The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  At the core of Obama’s difficulties at the KTDC was his disdain for Owuor. Another Maseno graduate, Owuor was raised in a staunchly Christian family and was a keen believer in both his faith and personal discipline. Every Monday he called a meeting to review the week’s work ahead, dubbing the meeting the “Monday morning prayer meeting,” to Obama’s great annoyance. Owuor had earned his BA and a MA in social sciences from universities in India, as had a number of other Kenyans of the period. But Obama, the Harvard man, was openly disdainful of his boss’s education. And Owuor knew it. “You see, people who came back from getting an education in the United States, they had high expectations for themselves. They were going to rise very high,” said Owuor. “And if you find yourself like Obama being under somebody trained in India, well, what is India? What is an education in India? Nothing. You’re either from the UK, or America.”

  Compelled to work cheek by jowl, the two men chaffed from the start. “Jerry Owuor was a clean Christian, very strict. But Barack was a free man, so how were those two to get along?” asked Arthur Reuben Owino, Obama’s old friend. “One was rather talkative and boastful, the other was a quiet and godly man. What would you expect to happen between them?”

  One of a relatively small staff, Obama’s responsibilities were multiple. His primary task was to assess the tourism industry’s potential in Kenya, make projections of the number of tourists who could be expected to come to the country, and perform feasibility studies of hotel and park projects in which the KTDC had a financial interest. In order to evaluate the market, Obama was also required to interview tourists as they disembarked at the Nairobi airport and visit with them at their hotels. With the assistance of KTDC’s other development officer, Nyaringo Obure, Obama periodically spent an evening with a group of tourists in order to develop profiles of their itinerary and their expectations. Piqued by their enthusiasm, Obama would often delight the visitors with yarns about his childhood experiences. Sometimes the stories involved savage, man-eating beasts; other times they revolved around inexplicable mystical spirits.

  “We would all be sitting around the fire at night at the lodge and he would be doing most of the talking,” recalled Obure. “He would make wild exaggerations. One story he told over and over was about how when he was a boy he was looking after the family cattle. Suddenly, a group of lions appeared and started to attack the cows. Barack pulls out his spear and kills the first lion by stabbing him in the chest. Then he goes for the rest, stab, stab, stab. Of course, I knew it was a lie. I don’t think there were even lions in the area where he lived. But the tourists just loved it. Another time he said a buffalo attacked one of his relatives. Barack happened to be in a tree overhead and he dropped down on the buffalo’s back and wrestled it to the ground. And so his stories went on and on.”

  To the managers of the hotels in which they stayed, Obama told a slightly different kind of story, but one just as untrue. During one of many tours of the Aberdare mountain region north of Nairobi while scouting possible hotel sites, Obama and Obure happened to get a flat tire on their car. At the time they were staying at the luxurious Outspan Hotel, a legendary country retreat in the heart of the coffee highlands. As neither of them could afford a new tire, Obama approached the general manager of the hotel. “He introduced himself as Dr. Obama, and explained that he was the general manager of the KTDC and could the man possibly give him a hand. I told him later it wasn’t right to give himself such a title, but he just waved me away. And their manager couldn’t have been more helpful. He gave us eight hundred shillings to buy the new tire and off we went.”

  During one of their long drives together, Obama happened to tell Obure a story so incredible that Obure just laughed in outright disbelief. Never one prone to talk much about his personal life, Obama spontaneously announced that he had a young son in America. In fact, the boy lived in Hawaii and had the same name as his own. “Well, of course I didn’t believe a word of it,” exclaimed Obure. “It was just Barack talking.”

  Obama soon began introducing himself as KTDC’s general manager not just when he was in a fix but as a routine matter. Eager to please the ranking government officer, the hotel or restaurant staffers leapt to accommodate him. There were drinks on the house and the finest rooms available. There were small “loans” proffered under the table and lavish meals on top of it. The hotel’s manager himself would often personally escort Obama out of the building to his waiting vehicle. Obure repeatedly admonished him to stop, to which Obama would reluctantly respond, “Okay, okay, I won’t do it anymore.”

  But Obama kept right on. In time word of his impersonation filtered back to the real general manager toiling behind his desk in KTDC’s office in Nairobi. Periodically, hotel managers would call him and inform him of Obama’s high jinks. And when Owuor dropped in to the Panafric or Brunner’s Hotel after work, the bar manager there would advise him that the general manager of the KTDC, a certain doctor, had already tried to get a few free rounds at the bar. Owuor took it all with a grain of salt until one day Obama went too far. When Obama was on a business trip in Tanzania, one evening he became so intoxicated that local police arrested and confined him to the army barracks jail. Owuor, back home, received a phone call. “It was the Tanzanian chief of police. He said that they had just locked up the general manager of the KTDC who had been arrested for drunkenness,” recalled Owuor. “And then he said that he had been told that I was the KTDC accountant. He said the general manager had told him to get in touch with his accountant and he would bail him out.”

  Owuor understood that Obama’s self-aggrandizing behavior was rooted in his conviction that he was the most qualified person to run the office, but Owuor was tired of it. So he sat Obama down and put it to him. “I said, ‘You are an economist. That is your training,’” Owuor recalled. “‘So, it doesn’t matter how stupid the general manager is for there will still be an economist. You cannot have the general manager and the economist in one person. They are two jobs. If you tell people I know nothing about economics and so on, you are very right. But for my job, I do not need it. You are the economist. So, stick to your own side of the house.’”

  By the time Obama’s six-month trial period had run out, board members were concerned. They continued to receive reports of alcohol on Obama’s breath in the morning. They were also annoyed that he had received payment for taking part in televised group discussions without authorization.22 The board, however, was not displeased with the work that Obama was doing. Tourism had continued to grow at a steady rate, holding its position as one of the most rapidly developing industries in the country. By the year’s end a total of 262,000 foreigners would visit the country either on holiday or business. As part of an effort to increase tourist beds in the county’s popular wildlife areas, the Kenya Safari Lodges and Hotels Ltd. had begun building two lodges in the Tsavo National Park, each with one hundred beds. At the same time, a beach hotel with two hundred beds had been launched in the seaside city of Mombasa. With Obama’s financial counsel, the KTDC had emerged as the largest investor in the holding company managing all three of the projects.23 Work had also begun on what would prove to be one of Kenya’s most popular tourist attractions. Called the Ark, it was a lodge nestled in the treetops in the heart of the Aberdares from which a diverse assortment of game could be easily observed.

  In downtown Nairobi, expansion plans were also under way. The owners of the Panafric, a popular international hotel, had agreed to nearly double its eighty-four-bed capacity and build a swimming pool with the help of a substantial equity loan from the KTDC. Hilton International had also committed to take over management of a six-hundred-bed hotel in the city’s heart, and this was well under construction; they would assume operations of the well-known New Stanley Hotel several blocks away.24 In order to staff all those hotels, the talk at KTDC had turned to developing a hotel training school, which was planned to open early in 1970. The industry, which employed a total of about twenty thousand people by 1969 and on which
so many had pinned their hopes, seemed to be flourishing.25

  At its June 1968 executive committee meeting, the board decided to confirm Obama’s position, but it also advised the chairman to speak with Obama, “as there was still need to guide him and discipline him.”26 Obama was sufficiently satisfied with his own performance that in August, just two months after he had been taken off of probation, he boldly asked for a raise. In a letter to Owuor, Obama suggested that his salary be increased to the same level as that being paid to the chief planning officer for the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. In other words, he was asking to be paid the same salary as Philip Ndegwa—or the salary that Ndegwa had been getting before he was promoted to Permanent Secretary of the ministry some months earlier. The board rejected his request, noting pointedly that the two jobs could not be compared.27 Ndegwa continued to surge—steadily, infuriatingly—ahead of Obama.

  Frustrated that his performance was not being given the recognition that he thought it merited, Obama continued to drink heavily. Now, his legendary order of a Double-Double was just an initial throat clearing at the bar before he got down to the serious job of drinking. At lunch he would down several beers in a row, ignoring Obure’s suggestion that he slow down. Owuor was irked that on several occasions Obama had failed to attend the Monday “morning prayer meeting,” presuming he was hung over from a drunken weekend. Obama also began to miss meetings he was assigned to attend, but when asked about his absence, he adamantly insisted that he had been present at the table. One Friday morning Obama did not show up to work at all, nor did he resurface over the weekend. By Tuesday a distraught Ruth showed up at the KTDC office frantically inquiring if anyone knew where her husband was. “We had no idea,” recalled Obure. “But later that day the Kisumu police called to say that he had gotten drunk and driven all the way to Kisumu. He’d gotten completely lost and didn’t know where he was. Ruth was very upset. It wasn’t the last time he disappeared.”

  Nor was it the last time Ruth had to go looking for him. Not long after Obama had disappeared in Kisumu, Oyiro Ayoro was having a midday drink with him and several other government workers at the downtown Nyanza Bar. They were well onto their second drink when a visibly upset Ruth appeared. Beseeching Obama to come with her as the tears slid down her face, she exclaimed, “Why do you have to spend the whole day in the bar. We must go home,” as Ayoro remembers it. “Barack was furious,” Ayoro said. “He shouted, ‘Go away before I hit you! A woman does not tell me where I should be or what I should be doing. Disappear, woman.’ He made as if he was going to hit her and Ruth took off in a dash.” Whenever he was flush, Obama was famously generous with his money. He would buy successive drinks for his friends at the bar and sometimes stand the entire room a drink or two. But spending at such a rate, he quickly exhausted his funds. When he was traveling on behalf of KTDC, some of those he ran into regularly learned to be wary of his spending habits when it came to alcohol. Leo Odera Omolo, a longtime friend of Obama’s, was working as a press officer for the Brooke Bond Tea Company in Kericho on the road from Nairobi to Kisumu during the years Obama worked at KTDC. Obama often paused there for a couple of nights respite. The two men would start with a bottle of whisky at Omolo’s home, but Obama soon insisted that they head to the tea plantation’s club-like Tea Hotel, beloved by expatriate executives. Obama was eager to pick up some of the attractive women at the bar and restaurant there, or as Omolo recalls it, “white girls, black girls, any girls. He wanted to be drinking where there were beautiful women.”

  “But then he would leave me a disappointed man because he would drink many drinks and buy many more drinks for others and he would leave me with the bill,” Omolo explained. “He would drink in one night the equivalent of one month’s salary. Barack was a most entertaining fellow to drink with, but sometimes I avoided him. I would tell him that I would not be around when he was passing through and I would not come home until midnight. I could not afford his visits.”

  Obama’s drinking companions were well versed in his disappointments and his rage at the Kikuyu bourgeoisie who seemed increasingly to monopolize the country’s political and economic life. Many of them shared his feelings. But at the end of 1968 two American visitors appeared on Obama’s doorstep for whom his tirades about the deep division in Kenyan politics were a wholly new conversation. The last time they had seen Obama he had been holding court outside of Hemenway Hall in Honolulu and heralding the days of Kenya’s independence to come.

  Neil Abercrombie and Pake Zane had been backpacking through Europe for over a year by the time they made their way to see their old friend in Nairobi. Exhausted from their travels, they collapsed at Obama’s Woodley home and caught up on the past six years. Obama was pleased to see them both and took them on a tour of his favorite nightspots in the city. But Abercrombie noticed that Obama was drinking heavily and often disappeared so that he might be alone. He never mentioned Barack Jr. or asked if they had seen him. Nor did Zane or Abercrombie bring up the subject of his Hawaiian son. “Family life was secondary to work, just as it had been in Hawaii,” recalled Abercrombie. “He was angry and disappointed that the government was not using him even remotely to the extent of his abilities. It was clear to me that he was drinking a very large amount. He was not so much drunk as he was drinking consistently. It was as though the drinking was now part of his existence.”

  Their two-week visit coincided with a day of national celebration marking the country’s achievements and recognizing national unity. It was to be a special event in Nairobi, attended by Kenyatta and a host of government ministers celebrating the country’s achievements. Representatives of all the country’s different tribes were to be in attendance. Although Abercrombie and Zane were eager to attend, Obama refused to go. He told them he did not want to cross paths with the president and scoffed at the notion of celebrating unity in a country riven with tribal divisions. “The one thing Barack wanted was to do something for his country, but he felt he could not,” said Zane. “He felt he was still part of Mboya’s team in working for the country’s economic development, but he was hemmed in on all sides. All the passion he had for Kenya when he was in Hawaii seemed to be smashing up against a wall of government and bureaucratic inertia. I really felt badly for him.”

  The situation would soon get much worse.

  THE MORNING OF JULY 5, 1969, DAWNED cool and sunny in downtown Nairobi, a welcome respite from the rainy season that had recently subsided.

  The streets were crowded with Saturday shoppers eager to get their purchases completed before the midday closing hour arrived. Obama was among them, strolling with the wife of his friend, Michael Kinyengi, as she surveyed the latest ladies’ fashions in the store windows. As they rounded a street corner onto what was then called Government Road, Obama was pleased to see Tom Mboya pull up in front of Chhani’s Pharmacy and get out of his car. Mboya had just returned from a meeting of the Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa the day before. A photograph of him striding through the airport with Philip Ndegwa, his Permanent Secretary at the Ministry for Economic Planning and Development, was visible in the East African Standard on virtually every newsstand.28

  Mboya paused and he and Obama talked for several minutes. Obama introduced Mboya to his companion and then jokingly observed that Mboya had parked his car illegally. “You have parked wrongly,” laughed Obama. “You will get a ticket.”29

  The two men then parted company. Obama and Mrs. Kinyengi headed into a dress shop as Mboya entered the pharmacy to purchase some skin cream. About ten minutes later Mboya said farewell to the shopkeeper, his longtime friend, and stepped out on the street. Several feet from the door stood a slight man in a suit, holding a briefcase in his left hand with his right hand in his pocket. Two shots sounded. Mboya sank to the ground, blood staining his red shirt as pedestrians crowded anxiously around him. When he was pronounced dead on arrival at Nairobi Hospital shortly afterward, Kenya’s future was changed forever.

  In t
he hours after his death was announced, rumors surged across the country that the killer was a Kikuyu. It had to be, didn’t it? First the Kikuyu had commandeered the heart of the government. Then they had effectively ousted Odinga from KANU. Now they had slain Tom Mboya in broad daylight. How could it not be a Kikuyu? The riots and demonstrations began by late afternoon. As shock and grief swept across Luoland, unruly mobs, churning with rage, began to roam through Kisumu. At a requiem mass at the Holy Family Cathedral three days later, a near hysterical mob of twenty thousand people, most of them Luo, surged outside. When President Kenyatta’s car arrived, police were unable to hold back the angry protestors who attacked his car with sticks and stones, shouting, “Dume!” meaning bull, the symbol of the Kenya People’s Union, in affirmation of their allegiance to Odinga. Mboya’s murder seemed to have unleashed all the pent-up disappointment of the past five years and the subterranean tensions that had festered in the grip of Kenyatta’s autocratic rule.

  The rumors were right, in a way. Five days after Mboya was shot, a young man named Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge was identified as a suspect and later charged with the murder. The announcement electrified the country. Njenga, it turned out, was a Kikuyu. And yet the evidence against him was far from decisive and no real motive could be discerned.

  The trial that followed revealed little of substance except that the Smith and Wesson .38 revolver that killed Mboya was in fact Njenga’s. The other piece of information to emerge was that during a preliminary hearing Njenga had asked a police superintendent, “Why do you pick on me? Why not the big man?” Njenga, a small businessman and low-level KANU activist, refused to identify the “big man.” He was soon convicted and sentenced to death. Although the government announced that Njenga was hanged, the procedure was open to only a tiny group, and many believe he was never killed at all.30 Many Kenyans suspect that Kenyatta or those among his inner circle arranged the assassination and that Njenga was simply the fall guy.