by Sally Jacobs
The consulting firm never happened. After Obama was fired from the KTDC, he managed to piece together stray bits of work, but none of them lasted long. He worked for the Kenya Water Department for some months and managed to parlay that job into a stint advising the World Health Organization on rural water supplies. But within a few months of losing his job Obama was adrift with neither a paycheck nor the prospect of one. Unmoored from the organizing rigors of a job and increasingly at odds with both his wife and children, Obama entered a period of fitful decline that lasted for nearly six years. Although he remained close with some of his older friends and continued to show up at his favorite watering holes—as long as someone else was buying—he periodically disappeared for long spells at a time. And when he emerged from this overcast period, he was a changed man, one whose world was considerably diminished.
With her husband now jobless and at large, Ruth struggled to keep the family afloat. She was now the sole support of the household. Not only did she pay the rent, the household expenses, and the wages of the housekeeper, she also signed the checks for five private school tuitions. In addition to Obama’s own four children’s schooling, there was Ezra’s school bill and sundry other expenses for itinerant Obama family members. Nor did Obama assist much with the household logistics such as driving the children to school or to their sports activities. As in most any other Kenyan family of the same class, such tasks were left to Ruth or the household help.
Although Ruth tried to maintain a household routine as she juggled her job at Nestlé and ferrying the children, Obama came and went at odd hours. Most afternoons he retreated to the bar at Sans Chique or Brunner’s and stayed there well into evening, railing against the failures of the government and the injustices that had befallen him. By the time he returned to the house, he was often stumbling and barely coherent. The children, cowering in their beds, listened as he crashed into furniture and cursed at his own clumsiness.
Auma heard the shouting too. As she told her brother Barack many years later, “The Old Man never spoke to Roy or myself except to scold us. He would come home very late, drunk, and I could hear him shouting at Ruth telling her to cook him food,” Barack recounted in Dreams from My Father. “Sometimes, when he wasn’t home, she would tell Roy and myself that our father was crazy and that she pitied us for having such a father. I didn’t blame her for this—I probably agreed.”1
Obama had long vented his anger on Ruth with verbal onslaughts and a hail of blows to her head. But as he grew increasingly despondent in the months after he lost his job, his assaults on her grew more violent. Ruth took out a restraining order and worried constantly about what to do next. She was anxious that one day Obama would turn his frustration on the children and that, she had decided, would be the end. Nonetheless, she did not leave him because still, somehow, she loved him. And she believed that he loved her as well: “I loved him despite everything. I just had a great passion for the man. And I love my children. I’m a person who stays hoping that things will get better.”2
But things didn’t get better. They got worse. One night Obama returned from the bars in his usual ill humor, except this time he had a knife. “He came to the door one day, banging, banging and Auma let him in of course, being a child,” Ruth recalled. “And when he came in he had that knife. He laid it against my neck as he shouted at me. I was terrified of course. He terrified me a number of times. But I did not think he would really kill me. He was a bluffer, just a bluffer. Even the children saw all of this happening. It was Roy who went and got a neighbor. She was a Luo friend of mine and she talked to Barack. She said, ‘Don’t do this, Barack. This is wrong.’”
Even then, Ruth did not leave. Instead, she started to contemplate a divorce. As she saw it, if she were able to get a divorce and gain custody of Mark and David, she would at last have some leverage over Obama. Part of Obama’s singular authority over her was his ability to take them from her. Perhaps if she were able to negotiate from a position of greater strength, she could get Obama to change his behavior and stop his chronic drinking. That, at least, is what she hoped.
In November 1971 Obama made the surprise announcement that he was going on a lengthy overseas trip. Somehow he had gotten his passport back and was now eager to try to drum up some international consulting work again. Unable to find a job, Obama continued to pursue his hope of setting up a consulting firm and hoped to reconnect during his travels with some of his contacts from his days at the KTDC. No sooner had he walked out of the house with his suitcase did Ruth call her attorney. One of her friends and a cousin who visited the house frequently had witnessed Obama’s abusive behavior on multiple occasions, and now they were ready to testify to what they had seen. “I knew the marriage wasn’t going anywhere and I needed some leverage,” said Ruth. “Divorce would give me the freedom so he didn’t have any legal hold on me. That seemed very important.”
While Ruth presented her case in a Nairobi courtroom, Obama was halfway around the world in Honolulu celebrating Christmas with the Dunhams, about whom he had told his current wife very little. He was also getting to know the little boy on the tricycle whose photograph he had religiously kept on his bureau for the past decade. That boy, Barack Obama II, was now ten years old and had decidedly mixed feelings about the looming dark figure with the slight limp who showed up on the doorstep a few weeks before the holiday. Since his father had left nine years ago, much had changed in his own young life. When the younger Obama was four years old, his mother had fallen in love with another foreign student, this one an amiable Indonesian who liked to wrestle with her young son. By 1968 Ann Dunham had married Lolo Soetoro, and the family settled in Jakarta. The marriage did not last long, however, and by the summer of 1971 Obama had returned to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and attend private school. Ann returned to celebrate the Christmas holiday that year, and eventually she and her young daughter had also returned to Honolulu to live, although she would not divorce her second husband for several more years.
Eying his father quietly from the corner of the living room on the day that he arrived, Obama observed that he was astonishingly thin, his bones pressing his trousers into sharp points at the knee. Wearing a blue blazer and a crisp white shirt with a scarlet ascot at his neck, he was overdressed compared to the casual island style. His cane was equally elegant with a rounded ivory head. But his eyes were a bleary yellow, “the eyes of someone who’s had malaria more than once. There was a fragility about his frame, I thought, a caution when he lit a cigarette or reached for his beer.”3
Obama stayed for one month. During that time he and the Dunhams visited island sites and the family’s own architectural landmarks. They drove by the apartments in which the couple had lived, the Kapi’olani Medical Center where their son had been born, and the trim one-story University Avenue house with the inviting veranda where Ann had ultimately retreated to live with her parents and her one-year-old son after her husband had left her. As the weeks passed, the watchful boy noted the power of his father’s presence and the singular effect he had on other people. Obama generated an electricity, a vibration that made Gramps, as Stanley was called by his grandson, more vigorous. Even Madelyn, known as “Toot” for “Tutu,” which is Hawaiian for “grandparent,” was drawn into debate about politics and finance in the elder Obama’s presence. When he waved his elegant hands in emphasis or recounted an amusing story in his commanding, all-enveloping voice, people listened. But between father and son there was not much conversation. “I often felt mute before him,” his son wrote, “and he never pushed me to speak.”4
Obama Sr.’s visit to Hawaii generated mixed emotions on both sides of the equation. For the elder Obama the sights and sounds of the island where he had lived in the flush of great promise were bittersweet. He did not look up many of his old friends and made no effort to connect with either Zane or Abercrombie. He sat, inexplicably, for a series of photographic portraits at the University of Hawaii, and these are filed in the school’s ar
chive bearing no explanatory label. In the photos Obama is dressed in a gray suit with a dark handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, and he stares solemnly into the distance. There is little resemblance to the ebullient young undergraduate in shirtsleeves photographed amidst a throng of his friends in a photo shot a decade earlier.
Presumably aware that his marriage to Ruth was nearing a bitter end, Obama apparently initiated the Hawaii visit in part with the expectation that his former wife might return to Kenya with him. Ann, then twenty-nine, had her own marital troubles with Soetoro and likely intuited that her marriage was not to last long either. She was already talking about enrolling at the University of Hawaii in order to pursue a master’s degree in anthropology. Although she considered Obama’s suggestion, she concluded that she and her children were better off staying in Hawaii where their lives would be more stable. “He had come back and wanted her to go to Africa with him, finally,” recalled Ann’s old school friend, Susan Botkin Blake. “Of course this was what she had wanted all those years he had been away. But now, she told people, she could not face leaving again.”
With the finality of Ann’s refusal generating palpable tension, Obama’s visit soon began to sour. Toot and Gramps were growing weary of Obama’s presence and waited impatiently for him to retreat at the evening’s end to the rented apartment in which he slept. The stress finally erupted one evening when young Barack turned on the television to watch the cartoon special How The Grinch Stole Christmas!, a favored Christmas ritual. Obama Sr. promptly ordered his son to turn off the television and head to his room to study. When Ann argued that the boy should be allowed to watch, the matter mushroomed into a fierce family squabble that consumed four highly irritated adults. As Barack Jr. watched the green Grinch alone behind his closed bedroom door, he “began to count the days until my father would leave and things would return to normal.”5
His countdown ended two weeks later when Obama gave his son a farewell hug at the airport and disappeared into the blue skies overhead. Obama would never see his father again. For a time the two exchanged letters. But by the time Barack reached his twenties and was swept up in his own quest for rootedness and identity, the letter writing had stopped and the stack of aerogrammes from his father were stored neatly away in a closet. After the painful Christmas encounter, another two decades would pass before Barack turned to the pages of his memoir to sort out some of his complex feelings about his father.
On his return to Nairobi, Obama was dismayed to encounter still more rejection. In his absence Ruth had not only consulted with a lawyer about getting a divorce; she had managed to have their marriage terminated. Beside himself, Obama once again tried to talk her out of it, just as he had when she fled to the United States with their first son in 1967. But this time Ruth was not to be swayed. “He said don’t go through with this, don’t go through with this, please,” said Ruth. “And I said, ‘No, no, no. I am going through with it, Barack, because I’ve had enough of this nonsense.’ I said I would still live with him even though we were divorced because you see then I had some leverage. I had the custody of the children now.”
Ruth’s hard-won leverage changed little. On the contrary, Obama continued with his dissolute lifestyle, seemingly impervious to his wife’s outrage. Finally, one night he stumbled back into the house and raised his hand over his youngest son, David Opiyo, and struck him. With that, Ruth’s seemingly inexhaustible forbearance came to an abrupt end. Days later, after Obama had headed out for the afternoon, a friend of Ruth’s pulled his pickup truck in front of the Woodley house and Ruth swiftly filled it with her belongings. By nightfall she and her two sons and the family housekeeper were moved into a small rented house in Westlands. The following morning a furious Obama was banging loudly on their door. “He shouted at me, ‘You prostitute, I am going to take the children. I am going to kill you.’ You know, on and on. It was drunken rages, and more drunken rages. I think he followed me because he was ashamed. And I think part of the shame was that the community knew what was going on. They had witnessed it,” Ruth said. “He kept coming back every week, the same thing, shouting and calling me names. It was very, very disturbing. It lasted for about a month and then we contacted the CID [Criminal Investigation Department of the Kenya Police] and they called him in. They said, ‘Look Barack, stop bothering that woman.’ And from that time on he never bothered me again. So, that was that.”
Ruth wasn’t the only one who had heard Obama raging at her door. Neighbors were horrified at his belligerent behavior, and in Nairobi’s tight-knit social circles, the word got around. “The man was very much an outcast at that point,” said Harris Mule, a high-ranking government economist then serving as deputy permanent secretary for planning in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, whose wife was a friend of Ruth’s. “Part of it was his personal history. I mean, Obama lived pretty much like an African. There were real horror stories of how he treated his wife. My own wife would tell me about this quite often so I would not think of such a thing myself. But the bigger problem, quite frankly, was the man was always broke. He would be a nuisance because he’d go to a bar without money and he would expect people to buy him drinks and he used to drink very expensive liquor which was whiskey. So his friends would get upset about that. They would try to avoid him.”
With Ruth and the two younger boys gone by 1973, Obama was left virtually alone in the red-roofed Woodley house. The housekeeper had left with Ruth. Ezra had departed the previous year to take a job managing spare machine parts at Coca-Cola’s Nairobi plant. Obama had landed him the job, a position that developed into a flourishing career that lasted for two decades. Malik, a student at the prestigious Lenana School, was also not around very much. Auma had recently been accepted at the Kenya High School and boarded during the week, returning home only on occasional weekends. More often than not, Obama found himself alone in the house with no one to cook for him or take the glass out of his hand when he fell asleep on the couch.
Auma, then thirteen, felt the breakup of the family deeply. Ruth had lived with the children since Auma was four years old, and she was the only mother Auma and Malik had ever really known. Now, not only were her “Mummy” and her younger brothers gone, but there was also no woman in the house to tend to her basic needs or to shield her from her father’s self-destructive behavior. Often, when she returned to the empty house on vacations or on a weekend, she found the cupboards bare of food. Although Obama was able to borrow funds to pay for his necessities, he often gave the money to charities to maintain the illusion of prosperity. In the months after Ruth left, as Auma wrote in her 2010 memoir, Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen (“Life Comes In Between”), “a sad time began.”6 “It appeared that both my father and brother tried to escape from the stillness of our house as much as possible,” Auma wrote. “Many times I was already asleep when they came home and often my father woke me up to talk with me.”7
Inviting his daughter to come sit with him in the living room, Obama turned to the young girl for solace in the long lonely evenings. As Auma stared coolly at him from her end of the couch, Obama insisted that he deeply loved his children and was working as hard as he could to provide for them. As the night wore on, he played his beloved Schubert’s Fifth Symphony on the record player while detailing the host of difficulties he had encountered in his life to his sleepy daughter. But Auma was unmoved by his sorrows. His late-night effort to forge a connection with a child he had long neglected was too little, too late. Engulfed in the dramatic cascade of flute and horns, she could not hear him. “I was far away from him. I did not understand his deep sadness and felt no compassion for his loneliness,” she wrote. “At that time I was firmly convinced that the situation to which he had brought us was his own fault.”8
To some extent Obama himself agreed. Although he publicly blamed Kenyatta and his Kikuyu coterie for his travails, Obama was painfully aware that in the end he was the one who was unable to provide for his children or his extended family. On
his trips to Kanyadhiang he never mentioned that he had lost his job. On the contrary, he always arrived laden with food and gifts, purchased with funds he had borrowed from friends or the Kogelo Union Association. Dressed in his trademark European suits, now thinning at the elbow, he unfailingly presented himself as a flourishing government economist. But in private he mourned the sorry state of his fractured families to his closest friends and turned increasingly to drink. “It was a very, very tough time for him,” said his old friend Peter Aringo, a former member of Parliament representing Alego. “I think he understood that the problem somehow lay within his own personality but he did not know how to correct it. It really broke his pride. So he blamed Kenyatta. It was Kenyatta who had made it impossible for him to take care of his families. Barack was fighting this huge monster and he could never win. By this time he had begun to drink a lot in the daytime. He really had nothing to occupy him.”
What gnawed at Obama the most was his inability to pay for the education of his vast network of family members or even his own children. Ever since he had been a child performing math sums at Onyango’s table, he had been taught that education was the passport to achievement and success. He had long preached the benefits of a college degree and proudly paid the school fees for countless young nephews and cousins. That he, Dr. Barack Obama, could no longer do even that galled him deeply. It was not for lack of trying. During the years that he was unemployed, Obama routinely dropped into the downtown office of the Institute of International Education, a U.S.-based nonprofit that provides international educational opportunities and training in hopes of securing funding for one or two of his relatives. Almost once a week Josephine Mitchell, director of the office from 1972 to 1975, who sometimes worked late into the evening, would look up to find Obama at the door. “He was looking for money,” recalled Mitchell, now seventy-three years old and living in Vancouver Island. “He always had a long list of family members in mind. He’d say, ‘I have this brilliant nephew you must let me tell you about,’ or ‘Here are the schools I have in mind for him,’ or, ‘Did you know that these are the schools I went to?’”