by Auma Obama
* * *
Even more difficult for me than those Saturday evenings were the weekends when the students went home. Every other weekend we were allowed to visit our families. On Saturday morning, we were picked up at an appointed time by our parents or a relative and had to be back at the boarding school punctually the next evening. All the girls seemed to look forward to it, and it was considered the worst punishment to lose the privilege of going home. For me, however, it was not a punishment; I was happy to be able to stay at school.
To be in our empty house, without my stepmother and little brothers, was much worse. If I spent a weekend there, I was mostly alone. My father worked a lot, putting in long hours, and did not come home immediately afterward, but instead spent the evenings with his friends. That was nothing out of the ordinary in those days. Kenyan fathers rarely dealt with the children; that was a woman’s job. Only there was no woman in our home anymore. Abongo, who attended his school as a day student, came home every day, but after a brief greeting spent most of his time elsewhere. Both of them, my father and my brother, seemed to flee the silence of our house as often as possible. Frequently, I was already asleep when they got back. And from time to time, it would happen that my returning father would wake me up to talk with me.
While I sat on the sofa in the living room, rubbing my eyes sleepily and pretending to be listening to him attentively, he talked to me late into the night about all the great things he was planning for us. He spoke about his love for us children, about the fact that he was doing everything in his power to provide for us.
On those nights, my father would also talk about my brother Barack and his mother, Ann. Over the years, I had heard a lot about this brother in the United States whom I had never met. But I was never particularly curious about him. Despite the fact that my father spoke regularly about Barry, as he called him, to us children and our extended family, ensuring that he was definitely part of the Obama family, he was too far removed from my everyday life for me to show real interest. Even now I only listened with half an ear as my father repeated the stories from letters and showed me photos sent to him by Ann updating him on Barack’s progress. He was very proud of Barack and also seemed to still care a lot for Ann.
Longing for a return to a tight-knit family circle, I would prick up my ears only when my father talked about Barack and his mother coming to live with us in Kenya. I detected in his voice a desperate need to believe that with the two of them he could re-create a home that was not tarnished by a sense of failure and discord. I did not question how likely this reunion was. When talking about it, my father’s voice was tinged with sorrow and loneliness, and deep down I probably knew it would never become a reality.
Sometimes he simply played a piece of classical music and told me this and that about the composer. I thus became acquainted on those nights with Bach, Schubert, Brahms, and other great figures of European classical music.
I often have vivid recollections of those nighttime scenes. I can see us sitting together on the couch, my father talking, me nodding. I rarely respond to what he is saying and am distant toward him. I did not understand his deep sadness, and his loneliness did not arouse my sympathy. At that time, I firmly believed that he himself was to blame for the situation into which he had brought all of us, which had resulted in a broken family.
* * *
Ultimately, my father’s attempt to get closer to me during those late-night conversations was doomed to fail. My pain was simply too great to allow any intimacy. I remained distant and mistrustful and felt as if I were sitting opposite a man I didn’t know at all. I resented the fact that he made me sit through his suffering when I felt that he did not acknowledge mine, when in my eyes he was, in fact, responsible for it. Not only did I sense that he did not grasp how great my loss was, behaving as if everything would soon be back to normal, but he had also been too much of an absent father for me to share my feelings with him. Previously, he had only rarely done anything with us of his own accord. When my stepmother was still living with us, she always planned a family outing on the weekends, and my father always submitted to her wishes. Or if nothing was planned with the family, he met up with friends after he had read the newspaper and solved the crossword puzzle. At the time, it was basically quite all right with us children that we didn’t have all too much to do with him. We were in great awe of him and were glad when he didn’t meddle in our affairs. We also had my stepmother and each other.
But there were also times when I asked my father for help, such as one day when Abongo was playing soccer with his friends and he refused to let me join them despite my persistent pleading and begging. I fetched my father, who put his foot down. My brother reluctantly gave in and made me goalie. Unfortunately, I did not last very long. After a short time, a ball hit me with full force in the belly, knocked the wind out of me, and brought tears to my eyes. That ended the game for me for the time being. I ran to my father, who immediately rushed out of the house and reprimanded my brother.
“You have to do a better job of looking out for your sister,” he shouted at Abongo, comforting me.
“That’s why she shouldn’t play with us,” my brother replied angrily, trying very hard not to sound impertinent, for fear of getting in trouble.
“If she wants to play, she can play,” my father said decisively.
Although I sometimes took advantage of my father’s authority to prevail against my brother, and Abongo himself constantly threatened to tell my father about my misdeeds, we usually tried to resolve our quarrels between ourselves and preferred not to get him involved.
To sit with my father relaxing and listening to music on a weekend at home seemed completely absurd to me. It was not only that I was afraid of him as a figure of respect, but also that the anger over our lost family and the longing for my vanished mother were rumbling in me rather powerfully. If only my father had taken an interest in us earlier, we might have had a different relationship, I thought repeatedly as the poignant music filled the room. Now that he had to deal with us on his own, without my stepmother, he knew how to relate to us only as an authority figure whose word was law—or, on nights like this, as a broken man.
Agitated and full of conflicting emotions, I listened to the flutes and violins of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony and could not shake the thought: Why can’t everything go back to the way it used to be?
At that time, I fully comprehended that my father needed the music and the conversation to drown out the emptiness that had permeated his life, but I did not grant him that escape. What about me? Didn’t he see that I was going through the same things he was? Had he ever seriously thought about my feelings at all? I suspected that my father didn’t ask me any questions about my emotional state because he was afraid of the answers. Nor did I demand an explanation from him. I avoided an honest conversation, because as a well-bred child I was not allowed to rebel against my parents’ decisions. I was strictly forbidden to talk back to an adult. So I remained silent and merely listened in frustration to the music.
With the distance of years, I grasp better what was going on in my father’s life in the sixties and seventies and what political struggles dominated his everyday professional life. He had returned highly motivated from his studies in the United States and believed that he could make a significant contribution to building up his native country. He moved from the private sector into government service, taking a post in the Ministry of Finance, where he was convinced he could be of real service. But the first thing he discovered was that he would have to align his visions of the country’s development with the prevailing political climate. The powers that be seemed to have no real interest in fostering Kenya’s progress. They seemed much more concerned with consolidating their own positions. My father’s honest efforts to support the government in word and deed were met with inaction and even hostility.
What ultimately became my father’s undoing was the fact that, with his academic background in economics, he was frequent
ly more competent than his superiors and did not shy away from making that clear to them. On top of that, he was Luo, which did not make things easy for him in the political landscape at that time, since the government posts were occupied mainly by the Kikuyu. In the conflict resulting from the mistrust that had developed between the various ethnic groups under colonial rule, and through ethnically motivated cronyism, the Kikuyu had gained the most advantages for themselves. My father refused to play along with the game of corruption and nepotism. He criticized vocally those two elements of political praxis—and was thus systematically chastised as a “know-it-all” Luo and marginalized to the point that he ultimately lost his position. His efforts to find a new job were blocked nationwide. He even had to surrender his passport so that he could not go abroad.
His growing professional discontent also put ever-greater strains on his relationship with my stepmother, Ruth, until it finally fell apart. Thus, on top of his lost job, he no longer had familial support either. In this situation, he tried in vain to be there for my brother and me. Today, I can understand why he didn’t succeed in that. Without employment and without money, and politically ostracized to boot, he couldn’t get back on his feet no matter how hard he tried.
I’ve often wondered how things would have gone for us if my father had held his tongue and bowed to the pressure of the power relations at that time. Would he have managed to move his country forward, stay true to himself, and hold his family together at the same time? Would things have gone better for us? But there’s no answer to this question. My father simply could not hold his tongue.
* * *
Under the prevailing circumstances, school break was always particularly trying for me. The boarding school shut its gates, and all the students had to go home, whether they wanted to or not. Now came hard weeks—for in our motherless household there was always something new to contend with. One day stuck in my mind with particular clarity, when my father appeared at home with friends and asked me to prepare lunch for all of them. Obanda was gone by then. I was told that my stepmother had fired him shortly before her separation from my father because he had shown up drunk for work. And she had taken our domestic help, Juliana, with her.
For us, a warm meal typically consists of vegetables, meat with sauce, and the traditional ugali, a cooked maize flour paste. The vegetables and meat sauce needed only to be warmed up, but I was supposed to prepare the ugali. My father was not aware that I didn’t know how to do it. And I didn’t dare to confess this to him.
First, I put water on the stove, as I had observed Obanda and the various maids do. Then I waited for it to heat up. But that seemed to take forever—and my father was inquiring about the food from the next room. Nervously and uncertainly, I stared at the slowly heating water. Once again I heard him call. On the spur of the moment, I reached for the packet of maize flour, which was only a third full, and poured the whole contents into the steaming water. It bubbled up, flour spraying out of the pot onto the stove. I quickly began to stir the mixture with a large, flat wooden spoon. I pushed the spoon forcefully back and forth in the thickening paste, in the way I imagined Obanda would have done it.
After a while, I noticed that my ugali was not getting firm, though there was no longer any bubbling and spraying. But I had already been stirring for some time. I turned up the temperature, to no avail. The soft sludge simply refused to harden. I knew that ugali had to be firm, even though it wasn’t clear to me how to get it that way.
“Where’s the food?” I heard my father calling once again in a joking tone. “We’re gradually starving.”
I was in anything but a laughing mood. My face was sweating from agitation and heat. I sampled a little of my ugali to check whether it was cooked now, but it still tasted raw. I wondered whether I should add more maize flour—but the packet was empty anyway.
Fifteen minutes had passed, and I was still moving the spoon back and forth. Usually it took at most ten to fifteen minutes to cook ugali.
“Where’s the food, Auma?” a voice suddenly said directly behind me. I was startled and turned around. My father was standing in the doorway.
“I cooked it, but it just won’t harden,” I answered, almost crying, as I pointed at the pot.
“Why?” My father stepped closer to me. “Let me have a look.”
He took the spoon from my hand and briefly stirred the soggy ugali.
“When did you put in the maize flour?”
“After the water had been on the stove for a while.”
“Was it boiling?”
“I think so. I’m not sure,” I answered timidly.
“Why aren’t you sure?” my father asked perplexedly. “You must know what you did.”
I didn’t say anything.
My father hated it when people did things thoughtlessly. His own actions were only rarely the result of chance. In my eyes, he was someone who always knew what he was doing and why he was doing it. And he himself seemed barely capable of comprehending that other people sometimes did rash things—things they could not necessarily explain.
“Was the water boiling when you poured in the maize flour?” He repeated his question somewhat more gently.
I still didn’t say anything and looked at the floor. I felt terrible. What if he now told his friends how out of my depth I was in the kitchen?
“Is there any maize flour left?”
“No,” I answered sheepishly.
“Then nothing will come of this ugali.”
And before I grasped what was happening, he turned off the stove, took the pot, and poured the whole contents in the garbage bin.
“But, but…” I stammered, aghast.
At that time, my father had considerable financial problems—I knew that it was sometimes a struggle for him even to put food on the table for us. Under those circumstances, how could he simply throw away a meal? I was surprised that he had brought friends home with him in the first place. What would we serve them now?
“When you prepare ugali, the water has to boil before you pour in the maize flour,” he explained to me with a sigh. “It probably wasn’t boiling at all. You could have gone on for hours like that, and it never would have turned into ugali. Here,” he added, pressing some money into my hand. “Run quickly to the kiosk and buy a packet of maize flour. Then I’ll show you how to cook ugali.”
“And your guests?” I asked uncertainly.
“They can wait.”
As fast as I could, I ran to the kiosk. On the way, I thought that my father wasn’t so bad after all. He actually wanted to teach me how to make ugali. I didn’t have to be afraid of him. This superman was, in fact, just a completely normal person.
His absence in my life, due to his work and his traditional paternal role, along with the image of him as a strict authority figure that Obanda in particular had painted for us in order to be able to discipline us with it—along the lines of “Do what I say, or you’ll get in trouble with your father!”— had stirred up a fear of him inside me that was hard to overcome.
The ugali episode ultimately ended with a crash course in cooking, during which my father explained every single step as he himself prepared the ugali, while I stood next to him and watched. Under his supervision, I then got to warm up the meat sauce and vegetables. When I finally served the meal to the patiently waiting guests, he praised me and didn’t say a word about the fact that I was not the one who had cooked the food.
* * *
Our financial situation deteriorated drastically when my father was taken to the hospital after a serious car accident. Among other injuries, he had broken both legs and had to spend several months in the hospital. The accident occurred shortly after he had finally gotten a new job, but because he was out on sick leave for so long, he lost it and was now once again unemployed. In Kenya, he could receive no unemployment benefits, no child benefits, and no other financial support at all.
We sometimes didn’t know how we would get through the next day. For us chi
ldren, that was a very frightening feeling. Only a few relatives still provided me with a sense of closeness and intimacy. During school break, Aunt Zeituni, my father’s younger sister, regularly brought us something to eat. Aunty Jane also did what she could to help us. She worked in the city center, and during the weeks when I was not in boarding school, I sometimes stopped by and picked up some pocket money. She was my mother’s sister, a full-figured, upbeat, and fun woman.
In those difficult times, it happened repeatedly that I was sent home from school due to unpaid school fees. A week after the beginning of each trimester, a list of names would be called in the morning when we had lined up in the hallway outside our dorm rooms to go to breakfast. Those whose names were called were instructed to report to the school bursar after breakfast. Whenever my name rang out, it was clear to me that it was about the school fees. With a slip of paper in his hand on which my name and the outstanding amount were written, the bursar informed me with a serious expression that he unfortunately had to send me home again. I could not come back until my father had paid the noted sum. I would then return to my residence hall, take off my school uniform, and head home. Other girls who had been summoned did the same. The school did not, however, feel obligated to inform our parents that we were released. So we set off without their knowledge; in my case, that meant about a two-mile walk.
When I showed up unannounced on such days—in the hospital or, after his release, at home—my father always gave me a reproving look, as if I were skipping school. Each time, he tried to send me back immediately. He called a few friends, who promised to help him with the payment of the school fees. Then he made out a check and sent me off again.