by Sally Jacobs
When Obama was around there was always a steady stream of conversation that sometimes stretched into the early hours of the morning. The situation back home was always high on the list. In the months after independence leading up to the declaration of the Republic in 1964, Kenya bustled with activity as the real job of nation building got underway. Already simmering differences between the political parties KANU and KADU over critical issues of Africanization and the country’s economic structure were becoming more fraught. Obama’s mentor, Tom Mboya, had been named Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, and Obama was anxious to see that Mboya had increasingly aligned himself with Kenyatta’s more conservative supporters. Obama paid close attention to such developments, and on his return would insert himself directly into the evolving political debate over the country’s future shape.
Although Obama clearly took pleasure in mentoring the young Kenyans who flocked to his apartment, his thoughts were preoccupied with his own brothers and sisters back home. As the eldest male, it fell to Obama to provide financial assistance for school fees for his siblings and to help out generally. What that really meant was that he needed to help his brothers. In a Kenyan family of the early 1960s people generally thought that daughters would get married and be consumed by domesticity, and thus they would have no need for postsecondary education. Obama’s older sister, Sarah, was just as clever and willful as her brother, and she often begged for advanced schooling, but Hussein Onyango would hear nothing of it. In the Obama family the next male in line after Barack was Omar Okech Obama, the first son born to Hussein Onyango and his wife, Sarah Ogwel. Omar was eleven years younger than his big brother in America, and it was his education that the family was now anxious to advance.23
Obama took his responsibility to heart, and in the little spare time he had he explored high schools in the area that might be suitable for his brother. As it happened, Obama had become friendly with a woman who had close ties to what was then called Browne & Nichols, a tony boy’s preparatory school that had graduated many of Boston’s preeminent politicians and businessmen and just happened to be located in a leafy Cambridge enclave a short distance from Harvard. Her name was Ellen Frost, a Radcliffe student with an interest in developing countries. Frost had gotten to know Obama at a party of African students, and the two had an occasional coffee together. Not only had Frost’s brothers attended Browne & Nichols, but her father, a downtown investment banker, was a treasurer at the school. Perhaps her father could mention Omar to the school’s admission officers, she suggested.
Frost’s father agreed, and in the fall of 1963 a sturdy young man with a somber expression arrived in Cambridge eager to go to work. Omar had apparently been brought to the United States on Tom Mboya’s 1963 airlift, as his name is included on one of the early student lists. According to a notation on that list, his brother, Barack, had put up $300 toward his brother’s travel expenses.24 “Omar was a tall, gangly good-natured adolescent,” recalled Frost, who went on to have a varied career in international affairs in the U.S. government and in business. “He did not look much like his half brother. But his classmates were fascinated with this boy from the jungles of Africa.”
Although Omar was apparently the only African student on campus, he seemed to fit in with the privileged prep school crowd in his trim blazer bearing the school’s seal and his starched white shirt, which he wore daily just as his brother did. A good three years older than the rest of the members of the class of 1966, he entertained his fellow tenth graders with elaborate stories of wild animals roaming the bush and of the indomitable Mau Mau freedom fighters. Mesmerized by his arched British accent, other students hung on tales of a life that seemed vastly different and more exotic than their own tame suburban existence.
Omar Obama squeezed in with his brother and his roommate on Magazine Street at times during the first few years he lived in Boston. With Obama Sr. immersed in his own studies, the younger Omar must have lived a fairly independent life. Given the substantial age difference between them, the half-brothers often seemed to visitors more like an uncle and nephew than siblings. By his second year on campus Omar was deeply involved with both the campus newspaper and the school’s debate team. But where he really excelled was on the soccer field. Soccer coach Stephen “Hummer” Holmes remembers the first day Omar headed out to play. He had on a T-shirt and shorts, but nothing else. No soccer cleats or shin-guards, not even a pair of socks. Like most any young soccer player in Kenya, Omar was accustomed to playing in his bare feet. And when Holmes insisted he wear something on his feet, Omar loudly objected. “‘Coach,’ he’d say,” as Holmes recalls, “‘I need to take off the shoes. Please coach. I can’t feel the ball. When I kick the ball, I cannot direct it. Please coach.’ And I’d answer, ‘Omar, I wish I could help. But when we play the game here, we wear shoes. It’s the rule.’”
Finding cleats that would fit him was no easy task. Omar’s feet were not only extraordinarily wide but were also deeply layered with callous from his years of playing soccer in his bare feet or, as Holmes describes it, “as if he had sewn in shoe leather for soles.” Custom cleats had to be made for Omar’s extraordinary feet, and he then took weeks to adjust to them. But when he finally got back on the field, Omar quickly became one of the team’s highest scorers with a unique kicking style that propelled the ball clean off the top of his foot. Although a far more talented player than others on the team, Omar readily volunteered to teach his teammates his skills. “He put his team first, his teammates second, and himself third,” said Holmes. “A very humble guy.”
Whether because of a lack of funds or poor grades, Omar did not graduate from the school. He withdrew after two years and enrolled in the public high school in nearby Newton in the fall of 1965.25 By then Obama had gone back to Kenya and Omar was on his own, apparently struggling without his older brother’s supervision. In his move to Newton, Omar was sponsored by John R. Williams, the amiable alumnae coordinator at the International Marketing Institute in Cambridge where Obama had worked years earlier and whose son was also enrolled in the Newton High School. For reasons that are unclear, Omar did not graduate from that school either but dropped out before the end of the year.26
Shortly afterward Omar changed his name to O. Onyango Obama, preferring his father’s African name to his own.27 He remained in Cambridge for several years, living in an apartment on Perry Street several blocks from his brother’s old apartment, and his residence became a legendary meeting place and crash pad for visiting Kenyan students. When Barack Obama came to visit in the early 1970s, he too spent Sunday mornings exchanging pakruoks and listening to music over ugali and fish on the porch at Perry Street. Achola Pala Okeyo, a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard at the time, also recalls Obama’s half-sister, Zeituni Onyango, who was visiting the United States and would periodically drop in for a visit. “Perry Street was a rite of passage, an initiation. If you were a Kenyan in Boston, you had to go there,” recalled Okeyo. “We’d do praise names and dance until we dropped. It was a huge amount of fun.”
Until their nephew became the president and the hordes of eager cameramen came in hot pursuit, Obama’s aunt and uncle lived relatively quietly in the Boston area. Apparently, in the early 1990s the same “Uncle Omar” who the president wrote in Dreams had gone missing in Boston was the treasurer of a small convenience store called the Wells Market in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where he sometimes pitched in and worked as a clerk.28 He was the one who was on duty when two men in black masks attacked the store one night in the summer of 1994, and he was beaten with a sawed-off rifle and robbed, according to press accounts. Now sharing a house with several other Kenyans in the western suburb of Framingham, Omar maintains his low profile and declined to be interviewed.
Zeituni, however, has had a hard time keeping out of the news. When British reporters went searching in the final weeks of Obama’s presidential campaign for the Aunt Zeituni, they found her living in a squat brick public housing complex i
n South Boston. A blunt and outspoken woman, Zeituni, fifty-nine, worked as a computer programmer for Kenya Breweries in the late 1980s before moving in 2000 to the United States. When the press learned that her request for political asylum had been denied and she had been ordered deported, her case instantly became a cause célèbre, igniting the issue of illegal immigration. During much of President Obama’s first year in office, Zeituni, even by her own description, was seen as a political liability as she put the immigration laws to the test in her own battle to remain in the United States. Since her nephew’s election, the dramatic Zeituni has made two colorful court appearances in Boston, each trailed by a platoon of suited lawyers and dozens of reporters to whom she exclaimed periodically, “Praise God.” In the spring of 2010 an immigration judge astonished some observers by granting her political asylum, which enables her to apply for a green card and, ultimately, citizenship.29
Like Omar, Zeituni looked up to her big brother. The second child of Hussein Onyango and Mama Sarah, Zeituni was one of several family members who lived for short periods with him in Nairobi in the 1960s. In Dreams she says that Barack was her favorite dance partner when they were young and describes the many dance contests they entered together. In a brief interview Zeituni added that she was deeply indebted to the elder Barack for helping her throughout her life and in particular for buying her a cherished pair of shoes as a child.30
DURING THE YEARS that Obama Sr. attended Harvard he lived largely like any other student. He dutifully attended classes and bent over his textbooks late into the night. But Obama was also a man of Africa, and he had certain personal appetites that he made little effort to curb. One of them was for women. The gang holding court back at Littauer Center saw virtually nothing of this side of Obama; indeed, many do not recall him at all. But those who knew him more intimately saw a man who often drank heavily and aggressively pursued a succession of young women. And Harvard administrators soon noticed it too.
To Obama, women were there to be taken. Raised in a polygamous culture, he believed that a man should necessarily have multiple women as a measure of his virility and mastery of the world. His own father, Hussein Onyango, had at least four wives and countless other women in his life, and most Luo men traditionally had at least a few. So integral a part of the culture is this practice that a man’s wives traditionally live on the same compound together, with the first wife having the highest status and overseeing the others. In fact, if Obama had married only his first wife Kezia and never married or had children with another woman, this would have been the subject of some note back home.
However, Obama’s relentless pursuit of women—and sometimes more than one at a time—was something more than cultural habit. It was as if he had to engage sexually with any eligible women whom he encountered. Obama, to be sure, could be devastatingly charming and attentive to the women who wound up as his wives—when he chose to. But with a certain category of women he knew less well, he made no pretense of being interested in them for any reason other than their bodies, and he made not the slightest apology for it. It was an attitude that some American women found astonishing. Ellen Frost, who experienced Obama’s charm firsthand, describes his aggressive come-on to women as a kind of compulsion. “As Obama saw it, it was natural for a man to collect many women. That was the natural order of things,” said Frost. “In fact, he was very proud of his ability with women. You’d watch him at parties. He liked to dance and he was a very physical dancer. He’d dance in a very suggestive way, no subtlety. It was as though he gained some power in the conquest. He did not bother to come on intellectually to women. He used suggestive, provocative language, I would say overtly sexual. I liked Barack and found him interesting but I did not like it when he did that. It was a kind of God’s gift to women thing.”
One of the African students on campus while Obama was at Harvard was a Nigerian named Chukwuma Azikiwe. The son of the first president of Nigeria following independence, Azikiwe was an undergraduate in the class of 1963 and later earned an MBA at the Harvard Business School. Obama’s earnest working habits impressed Azikiwe, but he was taken aback to find that when Obama was not at his books, he often imbibed heavily. Once, Azikiwe encountered an inebriated Obama aggressively propositioning a very uncomfortable young woman in a doorway and called him off. Another time, he ran into him at a party moments before Obama, again well into his cups, got into a fist fight with another guest. Azikiwe began to avoid Obama when he saw him on campus. Obama, Azikiwe concluded in an interview, “was an unguided ballistic missile.”
Over the course of his four marriages, Obama was selective about who he told about his wives and children and who he did not. Prodded by Frost’s amiable questioning, Obama revealed that he had a son in Hawaii of whom he was very proud. But when he mentioned to Azinna Nwafor that he might be visiting Hawaii, he said he was going “because the weather is quite good there” and made no mention of a son. For the women he dated, such erratic revelations were, to put it mildly, problematic. Some became furious when they learned that not only was he married, but married to two women at once.
Nwafor recalls a Saturday evening when he was a sophomore and studying in his room when he suddenly heard a loud banging on his window. It was Obama’s girlfriend at the time, a Radcliffe undergraduate, weeping and begging to be let in. As Nwafor consoled the young woman, who had apparently just learned that Obama was married, Obama himself abruptly appeared and snapped at Nwafor to leave her alone. “He was very angry with me, as he thought I was trying to take his girlfriend,” Nwafor sighed. “But I never did that. I never had difficulty getting my own girlfriends. It was interesting that someone who was capable of having multiple affairs could jump to that conclusion. We didn’t see each other much after that.”
Back in Honolulu, Ann Dunham was also growing annoyed with Obama’s dating habits. It wasn’t that she wanted him back. By the end of 1963 Dunham had resigned herself to the fact that Obama would not be returning to her side nor would they be going to Africa together when he completed his studies. When he had left, however, Obama had agreed to send financial support for their son. But pressed by the burden of providing for his visiting family as well as by the genuine costs of being a student, Obama never provided as he had promised. When Dunham gleaned from his occasional letters that he was dating other women in Cambridge and presumably spending money on those dates, her seemingly inexhaustible patience at last ran out. In the beginning of 1964 she began divorce proceedings, and by the spring of that year the unlikely union that had been sealed on the sun-kissed island of Maui came to an end. Obama signed a postal notice indicating that he had received the certified divorce documents in Cambridge, but he did not make an appearance in the Honolulu courtroom where the divorce was finalized.
In the years to come Dunham confided to her closer friends that Obama had greatly upset her during his days in Cambridge when he had chosen to spend the little extra money he had on women rather than his young son. “She mentioned that he had girlfriends in Boston but she did not mind because she knew that in African society men often had more than one girl,” said Alice G. Dewey, the chairperson of Dunham’s doctoral committee at the University of Hawaii and later an anthropology professor emeritus. “But it did bother her that he was spending the money on them that he should have spent on Barry [Barack Jr.]. Somewhere along the way, ‘This made sense,’ shifted to ‘Hey, you said you’d send me money,’ to ‘This is not going to work.’ She figured Barry was a responsibility of Barack’s that he was not living up to and it increasingly annoyed her.”
A few months before the divorce became final in 1964, immigration authorities once again grew alarmed at Obama’s interactions with women just as they had been during his Hawaii days. This time, Obama was dating a young Kenyan woman who had been brought to the United States under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and was attending high school in Sudbury, Massachusetts. The girl was not only doing poorly in school but had also taken an
unauthorized trip to London, which greatly disturbed UU officials. Obama, who was believed to be her boyfriend, was frantically trying to get her reinstated at school, according to his “A” file. In a memo describing the situation to J. A. Hamilton, then district director of Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Boston office, Immigrant Inspector K. D. MacDonald concluded, “Obama is considered by [redacted by federal authorities] to be a slippery character.” 31 Aware of Obama’s track record in Hawaii, Hamilton was apparently troubled by Obama’s involvement with yet another young woman who was having difficulties.
Concerned about the incident, immigration officials decided to look into Obama’s status at Harvard. They also decided to hold up on his routine request for an extension of his stay, just for the moment. Officials contacted Harvard’s International Office, but far from gaining clarity through their conversations with the staff there, more clouds began to gather. Obama had told immigration authorities he was married to someone in Hawaii and intended to get a divorce. But Harvard officials, prompted by the INS call, had done a little digging into the matter and were concerned that Obama was married to two women; they just weren’t sure if that made him a bigamist or a typical Luo. As immigration inspector M. F. McKeon wrote in a memo, “Harvard thinks he’s married to someone in Kenya and someone in Honolulu, but that possibly he belongs to a tribe where multiple marriages are O.K.” Harvard, which had apparently never before probed Obama’s statement that he was married, as it had seen no need to, was distinctly not happy. David D. Henry, the director of Harvard’s International Office, told INS that he would talk to Obama about his marital situation, but he would not do so until after Obama had taken his exams, according to the INS memo, “in case he might get upset and use that as an excuse for not passing. Harvard will call us with the results of the interview.”32