The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  A few objected openly. Dharam Ghai, a lecturer at Makerere University with a PhD in economics who went on to become the director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, wrote in the June 1965 issue of the East Africa Journal that the plan was unlikely to increase the African stake in the economy and that it would exacerbate emerging inequities in wealth.20 But his criticisms were milquetoast compared to Obama’s.

  Obama’s critique, published in the following month’s issue of the East Africa Journal, derided its authors first for failing to adequately define African socialism. He then moved on to warn that the government’s proposal largely perpetuated an existing economic system that left Kenya dependent on foreign capital and did little to resolve economic and class disparities that the colonial government fostered. He took particular issue with the paper’s endorsement of land titles and privatization over the African system of communal ownership, writing, “It is surprising that one of the best African traditions is not only being put aside in this paper but even the principle is not being recognized and enhanced.”21

  But Obama by no means embraced communal ownership for tradition’s sake alone nor did he employ stale African clichés. Instead, he argued for a novel approach to land consolidation through the creation of clan cooperatives that could provide for the equitable distribution of any gains while avoiding excessive concentration of economic power. Although he did not go into detail about how such cooperatives might work, what he proposed was a creative blending of the opposing economic principles that were under debate. Why could land not be used as an asset even if it was held in collective hands? However, if individual ownership was to be the chosen route, he insisted that the size of farms should be restricted in size. And in a provocative shot at Kenyatta himself, he added, “This should apply to everybody from the President to the ordinary man.”22

  Sessional Paper No. 10 states that the country has no class divisions such as those in European society. But Obama bluntly—and accurately—declared, “This is to ignore the truth of the matter. One wonders whether the authors of the paper have not noticed a discernible class structure has emerged in Africa and particularly in Kenya.”23

  Although Obama accepted that foreign capital was vital to the country’s growth, he called loudly for a wider distribution of the nation’s assets and a greater commitment to genuine Africanization. Noting that it was not Kenyans but rather Europeans and Asians who controlled the bulk of the country’s commercial enterprises, Obama argued that the government should focus less on how the country’s resources could be used to make profits and more on how they could benefit society at large. “We have to give the African his place in his own country and we have to give him his economic power if he is going to develop,” declared Obama. “The paper talks of fear of retarding growth if nationalization or purchases of these enterprises are made for Africans. But for whom do we want to grow? Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country? It is mainly in this country that one finds almost everything owned by the non-indigenous populace. The government must do something about this and soon.”24

  In conclusion, Obama sarcastically praised the government for producing a paper at all. “Maybe,” he wrote, “it is better to have something perfunctorily done than none at all!”25

  It was a courageous piece of writing, a blunt appraisal of the government’s capitalist orientation and a heartfelt appeal on behalf of the common man. In eight pages Obama attempted to respond to a major position paper drafted by dozens of experts and resolve the complex issues confronting underdeveloped economies. It was also an extraordinarily risky public stand on several fronts. In defending such socialist concepts as nationalization and land cooperatives, Obama had put himself squarely in the Odinga camp of radicals, which was in ever-increasing disfavor with the government. That he had even gone so far as to publicly question Kenyatta’s considerable accumulation of land, however indirectly, meant that he was a marked man. The paper likely also threw a shadow over his relationship with Tom Mboya, who was responsible for drafting the paper. Although Obama was seeking to reach a compromise position, he was nonetheless critical of his friend’s handiwork.

  David William Cohen, a Kenya expert and professor emeritus of anthropology and history at the University of Michigan, wrote a March 2010 paper analyzing Obama’s article in which he describes it as shrewd in its maneuvering among the dominant political personalities of the time—and also prescient. The article, he wrote, “makes an almost forgotten case for the African state (and for good governance, progressive taxation, and effective regulation of private investment). The 1965 article is an improbable yet extraordinarily acute rehearsal of the best critiques of structural adjustment (and its privileging of the private sector against the state) in the 1980s and 1990s and of the failures of unregulated capital in our present decade.”26

  Cohen suggested that far from just criticizing the government, Obama was trying to establish common ground between the two political giants of Odinga and Mboya. He added, “In a sense, this argument goes, Obama Sr. sought to remake the political craft of Odinga by borrowing from Mboya’s political style, while restaging some of the positions familiarly associated with Odinga’s leftwards agenda.”27

  Either way, Cohen, coauthor with E. S. Atieno Odhiambo of The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990, said that the article would have borne personal consequences for its author. “It was brave and it was futile. Those close to Mboya would have wanted to distance themselves from Obama while Kenyatta would have surely heard of the article. If he had not already worried about Obama, he would have begun to by then.”28

  Far from ending the debate about Kenya’s economic direction, the publication of Sessional Paper No. 10 generated continuing acrimony and contributed to the widening ideological gap between the left and conservative wings of the party. By the spring of 1966 the hostility between Odinga and Kenyatta had reached its zenith. In March Odinga resigned and set up his own opposition party called the Kenya People’s Union (KPU). With his departure, he denounced Kenyatta for the “Kikuyization” of the government and declared in his resignation statement that an “invisible government” composed of foreign forces and external commercial interests was running the government. Of that government, he proclaimed, “Its guiding star has become personal gain.”29

  Odinga’s departure now left Kenyatta with only token internal opposition. Although Mboya publicly remained one of his closest advisers, the aging oligarch now began to look askance at the articulate young Luo politician, convinced that he was now angling to succeed him. Following Odinga’s resignation, Kenyatta and his coterie of Kiambu supporters were free to pursue a course of economic growth without apology. As Norman Miller and Rodger Yeager put it in Kenya: The Quest for Prosperity, the nation would be guided “on a capitalist course under the expert direction of a trusted civil service. In fact, the rapidly expanding bureaucracy remained loyal to the president because of the social status and material rewards conveyed by membership. African socialism soon became an empty vessel floating on a sea of pragmatism and ambition.”30 An autocracy of patronage was now firmly in place.

  Odinga’s resignation deeply disheartened Obama, but it was only one of many dark clouds that gathered overhead in the months after his marriage to Ruth. One of them engulfed him as he was driving a friend’s new green Fiat just weeks after the publication of his paper. Obama was an exuberant driver when sober and a menace when he drank. His drinking pal, Philip Ochieng, likens him to Toad in The Wind in the Willows, saying, “He would get very excited behind the wheel and he’d zoom like Toad, completely out of control, his arms and legs flying. You did not want to be in the car with him.”

  One evening, after a night of hard drinking with a sweet-faced young man named Adede Abiero, Obama slammed the car headlong into another vehicle in a Nairobi suburb. Abiero, a twenty
-six-year-old postal worker and the breadwinner for four brothers, was killed instantly.31 Obama broke both of his legs as well as a number of other bones. Hospitalized at the Aga Khan Hospital, Obama remained in traction for over four months as his legs healed. Despondent over Abiero’s death, he had friends sneak bottles of whiskey into his room, and one night he fell out of bed drunk and broke yet another bone.32 The accident with Abiero was the first of numerous car crashes involving alcohol that had a cumulative impact on Obama’s legs and ultimately left him dependent on crutches or a cane.

  Obama’s mother, Habiba Akumu, often journeyed from Kendu Bay to Nairobi to help take care of him after his accidents and would sit by his bedside and talk to him. She was forever urging him to stop drinking and would frequently declare, “Alcohol will kill you,” recalls one of her other sons, Razik Otieno Orinda. Obama would just laugh and promise her that he would stop.

  During his long hospital stay two of Obama’s wives had the unexpected pleasure of meeting one another for the first time. Not long after he returned to Kenya, Obama had spent a week with Kezia and his children in Alego. He told her that he was setting up a home in Nairobi and would come back when he was able. Although he had told Kezia of Ann and his young son in Hawaii, he never mentioned Ruth, let alone that she was coming to Nairobi soon. So Kezia waited, something she was well used to doing. By this point she had been waiting for her husband’s return for five years. Having no phone with which to call Obama, Kezia followed up his visit with a letter inquiring when he might return, but she did not hear back. The next she heard of Obama was when her brother sent word saying that he had had a terrible car accident and was not expected to survive. Frantic with alarm, Kezia caught the overnight bus to Nairobi, and on her arrival she hurried directly to the hospital.33

  As she entered, relatives engulfed her and told her the news. Barack, they reassured her, would be all right. But there was more. “They told me that he had an American woman from Boston and they were married. I could not believe it. How come? I had been waiting and waiting for all those years and he had gotten married,” exclaimed Kezia. “It hurt me so badly. I was just saying, where do I go now? What do I do?”

  The two women were ushered into a small waiting room where they exchanged a few awkward words. Ruth recalls virtually nothing of the encounter. But Kezia remembers wondering how much of Africa this white woman could take, even as she welcomed Ruth to Kenya. “I said, we shall see. We shall see,” declared Kezia. “What I meant was, you think you know what it is like here. Well, we shall see.”

  Over the next few years Kezia caught an occasional glimpse of Ruth when she visited her children, but little more. Kezia was content that the children lived with their father because he paid for their private schooling that she could not begin to afford. But Ruth wanted nothing to do with Kezia and would often flee the house when she was expected. Kezia got a job working in a Mombasa restaurant shortly after the two women’s encounter, so she visited less often. Although Obama apparently visited his first wife whenever he was in Mombasa on business, he apparently made no effort to bring the two women together. Kezia, in fact, was the only one who seemed to wish for closer relations.

  Toward the end of the year alarming news found its way to the hospital. As Obama lay with his legs suspended in the air, he learned that his stillcherished hope of earning a PhD from Harvard was unlikely ever to happen. Months earlier Obama had written to Harvard asking if he might be able to return in order to present his dissertation titled, “An Econometric Model of Staple Theory of Development.” But Harvard clearly did not want him back. In November the school registrar responded that he would not provide immigration authorization for Obama’s return, noting that he had not registered the title of his thesis. That a student who had passed all of his exams would be blocked for failing to register the title of his dissertation, if indeed Obama had failed to do so, seems extreme, at best. But that is precisely what the registrar wrote. He advised Obama to inform the Economics department what faculty member he was working with, to explain how near he was to finishing, and to send to his department any completed chapters of his dissertation. When those conditions had been fulfilled, the registrar wrote, “we can then take up the question of the necessary immigration documents.”34

  Obama did not pursue the matter. Despondent at the news, he seemed to have put his dissertation aside. Then, mysteriously, it disappeared. One afternoon a few months later, when Obama and Ruth were not at home, burglars apparently broke into their house and took off with the television. They included in their haul Obama’s thesis. Or so he told Ruth. “That is what he said,” recalled Ruth. “I don’t know. Maybe they took a briefcase with the papers in it or something. That’s not impossible. But whatever happened, he was pretty upset about it because he never went back to it and he didn’t have any copies. So, that’s the end of the doctoral thesis.”

  Nor were things going particularly well for Ruth. Isolated and often left alone for long periods in the rambling Rosslyn house, Ruth initially went knocking on some neighbors’ doors and introduced herself in an effort to make friends. But most of the neighbors were British and not particularly interested in a young American woman who was married to an African—and a loud one at that. Ruth tried other means of connecting and occasionally attended gatherings of a small group of expatriate wives who met regularly in one another’s homes for coffee. But perhaps propelled by her own insecurities, Ruth found herself drawn more to the African women she encountered and she continued to feel miserably alone. Even the discovery early in 1965 that she was pregnant did not entirely dispel her mounting disappointment in the state of her marriage. By now Obama was making no secret of the fact that he was spending time with other women. He saw no reason why he should not. When Ruth insisted that he stop, he shouted at her to be quiet and abruptly walked out the door. Some afternoons, she cried for hours alone in the empty house wondering where her husband might be. “I cried for two years in Kenya,” sighed Ruth. “I missed my mother and my father. I missed home.”

  Despite his extramarital dalliances, Obama was immensely pleased with Ruth’s pregnancy. Another baby, hopefully a boy, would be an additional feather in his cap. Nor did he entirely disregard his wife’s unhappiness. When he met a young Scottish woman at the African Club one night, Obama asked if she might come and visit his wife. She was, he said, a bit lonely. Touched by Obama’s concern, Catherine Wilson, then working as a teacher in the town of Embu northeast of Nairobi, agreed. Wilson and Ruth, both young women in their twenties struggling to navigate Nairobi’s complex social scene, took to one another, and Wilson was soon a regular weekend guest.

  Observing the couple, Wilson was struck by Obama’s aggressive manner of conversation. It was as though, she noted, “he did not really want to be understood. He was loud and bombastic and I felt he did that precisely so you would not understand him. He was a bit of a maverick in that he wanted not to be known. That seemed very threatening to him.” But Wilson remembers her conversations with Ruth even more poignantly. Ruth confided in the younger woman the depth of her unhappiness, and she even admitted that she was thinking of going back to the United States. Now with a baby on the way, she was missing her family even more. “It just seemed to be a very painful situation for her and she was extremely lonely,” said Wilson. “I think Ruth did not like to see the way that others saw through Barack’s bluff and bluster. I have to say, I was very glad that I was not in her shoes. He seemed like he would be a hard man for a woman to have a relationship with, much less to be married to.”

  Toward the end of 1965 the outlook began to improve a bit in the Obama household. Ruth landed a spot as secretary to the general manager of Kenya’s Nestlé office. Not only did she find the work stimulating, but her boss also became a close and supportive friend. Then, in November she gave birth to a baby boy named Mark Okoth. The boy was called by his Luo name Okoth, meaning “born while it is raining.” Enchanted with her infant son, Ruth was temporarily distracted
from her marital woes. She also had a young woman helping out with the baby who provided her with some much-needed company.

  Obama’s name also came up for a plum new job. In September of 1966 the new Central Bank of Kenya opened its doors in the old Army Records Office, a stately three-story colonial office building in the heart of the city, and it began a search for dozens of economists. Obama had been chafing in his Shell posting for months, disgruntled that he had not been given a second promotion and openly objecting that he had an education superior to many of those above him. Days before the new bank opened, Obama gave notice to Shell and reported for work at the Central Bank in what had been rechristened “Herufi House.”35 Hired as a graduate trainee, Obama was assigned to the research department conducting economic analysis of other banks in the country and developing performance prognoses of certain businesses.

  He lasted nine months.

  Obama’s first complaint was that there were too many Europeans in the bank. In fact, of the bank’s sixty employees, twenty-two were expatriates and most of them were in controlling positions.36 Obama’s own supervisor was an English economist on loan from the World Bank. Like many other Kenyans working there, Obama deeply resented the continuing British presence. Although most kept their resentment to themselves, Obama openly criticized his supervisors to anyone who would listen. “He complained they knew nothing at all,” said Masakhalia, who was still working at the MEPD. “The truth was they were arrogant. Most of them thought we were black people who knew nothing and they knew everything. But it was our country now and we wanted them out. I’d say to Barack, ‘My friend, play the fool. You must in order to survive.’ But he could not. He didn’t know how.”

  Instead, the junior trainee denigrated the credentials of economists many years his senior in both age and experience. And he often did so to their faces. “He always talked about his Harvard training,” recalled Gladys Ogolah, the personal assistant to the bank’s governor. “He’d say, ‘You call yourself an economist and you haven’t even been to Harvard? Where did you go to school? You have no idea what you are talking about. I happen to be one of the best economists in the country.’ Well, anybody would take offense. Of course some people just ignored him because often he was drunk.”