The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  A straightforward woman with a tight cap of brown curls, Mooney was prone to prim cotton dresses and flat shoes. A “spinster” in the jargon of the day, family members believed she had long ago given up on the idea of marriage. She was a deeply committed Christian who believed that God had brought her to Kenya on a “literacy safari,”3 as she described it, to empower people to read. She said devotions daily.

  Then there was Obama. He was twenty-one years old, a racehorse at the gate, already sporting the “academic” look that was in vogue in some Nairobi circles. His jacket was finely cut, his glasses a donnish horn rimmed, and the occasional pipe provided the crowning touch. Never mind that once he put the pipe down he invariably resumed his chronic chain smoking. On the brink of becoming a father for the first time, he was consumed with a single burning passion, which was to be a player in the development of a newly independent Kenya. But with a record already marred by rejection from Maseno and a series of small, short-lived jobs on his résumé, his prospects were moderate at best.

  Mboya had urged Kenyans to think practically as they prepared for independence. He wanted them to get training in the fields that would be of service to the country, particularly in areas such as economics and administration. With his impressive mathematical skills, Obama was convinced his calling was to serve as an economist who could help develop the country’s fiscal foundations and project its needs in the future. All he needed to do was find some way to get a university degree, possibly even at a college overseas as some of his friends were planning to do. Mooney was the first person—other than the Old Man—who tried to channel his strengths in such a direction rather than punish him for his audaciousness. That she was a white woman only added intrigue to the relationship.

  Mooney had been hired to help the Kenya Department of Education set up a pilot literacy program, funded by the U.S. International Cooperation Administration (ICA), then an arm of the U.S. Department of State that administered aid for a host of development purposes. Her job, for which she was paid $6,355 a year, was to develop a country-wide literacy campaign that would instruct adults how to read and write first in their native language and then in English. The first step was to assemble a skilled administrative staff and launch a series of classes both in Nairobi and in the field.

  The need was huge. Eight out of ten African adults in Kenya could neither read nor write,4 a fact that loomed as a huge impediment to a nation fast approaching independence. Another one of Mooney’s tasks was to produce reading materials and primers written in the tribal languages, such as Dholuo and Masai, that could be used in the classroom. The Laubach method used a series of familiar pictures coupled with related sound associations to teach words. Once the student grasped the relationship between the sound and the thing, they could then master syllables and, ultimately, the words. For the millions of Kenyans who could neither read nor write in the 1950s, the political implications of such a campaign were huge, as Laubach well knew. “You think it is a pity they cannot read, but the real tragedy is that they have no voice in public affairs, they never vote, they are never represented in any conference, they are the silent victims, the forgotten men,” Laubach wrote in his 1943 book, The Silent Billion Speak.5

  Mooney launched the Literacy Center in a pair of rooms—No. 19 and 20—in Ribeiro House in the heart of Nairobi. She was soon assisted by another white woman, Helen Roberts, who had left her home in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 1958 to volunteer as a literacy teacher. Roberts, a grandmother of eleven and the author of children’s books, had heard Laubach speak and soon learned his method herself. Although Mooney was a skilled manager, Roberts, her senior by more than a decade, was the “people person,” and the two worked well as a team.

  They were a curious pair—two middle-aged women navigating the crowded city streets in Roberts’s blue Volkswagen Bug. Undaunted, they soon managed to introduce themselves to an emerging group of Kenyans who had begun to address the country’s dire need for educational opportunities. Mooney and Roberts also traveled widely “up country” to hold teacher training courses and distribute readers.

  Although the Laubach method caught on quickly and Mooney’s classrooms were soon packed with adult students, getting started had been challenging. In the beginning most Kenyans regarded Mooney with a deep-seated suspicion, wary of anything that hinted of the colonial government’s largesse, one of the legacies of the bloody Mau Mau years. Although many Kenyans were hungry for education, they were fearful of the government publicity vans and radio announcements that broadcast the program under the banner “Kusoma Ni Faida,” Swahili for “reading is profitable.”6 Most were convinced it was all part of a scheme to raise taxes or move them elsewhere, just as they had been forcibly relocated to the brutal detention camps during the Emergency.

  Indeed, Mooney’s appearance in the politically charged atmosphere of the day prompted a flutter of suspicion far beyond the audience at Makadara Hall as well. Days later a columnist for the Sunday Post, a Nairobi weekly newspaper, sniffed at the impropriety of her appeal, writing, “I know that Miss Mooney merely talked about Adult Literacy but a political platform is not the place for such talk by a representative of a Government Department—particularly a representative of a nation who are on record as being against the idea of the Colonies.”7 And a week after her address a member of Nairobi’s Criminal Investigation Department dropped by her office to “discuss” her breach of protocol. But Mooney, an earnest law abider, had acquired approval from educational authorities before she made her appearance.

  Deeply moved by the plight of those who could not read or write, Mooney was sure that her mission was divinely led. In a letter she wrote several weeks after she arrived, Mooney described watching a group of illiterate women leaving a community hall and heading “over the fresh green hillside to their homes, some of them ten miles away. And at last I felt that my own trail had stopped going in circles and had led me to the reason for being here.... I no longer doubt God’s time table. There is some reason for my being here at this particular time.”8

  Mooney’s efforts attracted the interest of two of Kenya’s most prominent college graduates, who were among a tiny handful of Kenyans who could boast of college degrees. One was Dr. Julius Gikonyo Kiano, who had earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkley in 1956 and was the first Kenyan to receive a doctoral degree, and the other was Kariuki Karanja Njiiri, who earned a Master’s of Arts degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.9 Kiano, a savvy Kikuyu economist, helped Mooney overcome the Kenyan people’s widespread mistrust of government and guided her in the recruitment of teachers. Njiiri, the son of a senior Kikuyu chief who had his pick of jobs on his return in 1959, became her chief assistant. Both men would be instrumental in assisting Tom Mboya to raise money and select candidates for the student airlifts. One of the names that would come across their desks for consideration would be Barack Obama.

  In the crowded Ribeiro Street office, Obama started out as a low-level clerk assigned to basic office tasks. He took dictation, helped organize the office, and assisted with translations in Luo and Swahili. But he was soon promoted to the writing committee, composed of half a dozen young men assigned to write elementary adult readers in their native language. Dressed in jacket and tie, Obama and the other writers sat at long wooden tables, carefully penning the pamphlets used as follow-up to the literary primers. If the high-arching Obama grumbled that the work was somewhat menial, he also realized that the job was a critical first step toward fulfilling his dream. First, the work was exceptionally well paying. But more important, teaching literacy was a critical component in the advance toward independence.

  In all, Obama wrote three books in Luo that employed “Otieno” the wise man as a model instructor. The first book was Otieno Jarieko, Kitabu Mokuongo: Yore Mabeyo Mag Rito Ngima, or “Otieno Jarieko, the Wise Man, the First Book: Wise Ways of Health.” Otieno describes a variety of healthy foods, demonstrates how to use a knife and fork, and gives inst
ruction in the proper way to build a latrine. The second and third books center on Otieno’s teachings of the wise ways of farming and citizenship, respectively. Obama worked on the three books almost the entire year and a half that he assisted Mooney, and he proudly included them on his résumé.

  Working closely with the American women and a handful of their Kenyan assistants, Obama kept his bravado under close wraps and toed the line. The style in the office was highly cooperative and the staff represented a host of different tribes, due in part to the need for materials written in varied tribal languages. Obama worked closely with one of Mooney’s early hires, a young Kikuyu named George Wanyee, who recently returned from India with a BA. Wanyee helped prepare Kikuyu charts and was the first editor of the Key, a newsletter for new readers.

  A photograph of Obama, in the fifth issue of the Key, shows him at the chalkboard in the Center during Laubach’s visit in the fall of 1958. Obama is at the ready with his chalk, helping to write the story of Jesus’s birth in Luo, a project he worked on for several weeks. Part of the point of the project was the religious story itself, but Laubach also noted that “the 1,000 most common English words are used in such stories.”10 Obama impressed Laubach, who chose him to appear in his farewell photograph with a group including Laubach, Njiiri, and Mooney.

  A highly organized person, Mooney ran a tight ship on Ribeiro Street and was well aware that the eyes of both the Kenyan and British governments were on her after her appearance at Makadara Hall. But she was also deeply interested in the lives of the Kenyans she was working with and went out of her way to help many of them achieve their personal goals. In addition to Obama, she assisted nearly a dozen other young Kenyans accomplish their educational goals. She kept a running “wish list” of projects and people for whom she hoped to find funding or contacts, often turning to Laubach for help. Even after she returned to the United States, she was instrumental in assisting another young Kenyan to enroll in a high school just outside Bohemia, New York, where he lived with her brother for two years.

  Over the course of long hours spent poring over the evolving texts with Obama, the serious-minded Mooney gradually warmed to Obama’s ironic sense of humor. In Obama she found a keenly intelligent student bristling with potential, one who also happened to have a powerful magnetism with women. That he was desperately eager to perfect his English and advance the rudimentary social skills the Old Man had taught him may have drawn her to him even more. At the time they met, Obama was just coming into his manhood. Obama was now a young father, for early in 1958 Kezia had given birth to his first son. They named him Roy Abongo Obama, although he later assumed the name Malik. Kezia took care of the baby almost entirely herself, but Obama was aware of his responsibilities as the father of an infant son. Mooney had no children of her own, but she delighted in young people and took a great interest in Obama’s small family.

  Although not a tall man, his broad face and often earnest expression gave Obama a commanding appearance. Along with his elegant demeanor, he possessed an intense physical allure. The same fluidity that drew admiring stares on the Kendu Bay dance floor of his youth was now present in an everyday grace of movement. The power of his appeal, however, had as much to do with his aura of self-confidence and ebullience as it did with his physical attributes, at least as a young man. And then there was the trumpeting voice, now matured, that could snap a sleepy room to attention from a corridor away. Obama, clearly, was not to be passed over.

  What Obama found in Mooney was more complex. Part of her appeal for him was certainly the job. Working at the Literacy Center provided both social standing and the opportunity to rise. But Mooney and Obama also spent time together outside the office, enjoying rural drives and attending some of the popular evening dances. And that association brought a different kind of benefit for Obama. Among a certain kind of African man, just keeping company with a white woman provided considerable social status. Doing so was a bold act, the behavior of a man who no longer intended to blindly knuckle to European social mores. Although certain elements among both the colonists and the Africans disapproved of interracial unions, others felt it was high time that things began to change. C. M. G. Argwings-Kodhek, the lawyer who squared off with Mboya in colorful political debates, had openly thrown down a gauntlet when he married a white woman while he was studying outside the country in the early 1950s, a time when, in Kenya, it was against the law to do so. Kenyatta had also married a white woman in England, although he did not bring her home until after independence. And if others speculated about the precise nature of the relationship between Mooney and Obama, well, all the better from Obama’s point of view.

  Several of Obama’s friends recall Mooney and Obama touring through town in her 1956 Plymouth or pulled off on the side of the road with Obama repairing one of the car’s seemingly perpetual flat tires. And when Obama stopped in at meetings of the Kogelo Union Association, a group that looked after affairs of interest to the Kogelo clan and provided support to the needy, she would wait patiently behind the wheel while he went inside.

  Mooney waited outside partly because the discussion concerned union business and was held strictly in Luo. There would surely also have been an element of social propriety being observed on her part as well. Just six years earlier, relations between African men and white women were strictly circumscribed by law. Under the Penal Code of the Protectorate of Kenya, a man or a woman engaging in sexual relations with a person of another race could be subject to up to five years in prison. The interactions between white women and African men in particular had long been closely scrutinized. With the influx of a growing number of wazungu in the 1950s, including educators and government advisers, black and white relations had become somewhat less extraordinary. But though the law forbidding such unions had been repealed in 1951 and the situation was more relaxed, mixed couples still raised eyebrows on the streets of Nairobi. On the back roads leading through the countryside, Obama and Mooney drew astonished stares.

  Obama minded not at all. Although many a Kenyan man would have shredded his identity card before asking a white woman to dance, Obama did not hesitate. When he came across Mooney at one of the dances at the Railway Hall not long after he started working for her, he tucked his cigarette jauntily between his lips, and extended his hand. “At that time, to go and beg a dance from a white lady, you must be very brave,” said Arthur Reuben Owino. “You must be well behaved and well dressed—you know, civilized. But Obama was all of that. And when he asked that white lady to dance, she said ‘yes.’”

  And she said yes more than once. Despite the raised eyebrows, Obama and Mooney clearly took great pleasure in dancing together. He was the one who escorted her to an invitation-only evening at the prestigious African Club, an elegant event featuring classical music and an impressive list of guests clad in their most elegant silks and smoking jackets. In a letter to friends back home, Roberts wrote, “Well, the dance was a wonderful affair. The band was excellent and the quality of guests was very high.... Betty danced many dances, without harm to her back, tho she got very tired.”11

  Obama confided in a few of his friends that he was not sure how far to take the friendship, so they observed the evolving situation with keen interest. Obama, of course, paid little mind to rules or social niceties, but a middle-aged mzungu? One working for the government? This was a whole new level of daring. Or something.

  Richard Muga, a childhood friend of Obama’s who lived with Obama during the first year he worked at the Literacy Center, recalls that Obama often visited Mooney in her two-bedroom flat. A tireless letter writer and amateur photographer, Mooney took many photographs of Obama that she kept throughout her life. They are a curious collection of largely posed shots, possibly taken to be used with school or job applications overseas. In a couple of them he stands in her flat next to her boxy, brown radio, staring intently into the camera, his expression pensive. In another he frowns in a lineup with other members of the literacy staff, standing on a Nair
obi street. One shows him smiling whimsically—and completely uncharacteristically—at a white flower that he appears to have just plucked. “They were so close, no air passed between them,” said Muga. “They cooked together. They spent time together. And a lot of people noticed that Barack’s English got much better during that time. The Mooney lady helped him very much with that.”

  Kezia, preoccupied with her new baby back at their home, seemed wholly unaware of such observations about her husband. On occasion she and Roy were included on outings with Mooney and several others from the office. As was the custom in Nairobi of the time, men routinely socialized in the evenings without their wives. Far from resenting this mzungu’s close association with her husband, Kezia was glad that he had a job and was hopeful that the connection might bring even greater opportunity. Although Kezia acknowledges that her husband had a roving eye even from the start, she does not believe that Mooney was one of his romantic interests.

  Despite the speculation of some of Obama’s friends, that Mooney would have had a physical relationship with Obama seems unlikely for a multitude of reasons. For starters, her religious convictions would have put any married man off-limits. What’s more, Mooney was friendly with Obama’s young family. She and other members of the office staff would sometimes picnic on the outskirts of Nairobi along with Kezia, baby Roy, and Mooney’s assistant, Wanyee. Mooney herself had experienced firsthand the pain of a broken home after her father left her mother when she was a teenager, and she was deeply opposed to extramarital affairs. Mooney often declared that she was waiting to find someone as reliable as one of her two older brothers, who had long-standing marriages, for her to marry.