the popular fast-paced mach melodies and percussionbased rhumbas. Despite Onyango’s severe ways, most family events were accompanied by performances on a lyre-like instrument called the nyatiti, then common among Luo families. Often the music would evolve into a popular form of verbal entertainment involving “praise names,” a string of laudatory words a person uses to describe themselves or someone else. A pakruok is another form of self-glorification that employs metaphors or similes and often uses symbols from the environment, such as plants or animals. On overhearing a Luo enjoying his Tusker beer while uttering a string of complimentary adjectives describing himself, a non-Luo might concur with the Kenyan truism that Luos are as supremely arrogant as they are intellectual. But among Luos, such talk is more game than brag, although of course there might be the slightest bit of truth to those elaborate appraisals. Barack would often approach friends in later years declaring himself “an wuod Akumu nya Njoga, wuod nyar ber,” or “I am the son of Akumu, the daughter of Njoga, a beautiful woman.” Or he might say, “an wuon nyithindo mabeyo,” meaning “I am the father of beautiful children.” It was a childhood habit that entertained him, and like many other practices learned from his childhood—not all of them as benign—he never abandoned it.