by Sally Jacobs
Then came the day when a Kenyan was made the first African governor of the bank in the spring of 1967. Here was another Ndegwa not up to the job, as Obama saw it. This one’s name was Duncan Ndegwa, and he was a graduate of Makerere University and St. Andrew’s University in Scotland. He was also one of Kenyatta’s most trusted advisers, having served as secretary in the Office of the President as well as head of the government’s Civil Service. Ndegwa had an impressive résumé by most any assessment, even Obama’s. But he was also a Kikuyu, and Obama grumbled that tribalism had carved him a career path that he did not entirely deserve. Nonetheless, the two men got along well when they encountered one another at the bars they both favored, and Obama’s intellectual and oratorical skills impressed Ndegwa. The man was clever all right. No discretion, mind you, but he was immensely entertaining.37 Behind Ndegwa’s back Obama continued to complain to friends that the new governor was not as well trained an economist as he. “He hadn’t gone to Harvard, after all,” laughed Otieno O. Wasonga. “He’d say, ‘Why didn’t they make me the governor?’ Ndegwa hadn’t been properly trained in an economics school as he had.”
Obama clearly possessed some sophisticated economic skills, but he was beginning to have trouble managing some of the basic aspects of his life. Often he came to work late and was so hung over that he needed hours to pull himself together. Other days he was delayed by minor traffic accidents en route to work. What’s more, his personal finances were in mounting disarray. Obama bounced several checks in his first months on the job, and his superiors were increasingly concerned. Yet when they admonished him for some of his behaviors, Obama told them exactly what he thought. Obama managed to do his job adequately, but the bank’s managers found his personal excesses unacceptable and let him go the following summer.38 “It was a pity, but he had no discipline,” explained Ndegwa. “And a bank must have discipline.”
Ndegwa was sorry to see him go. Establishing Kenya’s primary banking institution was a critical component of building a nation, and Ndegwa was disappointed to see a Kenyan forced to quit that process. What’s more, he had grown fond of Obama and worried where he would land. “I think Obama was too much of an intellectual force of his own. I always thought he should have been in an academic institution which would have suited him better than a professional environment,” said Ndegwa. “I didn’t see him succeeding much anywhere else because he had no sense of cooperation with people. He had a lot of compassion for people, but he was not good at cooperating.”
Angry and dejected, Obama began to live up to his nickname in earnest. Unemployed for several months, he spent afternoons in a series of bars and was absent from home for long stretches of time. Word traveled fast in Nairobi’s small professional circle, and most of Obama’s colleagues were aware of what had happened, which made his humiliation greater. Nor did Obama make much attempt to shield his wife. Even when Ruth and the baby were by his side in public, he flirted with women passing by and admonished her angrily if she objected. When she was not present, Obama held back little. At last, a family friend who felt sorry for Ruth and her baby informed her in blunt detail about the scope of her husband’s womanizing. Ruth decided she had had enough.
It was time to go home. Ruth knew she had to be discreet, for she too had heard the stories about women who had tried to leave unfaithful husbands and about how those husbands had tracked them down and beaten them. She would not let that happen to her with her little boy around. Secretly, she arranged for a friend to invite Obama to drive with him to Kisumu for a weekend visit. Obama was always eager to return to Luoland and was not likely to turn down such a trip, which indeed he did not. The journey would give her a good couple of days to make her getaway.
Once Obama was gone, Ruth moved fast. Within days, Ruth and Okoth caught a one-way flight to Boston. Ruth was heartbroken. Although she still loved Obama deeply, she had decided that she could not endure a marriage with him, and her plan was to get a job in the United States and never return to Kenya. But Ruth’s careful plan had failed to take one thing into account. Weeks later Obama bought an airplane ticket to Boston too. He was going to go and get her back.
8
LIONS, TIGERS, AND LIES!
By the time he reached his middle years, Maurice Joseph Baker had achieved many things of which he was proud. His auto parts sales business was flourishing, even if it took him on the road more that he would have liked. His beloved daughter, Ruth, had graduated from Simmons College and gotten a job in a downtown law firm. And in 1958 he had become the proud owner of a brand new ranch home with a brick facade in suburban Newton, just nine miles from downtown Boston and the namesake of the infamous Fig Newton cookie. For the amiable Joe, who had grown up on the second floor above his parents’ corner store in the blue-collar town of Malden, it was a considerable achievement.1
And so it was that when Ruth, his beloved “Ruthie” with her wry sense of humor and luxurious golden hair, took off and married an African man, he was devastated. That she chose a black man was just part of it. Joe had been raised in an orthodox Jewish home, and he had always presumed that his daughter would marry within the faith. After she left in 1964, Joe no longer dropped in at Pressman’s Delicatessen in Chelsea where he had long been a regular, unable to face his longtime buddies.2 Family members were told that Ruthie had upped and joined the Peace Corps and was working to improve the lives of the downtrodden Africans. But for a long time her cousins never heard much about what happened to her over there in Kenya. Mostly, Ruthie just seemed to be gone.
But then she came back. Ruth arrived at 16 Hartman Road in the summer of 1967 with a single suitcase and her one-year-old son, Okoth, in her arms. Thrilled to see her, the Bakers ushered her indoors and wept at the sight of their beaming grandson. But after they dried their eyes, they told Ruth unflinchingly that she and her coffee-colored baby would not be able to stay in the house. Her mother, Ida, placed several phone calls, and within a few hours she had located acquaintances in nearby Cambridge who would allow Ruth and Okoth to stay with them. Although deeply disappointed that she could not stay at home, the ever-forbearing Ruth forgave her parents their embarrassment. “It didn’t bother me that much because I understood my mother,” Ruth explained. “She was very conscious about how other people think. She wanted me away from her neighborhood because she could not explain that her white daughter had a black baby. And you know, that was okay. They still loved me, I knew that. And I loved them. Real love doesn’t change.”
Daunted by her African experience, Ruth was now determined to stay in the United States and to remake her life. She began to look for jobs and a place she could live long term. But before she could make much progress, a contrite Obama showed up at her door. Her parents had given him her address, partly hoping she would reunite with her husband—after all, he was the father of her child—and partly hoping that she would not. Ruth tried half-heartedly to turn him away. But Obama charmed her with an onslaught of entreaties. He loved her to the core of his being. He adored their son and had yearned for them every day they had been gone. If she would only return with him, he vowed that everything would be different. He would never pursue another woman again. He would not even look at another woman, he insisted.
What’s more, he had already lined up a new job. Starting in October Obama was to be the senior development officer for the newly created Kenya Tourist Development Corporation (KTDC), a high-profile government corporation charged with overseeing the blossoming industry and directing public investment in a spate of new hotels and parks. As the second highest–ranking employee in the organization, Obama was to receive a handsome annual salary of 2,275 pounds.3 It was a plum job that put Obama squarely in the league of the government’s other ranking economists and at the forefront of an industry to which Mzee, the Swahili term of respect for an elder, Kenyatta himself was closely attuned.4 It was not a permanent secretary’s post like Philip Ndegwa had landed or even the top job at the KTDC, but it was a good job nonetheless. And
it gave him a much-needed chance to rehabilitate himself.
Adding to Obama’s bounty, the job came with a lovely home in the exclusive Woodley Estate west of the city’s center, a neighborhood that the Nairobi City Council developed expressly for Europeans in the late 1940s.5 Since independence, however, a handful of prominent Africans, including members of Parliament and government ministers, had trickled into the handsome homes flanked by high green hedges. Obama’s house was a welcoming stone bungalow with a red tile roof, complete with a separate servants’ quarters that could accommodate the trail of relatives that invariably followed him.
Ruth soon abandoned her plan of staying in the United States and agreed to return with him to Nairobi. But it wasn’t because of Obama’s promises of fidelity or even the goodies he dangled before her. “There was a connection between us, a passion, the type of love that holds a man and a woman together,” said Ruth. “He loved me in a certain way, as much as he was able. It wasn’t just because I was white because surely that wears off. For myself, he was a man I had a very strong passion for. I did not have that passion again in my life.”
Once they were back in Nairobi, Obama’s promises lasted only as long as it took Ruth to unpack her bags. No sooner had the couple settled into their new home than Obama resumed his carousing ways, leaving Ruth to juggle her secretarial job at Nestlé and caring for his extended family with only the help of a housekeeper. There were now three of his children living in the house along with a succession of visiting relatives. Roy, his eldest son, who would later be known as Malik, attended the prestigious Lenana School, once exclusively for whites. Rita, later known as Auma, attended a day school before eventually enrolling in the Kenya High School. Although Kezia regularly visited her children, bearing sweets and small gifts in the early years after they moved in with their father and his new wife, Kezia’s tearful demeanor annoyed Obama, so he had her visits abruptly stopped. Auma would not see her birth mother for nearly seven years.6
There were also the young relatives who lived in the servant quarters out back. Not long after he returned from the United States, Obama had taken his first cousin Ezra under his wing. Ezra was a clever and amusing boy whose father, one of Hussein Onyango’s brothers, was unable to pay for his son’s schooling. So Ezra moved into the squat servants’ quarters in 1967 and remained there for four years while Obama paid for his education. He was not alone. When Wilson Obama, another cousin, showed up in similar need, Obama agreed to pay for his education and offered him a place to stay for close to two years. Amir Otieno Orinda, Obama’s half-brother with whom he shared the same mother, was in and out of the house as well. Zeituni Onyango, Obama’s half-sister, stayed at the house for several weeks in the late 1960s and would later help to take care of Malik and Auma.7 As those and other Obamas came and went from the busy household, Ruth sometimes found herself passing people in the hallway who, she says, “I hadn’t the slightest idea who they were.”
Obama, meanwhile, had once again become a habitué of the city’s nightspots and would migrate from one elegant hotel barroom to the next. Buoyed by his new post and the keen interest others took in his command of econometrics, Double-Double now had mingi—Swahili for “many”—drinking companions. Flush with their new salaries and Harambee Avenue offices, a certain element of the new African elite cultivated a lifestyle richly steeped in alcohol. One of their favorite places was the bar at the newly opened InterContinental, called The Big Five in reference to the five most difficult and dangerous animals to hunt in Africa’s far-flung game parks. The intimate retreat offered an eclectic mix. Patrons lounging on the plush leather stools could as likely rub shoulders with a dewy-eyed tourist from New Jersey, a minister who had just strolled out of the nearby Treasury building, or a World Bank project manager making notations on his napkin, all under the glassy-eyed gaze of the lion and gazelle mounted on the walls.
It also drew from the senior ranks of the civil service and the top echelon of the business community. Some of the regulars among the African elite were Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s current president and then Minister of Commerce and Industry, and Francis Masakhalia, Obama’s old Maseno School friend and by then an economist/statistician with the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development headed by Tom Mboya. Members of the nearby Parliament and a host of Treasury officers were often a part of the mix. When Obama tired of his double shots there, he often headed to the Panafric Hotel for a chaser or two of Chivas or Martel cognac. To wrap up the evening he occasionally stopped at the Starlight Club for a spin around the dance floor before heading home to Woodley in the early hours of the morning.
By the time he got there Obama was often stumbling and barely coherent. If Ruth or one of the children made the mistake of locking up before they went to bed, Obama would hammer loudly on the door and angrily demand that someone let him in. Gladys Ogolah, the next-door neighbor who knew Obama from their days at Central Bank together, heard every word of it. “He would shout at Ruth, ‘Open the door, woman. Open the door,’” Ogolah recalled. “He would say, ‘Why are you sleeping when I am not back at home. Open the door now.’ And then he would beat on the door, boom, boom, boom.”
Ogolah was hardly the only Woodley resident keenly aware of their baritone-voiced neighbor. Even when Obama was sober, his thundering voice wafted over the hedges and shattered the neighborhood calm. Sometimes, he was just calling to his children without making any effort to keep his voice down. But on the nights when he and Ruth got into an argument, his domineering voice could be heard the length of the Loddon Grove road and sometimes beyond. Not long after they moved into the house, the Obamas had become a regular topic of neighborhood talk, little of it good. “Barack would come back from work or wherever he was in the middle of the night and they would fight very loudly,” recalled Ndolo Ayah, who lived nearby. “Everybody knew about it. I think we all worried a bit about Ruth’s safety. Barack was not a violent person, but he could be very violent in his language.”
Gladys Ogolah and her husband, Boaz, got to know the Obamas well and not just because of the couple’s ongoing fighting. Boaz Ogolah was also an economist who worked in the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, and Obama respected his breadth of knowledge and experience. Sometimes Obama would drop in for a drink, and the two men would critique the other economists in government service whose academic credentials they considered inferior to their own. Obama would also talk openly of some of the beautiful women to whom he was attracted. “Barack was a Luo and a polygamist, and so this was no big deal to him,” said Ogolah. “He was very open about it.”
Just a few years younger than her neighbor, Gladys Ogolah grew to like her new American friend. Ruth clearly enjoyed Kenya and appreciated many of its customs. Unlike some mzungu who tended to stick with their own, Ruth counted African women among her closest friends. She was also devoted to all of Obama’s children and even some of his closer cousins. She was the one who arranged their weekend outings swimming at the Panafric and Safari Park hotels or picnics in the countryside. And she was the one who drove them to their schools and doctors’ appointments and, at times, shielded them from their father. “Ruth was a very great woman,” said Ezra Obama, sixty-one and a retired manager of market development for Coca-Cola living outside Nairobi. “She treated all of us children the same and I respected her very much.”
But no matter how much Ruth tried to make things run smoothly, Obama seemed always to have a complaint. And when his shouting developed into more aggressive behavior in the passing months, it was to Ogolah that Ruth often turned, running through the darkness to the safe haven of her neighbor’s kitchen. “Sometimes, when he came home late he would order her to cook for him in the middle of the night and if she would not he would hit her about the shoulders and neck,” recalled Gladys Ogolah. “Ruth would run screaming down the road to our house crying. She was tired of being hit and tired of being called names. She had a very, very rough time and I was always worried about her.”
As
a boy, Mark Ndesandjo was fearful of his towering father and tried hard to stay out of his way so he would not inadvertently trigger his rage. “What I felt from him was coldness. There was fear. That is what I recall,” Ndesandjo said in an interview. “I was physically afraid of him. He was a large looming man and you did not know what to expect. Is he going to hit you or your mother or other people in your family? He did not smile except when he was drinking or when he was with friends.”
Anxious as to what their father’s condition would be on his return home each night, the children passed the afternoon following school with mounting apprehension. “Everyone in the house was totally on edge because you never knew when my father would be back,” Ndesandjo said in an interview. “When he got there he would probably be drunk. And then the light would go on and you would hear thuds and shouts and my mother’s voice rising and crying and screaming. You would hear sounds like falling objects and it would go on and on and on and on. I instinctively bonded with my mother because she was afraid and she was also very protective of me. And that made my father even angrier. He resented me because we were both now competing for my mother’s attention. I was my mother’s firstborn and she had shifted some of her attention away from him to me. Sometimes when she was holding me, he would shout at her, ‘Stop tending to that brat.’”
Nor was Obama’s abuse of Ruth confined to their home. As he became increasingly careless about shielding his attraction to other women, Obama repeatedly humiliated his wife in public. “He would criticize me and flirt with other women right in front of me. Always, there were other women,” Ruth sighed. “He took great pleasure in demeaning me because it made him feel better.”