The Other Barack

by Sally Jacobs

  For Obama, the union with Jael provided a stability to his life that had long been lacking. Like many African men, Obama continued his nightly visits to the bars in town with his male friends, leaving his young wife at home. But he now had home-cooked meals and someone to look after him. Their lifestyle in the boxy Mawenzi Gardens complex, with its cement block walls and tiny outdoor patio, was a far cry from that to which he had once been accustomed, but it was a vast improvement over the dingy hotel rooms and bachelor pads of recent years. Obama also felt that at long last he had gained some recognition for his hard work on the Lake Turkana and Sudan road projects. Early in 1982 he was selected to partake in the country’s fifth national development plan covering the years 1984 to 1988, considered a vital government project. Obama was to chair a planning group on roads and housing that would review the country’s progress since independence and establish goals for the future. Seven years after he had been confined to a behind-the-scenes accounting post, he was now overseeing dozens of government workers at regular committee meetings each week. It wasn’t a division head or even an official promotion, but the position gave Obama a bit of the authority he felt he deserved.

  Establishing development goals in Kenya of 1982, however, was a daunting task. President Moi’s honeymoon period had lasted barely a year when the deepening world recession began to have a severe impact on the Kenyan economy, and the country faced an acute shortage of foreign exchange. As a scarcity of goods became commonplace, a series of strikes shook the country and many grew alarmed about the adequacy of the country’s food supply—and for good reason. In an effort to maintain control of the increasingly turbulent situation, Moi began to crack down on dissent and increased the army’s size in a deliberate show of muscle. On August 1, 1982, the country’s air force personnel staged an attempted coup d’état and seized control of the Voice of Kenya radio station, claiming they had taken over the government. The maneuver was short lived, as army troops managed to regain control within hours, although looting and chaos on the streets continued for days. For weeks afterward a curfew remained in place, as the deeply shaken nation struggled to regain an equilibrium.

  As the year drew toward an end, Jael found herself anxious about her husband. Their baby, named George Hussein Onyango Obama after a cherished cousin, had been born in May. Although the birth of another son invigorated Obama, he remained anxious about his finances and how he would be able to pay for yet another round of school fees. He was also deeply upset about the country’s state of economic crisis and Moi’s drift to the right. The specter of a return to the bad old years, even a pale version of them, left him despondent. When Obama headed out in the evenings, Jael cautioned him to be circumspect, worried that he might antagonize one of the soldiers patrolling the streets and wind up in jail. Amir Otieno Orinda, Obama’s half-brother by his mother, who was visiting the couple, agreed. “She told him not to go outside,” recalled Orinda. “She knew he was a hot-headed man and that he would not be afraid of the patrol. He kept saying the country was piny rach or ‘the country is no good.’”

  There was still another matter that contributed to Obama’s dark mood. His old nemesis, Philip Ndegwa, had just reached an unprecedented pinnacle and his shadow fell longer than ever. Ndegwa had held a succession of high-profile positions in recent years, including serving as adviser to newly elected president Moi and then as chairman of the Kenya Commercial Bank. But in November of 1982 it became clear that Ndegwa was going to be named governor of the Central Bank of Kenya, one of the most influential positions in the Kenyan government. Ndegwa, who of course had been famously tutored by Obama back in their Harvard days, was now the commander of the same bank that had dismissed Obama after ten months as a graduate trainee fifteen years earlier. Ndegwa’s posting, which would become effective in December, was galling.

  On a day in late November Obama came home with some chilling words. He told Jael that if he should die, she must make sure that George went to the best schools. And if he should die before the boy turned eighteen, she must make sure that all of his children received an equal share of whatever he had. He was adamant that he did not want “[unclear] to get five cents out of this.”27 Although Jael pressed him repeatedly to explain why he was saying such things, Obama refused to say anything further.

  Three days later Obama was dead. On November 26 Obama’s pickup truck had slammed into a eucalyptus stump as he was heading home at night from the Kaloleni bar. No one knew exactly how the accident had occurred, and some in his circle of drinking pals promptly questioned if it was an accident at all. On that day Obama had worked later than usual. He was preparing for an upcoming committee meeting on the fiscal constraints that were expected to shape the fifth development plan and had wound up in the office later than expected. As he was leaving the building early in the evening, en route to the Kaloleni, he happened to run into Edgar Edwards in the basement garage. Edwards, the senior economic adviser, could tell from Obama’s thick speech that he had put away a few drinks already. As he often did when he encountered Obama in such a condition, Edwards took a few minutes to urge Obama to drink less so that he could make better use of his substantial talents. Obama listened noncommittally, as he usually did to Edwards’s admonishments. “He was always very reserved around me,” recalled Edwards. “He listened and nodded his head, but he would never respond positively or negatively. He just listened respectfully.”

  Obama continued on his way and dropped in at the Intercontinental for a couple more drinks. By the time he reached the Kaloleni at around 8 p.m., he was in exceptionally high spirits. The score of regulars there were also well into their cups and the place was humming. Otieno was hunched over the table, deep in conversation. So too were Obondo and Olum. Obama headed to the bar, where he ordered his trademark Double-Double set of whiskies and bought a round of drinks for several other customers. At 10:30 p.m. Obama asked a friend, David Owino Weya, who often bought him drinks when he was out of money, to walk with him to his car. On that night the man who usually drove Obama home when he was in no condition to drive himself was otherwise engaged. A few people offered to drive him, but Obama was adamant that he could drive himself. “He was a bit tipsy but in quite a good humor,” said Weya. “When we got to his car he gave me two hundred shillings. He said, ‘I am leaving but you go and buy yourself some drinks. I will see you tomorrow at lunchtime.’”

  Weya was the last person to whom Obama spoke. A half hour later Obama drove into a broad stump at the edge of the Elgon Road a short distance from his home. He died instantly. The police came upon the wreckage several hours later and moved his body to the mortuary. As word of his passing spread quickly during the day, a handful of stunned relatives hurried to his side to say their final goodbyes.

  Speculation about the accident mushroomed just as quickly. Not surprisingly, the elements of Obama’s death were as mysterious to his family and friends as were fundamental aspects of his life. Family members, many of whom attribute Obama’s employment difficulties to payback for his brazen outspokenness, believe that nameless government enemies murdered him. It is a matter of gospel among them that Obama’s body was unscathed in the accident and his car undamaged—the very windshield unbroken. Even his eyeglasses, they maintain, were intact.28 If Obama had careened drunkenly into a tree, surely his body would have been brutally broken, his car a shattered wreck. He must have been killed in some other manner and his body placed in the car in such a way as to make it appear that he had an accident. Or so their reasoning goes.

  Others were convinced that Obama’s death was a suicide. How else to explain his curious remarks to his wife? Obama’s rage about the arc of his own life and his aching disappointment in his country’s path was hardly a secret. Nor was his self-destructive habit of drinking. Peter Aringo, traveling outside the country, remembered in one of his last conversations with his old friend that Obama had been despondent about his children, as they were scattered so widely and, in some cases, doing poorly. “It wei
ghed on him greatly,” said Aringo. “So I was not surprised to hear that he had died.”

  By far the most plausible scenario is that Obama died in a drunken car accident, just as the police said. Both Obama and his car were crushed in the accident. The Nairobi Times reported that Obama’s car was so badly destroyed that his body “had to be wedged out of the car.”29 As for Obama, doctors concluded that he had died as the result of “bleeding due to ruptured heart due to a traffic accident.”30 Whether Obama deliberately turned his car into the stump will never be known for sure, but the fact is that at the time of his death Obama had at long last arrived at a place of some peace. He was doing work that he loved and had regained some semblance of dignity. That he was a father again meant that he had the opportunity to do it differently this time, to be the kind of nurturing parent he had never had himself.

  The funeral, an elaborate event that lasted for several days, took place at the family homestead in Alego. After years of feeling he was insufficiently appreciated, the list of notables who attended would have delighted Obama. There were members of Parliament and dozens of his colleagues from the Treasury. Peter Aringo and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Robert Ouko, both spoke in tribute to his fierce intelligence and passion. Obama’s mother, Habiba Akumu, frail and tearful, sat mournfully by his wooden coffin, the grief over her eldest son’s death etched in the deep lines of her face. Dressed in a white floral dress and blue head kerchief, she sat protectively by his coffin as though she might protect him in death from the disappointments that had plagued him in life.

  OBAMA IS BURIED next to his father on the Obama family compound about an hour’s rough drive north of Lake Victoria. His grave is covered in broken yellow tiles and bears the Dholuo words ibed gi kwe, or “peace be with you.” If Barack Obama were to have sung a Luo praise song of his own life, he would have dwelled not on the tumult of his final decade but rather on the extraordinary and unlikely journey of a child born in a thatched hut in Kanyadhiang. The bird had flown high and far. Although Obama fell short of the exacting heights to which he aspired, he achieved ambitions that many Kenyans of his generation could not have begun to fathom.

  Emerging from a bruising childhood, Obama rose swiftly above the red African dust. With his fierce intellect as his passport, he was not simply a man firmly of the twentieth century but one who stood at the fulcrum of a changing world as his country emerged from the tyranny of colonialism. Obama came within inches of the Harvard doctoral degree that he so coveted, the academic jewel that would have served as the bedrock for the career he envisioned. But Harvard denied him that. So broken was Obama by Harvard’s summary judgment of him that he returned to Nairobi unable to even look at the dissertation that he had initiated with such high hopes. When, in a moment of despair, he claimed that paper had been stolen by thieves, what had really been lost was a deeper faith in himself.

  Obama never fully recovered from that disappointment, but it did not prevent him from taking the stage at a vital moment in his country’s life. At a time when many more cautious men retreated from a new imperious government that lashed out at dissent, Obama spoke truth to power. Confronted with the challenges of newly independent Kenya, a place radically changed from that which he left as a hopeful young man, Obama struggled to reconcile his ideals for his country with a bitterly disappointing reality. He refused to knuckle despite the enormous personal consequences. In the end, it was not, as his friend Ndolo Ayah said, that Barack Obama did not finish the race; rather, he finished too early to see what he had wrought.

  Nearly every day tourists from the farthest reaches of the world contemplate the cracked yellow tiles on his grave and take photographs of the resting place of President Barack Obama’s father for their albums back home. As the next page of history has turned, Obama’s impact has proved to be profoundly greater than he could have imagined. Although he never knew it, his legacy was to produce the most powerful man in the world. The other Barack would have liked that.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  That any project of substance requires a village of helpers is a cliché. It is also true. This project enlisted the support of a global metropolis. During the two and a half years it took to produce this book, I have relied on an army of assistants around the world. I bow first to my team of friends and advisors in Nairobi and Kisumu. A heartfelt thanks to the four who burrowed so deep and traveled so many kilometers and then went back again: Okoth Beatrice Akoth, Leo Odera Omolo, Terry Wairimu, and Felgona Atieno Ochieng. Each of them committed themselves to finding the truth despite the sometimes daunting obstacles.

  Many in the Obama family gave me their time and assistance. I am particularly thankful to Ezra Obama and Obama Kobilo, who made the drive with me to Kendu Bay more than once, and to the ever-welcoming Hawa Auma. Thanks also for their generosity and reflection to Francis Masakhalia, Fred Okatcha, Bitange Ndemo, Achola Pala Okeyo, Johnson Hungu, Peter Aringo, Edgar Edwards, and Chukwuma Azikiwe.

  Among the many who supported the cause in Hawaii, there is first and foremost Ken Kobayashi, a determined reporter and my colleague on the ground for nearly two years. I thank you. Also, much gratitude to Gov. Neil Abercrombie, Hal Abercrombie, Pake Zane, and Naranhkiri Tith.

  To Team Jacobs, the heart of it all: Shi Shi and Streett Jacobs, Grace Hamada, Sandra May, Jayson Walker, Jane Beal, Tabby, Castro, and Dixie. Each of them endured—and sometimes even looked at—the elaborate flow-charts left behind when I headed out on the road.

  To my extraordinary friends who always made time to read and reflect, even when they didn’t have it, Larry Tye and Judy Rakowsky, a heartfelt hallelujah. I am deeply grateful also to Kim Blanton, Sarah Wesson, Dudley Clendinen, and Phil Bennett. For their expertise and patience, John Lonsdale, Dharam Ghai, David W. Cohen, Parker Shipton, Dominique Connan, and Celia Nyamweru.

  I am also most grateful to the families of Elizabeth Mooney and Helen Roberts for sharing their wealth of letters and photographs and letting me tell the extraordinary story, at last. If it weren’t for Miss Mooney, who delivered the first Barack Obama to the United States, there might not be an Obama in the White House at all.

  To others who made a difference along the way Lois Beckett, David Arnold, Liz Cooney, Paul Nyangani, Azinna Nwafor, Dorothy and Bob Stephens, Gitau Warigi, Barbara and M. F. Scherer, Richard Parker, Roger Noll, Ann Trevor, and Brendan Bannon.

  Last, but certainly not least, I am indebted to the Boston Globe for giving me the time to work on this book and for taking me back when it was done.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  1 Peter Firstbrook, The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family (London: Preface Publishing, 2010), 52; David W. Cohen,“The River Lake Nilotes from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in Zamani: A Survey of East African History, ed. Bethwell A. Ogot and J. A. Kieran (Nairobi, Kenya: East African Publishing House, 1968), 149.

  2 Grace Kezia Aoko Obama, affidavit in Succession Cause No. 233 of 1985, in the matter of the estate of Barack Hussein Obama, High Court of Kenya, Nairobi, November 1988.

  3 Habiba Akumu, affidavit in Succession Cause No. 233 of 1985, in the matter of the estate of Barack Hussein Obama, High Court of Kenya, Nairobi, November 1988.

  4 Ruling by Judge J. F. Shields, June 1989. Succession Cause No. 233 of 1985.

  5 From Ruth Ndesandjo, Ezra Obama, and W. E. Obama Kobilo interviews.

  6 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Random House, 1995), 212.

  7 From Abong’o Malik Obama interview.

  8 Obama, Dreams from My Father, 217.

  9 Auma Obama, Das Leben kommt immer dazwischen (Cologne, Germany: Bastei Lubbe GmbH & Co. KG, 2010), 123.

  10 Andrew Jacobs, “An Obama Relative Living in China Tells of His Own Journey of Self-Discovery,” New York Times, November 4, 2009.

  11 Obama, Dreams from My Father, 344.

  12 From Mark Ndesandjo interview.

  13 Mark Ndesandjo, Nairobi to Shenzhen (
San Diego: Aventine Publishing, 2009), 6.

  14 Ibid., 133.

  15 George Obama with Damien Lewis, Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 48.

  16 Ibid., 269.

  17 Obama, Dreams from My Father, 129.

  18 Ibid., 221.

  19 From Neil Abercrombie interview.

  CHAPTER 2

  1 Ronald Hardy, The Iron Snake (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 308.

  2 Assa Okoth, A History of Africa, vol. 1: African Societies and the Establishment of Colonial Rule, 1800–1915 (Nairobi, Kenya: East African Educational Publishers, 2006), 198–99.

  3 Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru: The Autobiography of Oginga Odinga (Nairobi, Kenya: East African Educational Publishers, 1967), 1.

  4 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Random House, 1995), 397.

  5 Ibid., 398.

  6 David W. Cohen, “The River Lake Nilotes from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in Zamani: A Survey of East African History, ed. Bethwell A. Ogot and J. A. Kieran (Nairobi, Kenya: East Africa Publishing House, 1968), 142.

  7 Ibid., 154.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Bethwell A. Ogot, A History of the Luo Speaking Peoples of East Africa (Nairobe, Kenya: Anyange Press, 2009), 512; Peter Firstbrook, The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family (London: Preface Publishing, 2010), 47.