The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  Not everyone made it through the rigorous and highly competitive program. More than a few who found the heavy emphasis on math in the early 1960s not what they had expected cut their losses after two years and fled with a master’s degree, widely considered by those left behind to be a consolation prize. Professor James Duesenberry regularly greeted his opening class in Money and Finance with the chilling observation: “In every entering class there are just so many geniuses,” he would say, taking a long, slow look at the students listening intently to him. “I just don’t know where they all go.”19

  The first year was a slog of must-dos. There was economic theory with Ed Chamberlin, a department fixture who had made his name in the early 1930s with the publication of his theory of monopolistic competition, and macroeconomics taught by Robert Dorfman, a stern figure who was one of the department’s earliest proponents of the mathematical trend. Statistics and economic history were also de rigueur. In their second year students were free to branch into areas of their own particular interest, with the realization that whatever they chose they would have to make a comprehensive presentation of several subject areas for their oral exams at the end of the year. If they passed their exams, they could then move on to pursue their dissertation.

  Like the majority of his classmates, Obama had taken only a modest amount of math in his undergraduate years and was largely unprepared for the rigors of macroeconomics as it was being taught. He was an admirer of some of the pioneers of the emerging field, such as MIT’s legendary Paul Samuelson, author of the largest-selling economics textbooks of its time, Economics: An Introductory Analysis, and Kenneth Arrow, who had coproduced a transformative mathematical proof of a general equilibrium, and Obama read their work closely. Although he managed to pass the department’s math test in the first few months, he struggled to keep up with the weight of his coursework. In his letter to Sylvia Baldwin, his friend in Hawaii, Obama uncharacteristically conceded that things were getting “pretty rough.” “The competition here is just maddening,” Obama wrote. “In fact I have to read at least 12 books a week plus monographs, periodicals and professional journals, let alone the routine of school, the papers required and my own research on the theory I am trying to build. It really does keep me busy.”20

  Obama was so busy, in fact, that he had no time for either the public speaking or campus socializing that he had dallied in while in Honolulu. A month after Obama arrived, Dr. Ralph Bunche, who in 1950 was the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize and was an active supporter of the civil rights movement, spoke on campus and declared that not only was the Congo unprepared for independence, but also that many of the new African states were not ready for such a step. The same argument had provoked Obama to loud fury two years earlier in Hawaii, but this time he said not a word in public. No admonishing letter to the Crimson. No pontificating on the granite steps above Cambridge Street. Nor was Obama one of the regulars at the coffee shop on the mezzanine at Littauer, where some of the heavyweights in the class like Thurow and Bowles regularly hung around noodling over multiple regression analysis and linear programming, not to mention debating the Vietnam War and the racial turbulence in the South. More often than not, Obama was in his cramped study carrel in the Littauer basement bent over the calculus problems that bedeviled him. The coffee klatch was a telling measure of the changes transforming the study of economics. The things that were cutting edge—structural imbalance, econometric forecasting models, game theory—were not so much in the textbooks as they were in the air. “The guys you saw there every day had a higher batting average, they just did better than the others,” explained Roger Noll, then a classmate and later a professor of economics at Stanford University. “The up-to-date conversation was going on in the lounge. That’s where you were talking the new stuff. That’s what kids do if you want to be at the forefront. You don’t want to be Ken Galbraith, you want to be Ken Arrow.”

  Barack H. Obama as a student in Hawaii. He was one of an elite group of young Kenyan men and women educated in America and charged with shaping the new Kenyan nation after independence was achieved in 1963.

  The gravesite of Obama Opiyo, the great grandfather of President Barack Obama. The grave is located in Kanyadhiang where the president’s father, Barack Hussein Obama, was born in 1936.

  Kezia Obama, the first of Barack Obama’s four wives, standing with their children Malik and Auma in the 1960s. Kezia now lives in Bracknell, England, while Malik and Auma live in Nairobi.

  Barack H. Obama was recognized as an exceptionally bright student while still a young boy. Although he was accepted at the prestigious Maseno School in Western Kenya and studied there for several years, the principal grew annoyed at his challenging behavior and would not allow Obama to complete his studies.

  Arthur Reuben Owino, a classmate and childhood friend of Obama’s. Reuben recalls that Obama would often say, “You don’t know what you are talking about. I am telling you what I know. ‘And then you would be arguing with him endlessly, endlessly.’”

  Elizabeth “Betty” Mooney was an American literacy worker in Kenya in the late 1950s. In this photograph—one of her favorites—she visits a Masai tribal community in 1959.

  Mooney with Helen Roberts, an American literacy volunteer from California, standing near their car in Kenya. Mooney hired Obama as her secretary in 1958 and later paid for his first year’s tuition at the University of Hawaii.

  Obama and Mooney worked closely together for nearly two years, and she took many photographs of him. Here, he poses in front of the radio in her home in Nairobi.

  The primer writing committee hard at work. While working for Mooney in the Kenya Adult Literacy Program, Obama wrote three primers in the Luo language for new literates on health, agriculture, and citizenship. The first book was called Otieno Jarieko: The Wise Man.

  Barack Obama in a photograph taken by Betty Mooney.

  The Obama family on a picnic in Kenya with Betty Mooney in 1958. From the left: Kezia and baby Malik, Betty Mooney, Barack Obama, and George Wanyee, another worker in the literacy office.

  Barack Obama studying at the YMCA in Honolulu. He was the first African student on the University of Hawaii campus, and his crisp attire stood out among the more casual clothing favored by other students.

  During his years at the University of Hawaii, Barack Obama was hard to miss. He frequently spoke in public on topics related to Africa and debated other students on the subject of communism versus democracy.

  Nearly a decade after he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UH, Obama returned to Honolulu in 1971 in a far more somber mood. During that visit, the only time that he saw his son, Barack Obama II, his third wife was in court back in Nairobi seeking a divorce.

  Although Obama was an undergraduate at UH, he often spent his time with a diverse group of graduate students at the university’s East-West Center. Here he attends a party of international students in Honolulu in 1961.

  Obama attends a peace rally in Ala Moana Park in May of 1962. In brief remarks to the crowd, Obama called for a reduction in military spending. “Peace will release great resources,” he said.

  Fellow UH student Pake Zane was a friend of Obama’s on campus and later traveled to Kenya to visit him. Obama told Zane that he had received death threats as a result of his testimony in Tom Mboya’s murder trial.

  om Mboya, the popular Kenyan ationalist leader, in London for he 1960 Kenya Conference. boya, a fellow Luo, was a entor to Obama, and the two poke on a Nairobi street corner short time before Mboya was ssassinated in July of 1969.

  Jomo Kenyatta, president and founding father of Kenya, attends a 1964 ceremony in Nairobi. Obama was openly critical of Kenyatta’s economic policies and the tight-knit group of Kikuyu with which he surrounded himself.

  Omar Okech Obama, Barack Obama’s half brother, attended the Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1963 to 1965. Omar Obama, third from the left in the back row, played varsity soccer and was a member of t
he school’s Debate Club and Newspaper Club.

  Ruth Beatrice Baker, graduating from Simmons College in Boston, in 1958. Baker dated Obama for several weeks in Cambridge and then followed him to Nairobi where she became his third wife on Christmas Eve, 1964.

  Obama and his growing family lived in the Woodley Estate section of Nairobi in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Neighbors could often hear his booming baritone over the fence and were well aware that the Obama marriage was a troubled one.

  The two Barack H. Obamas pose for a photo that was apparently taken in Honolulu in 1971. The Christmas visit was the only time the two were together after the elder Obama left his small family in Hawaii to attend Harvard University in 1962.

  Hawa Auma Obama, the sister of the elder Barack Obama and president Obama’s aunt, standing outside her home in Oyugis, Kenya. Auma sells coal by the roadside for a living.

  The Kaloleni Public Bar, a favored Luo watering hole on Nairobi’s southeast side. Obama retired to the Kaloleni almost daily after work and passed his final hours drinking there with friends before he died in November of 1982.

  Habiba Akumu, Barack Obama’s mother, sits mournfully beside her son’s coffin in 1982.

  The gravesite of Barack H. Obama on the Obama family compound in Alego. The gravesite of his father, Hussein Onyango Obama, is a short distance behind it.

  Mark Ndesandjo, one of President Obama’s six siblings on his father’s side, is interviewed in Guangzhou, China, in 2009. Ndesandjo wrote what he calls a semiautobiographical novel in which the father is described as physically abusive and a heavy drinker.

  The second oldest of President Obama’s siblings, Auma Obama, published her autobiography, Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen, or Life Always Comes in Between, in 2010. Auma Obama, who studied in Germany, writes that she found it hard to forgive her father for the breakup of their family and years of neglect.

  The youngest brother. Born six months before his father died, George Hussein Onyango Obama never knew the father that he shares with the U.S. president. A resident of the Nairobi slum of Huruma, George penned his own memoir, Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival, in 2010.

  Barack Obama’s oldest son, Malik Obama, made headlines of his own in the fall of 2010 when he took his third wife, a nineteen-year-old still in secondary school. Malik, 53, lives in Alego next to his grandmother, Mama Sarah.

  The first of Barack Obama’s four wives, Kezia Obama, maintains that she never divorced her late husband and that he continued to father children with her, even after he married two American women.

  Noll, who had earned a BS with honors in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, was one of the math guys. With his West Coast openness and affable manner, he was also an approachable sort. So he was the one Obama stopped one day in the lounge and asked if he would give him a hand with a class on calculus that was at the heart of the program. “Obama was saying, boy, this is hard, this is really hard. This is not what I thought economics was,” recalled Noll, who worked with Obama on several occasions. “But he did not complain. He was just reacting to a different kind of economics than he had studied as an undergraduate. He was not at all unusual for the twenty-five or so other students who were completely underwater. There were a lot of students who were in worse shape than he. The disparity of preparation in the class was immense and it made it an extremely difficult group to teach.”

  Obama managed to master the new techniques and would ultimately pass both his general and oral exams in the spring of his second year at Harvard. But in the version of his Harvard experience that he recounted when he got back home, the story line went quite differently. By his account, Obama was not the one who needed tutoring in math but rather Philip Ndegwa, his budding rival. And the man to whom Ndegwa turned for help was none other than Barack Obama. Obama, who clearly learned his stuff, likely did give Ndegwa a hand. Although Ndegwa had attended the prestigious Alliance High School in Kenya and Makerere University before he came to Harvard, he apparently struggled with some of the advanced math himself. Nor did he get a degree from Harvard, as he left after only one year. But for years afterward, as Ndegwa rose steadily higher, Obama would flaunt his tutelage and angrily denounce Ndegwa as unfit for his job. “Obama would slam his fist on the table and say that Philip knows nothing, he knows nothing about math or economics,” recalled Francis Masakhalia, Obama’s friend and a prominent Kenyan economist who served as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning. “He would say, ‘I am a much better economist than he can ever hope to be.’” In a particularly creative twist on his Harvard years, Obama claimed to have been taught there by Ken Arrow and recounted in detail to his superiors the classes he took with the famous economist.21 But Arrow did not even arrive at Harvard until 1968, four years after Obama left.

  Still, Obama loomed large to the growing number of young Kenyans arriving in Boston in the early 1960s, eagerly seeking a college degree and, in some cases, a high school diploma. They came with little money and less an idea of what to expect in the churning cities of America. What they did know was that Obama had already achieved many of the things to which they aspired. He had not only earned a college degree but had also been recognized as Phi Beta Kappa. Now at one of the world’s most famous universities, he had a summer job at the International Marketing Institute in Cambridge, a small firm that offered programs in product marketing to business people from around the world, and this meant that he had a little extra cash. Just as impressive, he had a series of girlfriends who hovered over him and cooked rice and novel meats. And when the younger students came knocking at the door on Magazine Street, Obama welcomed them warmly and offered them not only a place to sleep but also all the advice they could absorb. “We looked upon him as a model. He really gave us inspiration,” said George Saitoti, a former vice president of Kenya and later Minister for Internal Security. “This was a serious person who was very well respected and who was very approachable. We were just young boys, you know, and he spoke very firmly to us about education and what we needed to do. He sounded just like President Obama does now.”

  Saitoti, then eighteen and a senior at the Cambridge School of Weston was one of a half-dozen young men who made their way to Obama’s apartment. Some would stay for only a night or two, while others spent an entire summer there while working odd jobs in the area after school. Brothers Moses and Otieno O. Wasonga, who were attending high schools north of Boston, routinely spent their weekends with Obama, who nicknamed them wuod ruoth, Luo for son of a chief. The Wasongas’ father was, in fact, a chief and had known Hussein Onyango well, which drew them even closer to Obama.

  Oyuko Onyango Mbeche was only fourteen when he arrived in Massachusetts on the second of Tom Mboya’s airlifts in 1960 to attend Assumption Preparatory School in Worcester before going on to Assumption College. But Mbeche quickly found that conventional sources of guidance were not particularly helpful. When he sought assistance from the Kenyan Mission at the United Nations in New York to help find a job a few years later, he claims that simmering tribal hostilities between the Kikuyu and Luo had already poisoned the waters. For a Kenyan whose name began with an O, thus immediately identifying him as a Luo, no guidance would be available from the Kikuyu-dominated office. Mbeche asked around for help, and when he learned of an older student named Obama, he too headed for Magazine Street. Mbeche wound up not only spending the summer on Obama’s floor while working as a technician at a nearby hospital at Obama’s suggestion, but he also eventually changed his career objective as a result of Obama’s influence. Obama, he recalled, frequently talked about the importance of advanced math and urged Mbeche to study calculus so that he could take on more sophisticated mathematic challenges. Intrigued, Mbeche enrolled in Harvard Summer School to study math and eventually abandoned his plans to go to medical school in order to become an engineer. “He was always saying that math is a language like any other and I began to understand what he was talking about,” said
Mbeche. “You get curious, you know.”

  At twenty-six years of age, Obama was the old man of the group. Some evenings, far from the cerebral intensity of the Littauer Center, he would sit with his pipe jutting out of his mouth and riff with the young men staying with him. They listened to his favorite Lingala music or the innovative jazz compositions of Tabu Ley Rochereau, an immensely popular Zairian singer who popularized the “Independence Cha Cha.”

  Another favorite pastime drawn from Obama’s childhood was an exchange of pakruoks, a Luo game in which several people would trade humorous or self-flattering phrases about those in attendance. Obama would often raise his hand, call a halt to the music and declare of himself, “An wuod akumu nya Njoga, wuod nyar ber,” meaning, “I am the son of Akumu, the daughter of Njoga, who was a beautiful woman.” Or he might say, “An Obama wuod kogello, wuoyi madichol manyiri thone, wuoyi mochamo buk ma musungu oyie,” meaning, “I am Obama, son of Kogelo, a dark man who ladies die for, a man who has eaten books until the white man acknowledged.” The young men were accustomed to hearing the admonishment, “Wuoyi mariek somo kwano kendo ok dhi e miel,” meaning, “A smart man studies math and stays away from parties.” The game would devolve into a riotous play on personal characteristics or foibles that would leave them all weak with laughter.22