Shortly after Barack Jr. was born, the father left Ann to go to Harvard. There he took up with another woman, Ruth Nidesand. Harvard officials and immigration authorities suspected Barack Sr. was a bigamist, but they could never get a straight story out of him. They finally canceled his scholarship, which forced him to return to Kenya. Back home, Obama Sr. embellished his Harvard experience. He tried to impress other Kenyan economists by saying he had studied at Harvard with Nobel laureate Ken Arrow, even though Arrow did not arrive at Harvard until 1968, four years after Barack Sr. left. For years Barack Sr. advanced economic theories that had been proven, he said, in his dissertation, but when someone asked him to produce the dissertation he could not; burglars, he said, had broken into his house and stolen it.
12
At first, Obama Sr. was treated with great respect in Kenya. He was employed by a bank and then by the Kenyan government. But his career quickly went into a tailspin. Part of the reason was his arrogance, but a bigger factor seems to be that Barack Sr. got the reputation for making things up and saying anything to impress others or get what he wanted. “He would make wild exaggerations,” said one of his co-workers, Nyaringo Obure. “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 a 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. Another time he said a buffalo attacked one of his relatives. Barack happened to be in the 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.”
Obama was frequently caught lying about expenses and other matters, and on more than one occasion he was demoted or fired. Yet even when real importance eluded him, Obama still found a way to get it. Later in his career he became known for impersonating important people so that he could be treated as a celebrity. On one occasion, he attended a conference in Ghana where he pretended to be Z. T. Onyonka, the Kenyan Minister of Economic Planning and Development. When the real Onyonka showed up, the organizers thought that he was the impostor. Needless to say, Onyonka was not amused and severely reprimanded Obama Sr.
13
What can we make of all this? When I think of Barack Obama Sr., I am reminded of a woman who used to visit our house in India. The stories she told had us riveted as kids, and yet they seemed unbelievable, too fantastic to be true. She narrated them with such passion, however, that we felt they had to be true. In retrospect, I believe the woman was a fabulist, a spinner of fables. She was good at it, however, and this made her stories compelling. Barack Sr. was also a fabulist, and this is part of the magic that his son sought to learn from him.
Over time his personal failings brought down Barack Sr., whose personal life would today have surely qualified him for his own reality show. Barack Sr. turned down a full scholarship to the New School for Social Research in New York, even though the scholarship included funds to bring Ann Obama and young Barack Jr. with him. Instead he accepted a partial scholarship from Harvard that required him to leave his wife and child behind in Hawaii. The woman he took up with at Harvard, Ruth Nidesand, followed Barack Sr. back to Kenya. There he married her and had two children by her, while reuniting with his first wife and having more children with her. Ruth accused her husband of routinely abusing and occasionally beating her. She recounted a sample episode. “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. He kept coming back every week, the same thing, shouting and calling me names.” A neighbor, Gladys Ogolah, commented that “he would hit her about the shoulders and neck. Ruth would run screaming down the road to our house crying.” A heavy drinker even at Harvard, Barack Sr. increased his alcohol consumption especially as his career declined. One of his friends, Leo Omolo, remarked that “he would drink in one night the equivalent of one month’s salary.”
14
Barack Sr. got into numerous drunk-driving accidents, in one case killing a man, in another hurting himself so badly that both his legs had to be amputated and replaced by iron rods. This did not, however, undermine his courtship style, because he impregnated his fourth wife, Jael Otieno, in that condition, thus producing his eighth child, George Obama. Finally, in 1982, Barack Sr. got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.
None of this sounds like Barack Obama Jr., who was horrified to discover this aspect of his father, and understandably vowed not to follow him in these destructive habits. What young Barack also knew, however, was that his father was a man of big dreams and big ideas. So far we have said nothing about those. Barack Sr. was, from his youth, an anti-colonialist, which is hardly surprising since he grew up at a time when Kenya was fighting for independence from the British. This was the 1940s and 1950s, and the anti-colonial juggernaut was spreading throughout the world. India became independent in 1947, and soon the freedom tide reached Ghana, which was the first African country to gain its independence ten years later.
While in Hawaii, Barack Sr. gave an interview to a local paper in which he discussed colonialism. “Many people have asked me, ‘Are the people of Kenya ready for self-government?’” he said. “And to these people I say, ‘Nobody is competent enough to judge whether a country is fit to rule itself or not. If the people cannot rule themselves, let them misrule themselves. They should be provided with the opportunity.’” I find it hard to disagree with this, but for Barack Sr. anti-colonialism was like a religion; he shunned people who held to different beliefs. Mark Wimbush was a white Kenyan with a Scottish mother and an English father; he arrived at the University of Hawaii around the same time as Barack Sr. Wimbush’s attempts to befriend Barack Sr. were rejected. “We were the ugly colonialists,” Wimbush said. “Part of the tension between Barack and me might have been that fact.” Barack Sr. was also vehemently opposed to U.S. foreign policy, as well as to higher U.S. defense spending. In May 1962 he appeared at a Mother’s Day peace rally in which he declared that “anything which relieves military spending will help us.” Barack Sr. was a self-described socialist, a position he subsequently elaborated in his 1965 article in the
East Africa Journal
, “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” And according to fellow student and future economist Naranhkiri Tith, Barack Sr. had a soft spot for Communism, regarding it as a modern version of the communalism of African tribes. “I did not believe Communism could save the world,” Tith says. “I gave examples of what I had seen. Obama senior was the opposite. He was always glorying about how Communism had liberated Africa and Cuba. For him, Communism was going to save the world. Capitalism was going to collapse.”
15
In Nairobi I interviewed the journalist Philip Ochieng, who came to America to study around the same time as Barack Obama Sr., and who became a friend and drinking buddy of his. “Our generation was totally anti-colonial,” he said. “And colonialism had very many faces—the economic face, the racial race, the religious face, there are so many.” I asked Ochieng if he believed the West became rich by stealing the wealth from colonized countries. He replied, “This is almost a truism. The raw materials taken from the Third World are manufactured in Europe and America and then re-sold to us at very astronomical prices.” Ochieng also said that “America has taken over from Europe in what we call the neo-colonial system. America has gradually taken over from Europe as overlord of the world.” I asked about Israel. Ochieng described it as “a little Trojan Horse in the Middle East.” I asked Ochieng if he still described himself as anti-colonialist, and if that characterization would apply to Barack Obama Sr. He said, “I am, I am still. Barack Obama was.”
Even though Barack Sr. espoused anti-colonial ideals, he played a very small role in Kenya’s freedom struggle. Kenya got its independence in 1963, and for the preceding four years Barack Sr. was in America. Even when he returned to Kenya, he became bitterly antagonistic to the leading figure of Kenya’s independence struggle, Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta wanted self-rule, but he didn’t hate the British. While occasionally calling himself a socialist, Kenyatta generally supported property rights and free markets. Barack Sr. roundly condemned Kenyatta as a hypocrite, insisting that true socialists are people who use state power to seize private property and bring down concentrations of economic power. Peter Aringo, a former member of Parliament, said of his friend Barack Sr., “He did not like the aggressive capitalism that Kenyatta was putting into place. This sharing of the crumbs from the table did not impress him and he said so.”
16
Eventually Kenyatta lost patience with the left-wing socialists inside his government and got rid of most of them, including Barack Sr.
So we are back to the 26-year-old Obama in Kenya, trying to figure out the truth about his father and how to relate to him. For him, it is a basic question of his own identity. Everywhere he goes, he is haunted by his father. At the airport a woman asks him, “You wouldn’t be related to Dr. Obama, by any chance?” Obama is ecstatic. “She’s recognized my name. That had never happened before . . . not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A. or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide . . . . No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged.” In the market, a vendor takes him to be an American and he beats his chest and responds, “I’m a Luo.” Later he reflects, “I feel my father’s presence as Auma and I walk through the busy street.... I hear him in the laughter of the pair of university students . . . . I smell him in the cigarette smoke of the businessman . . . . The Old Man’s here . . . although he doesn’t say anything to me. He’s here, asking me to understand.” On his way to his family homestead, Obama falls asleep and dreams that he is running through a village when his father appears to him, “a giant figure looming as tall as the trees, wearing only a loincloth and a ghostly mask. The lifeless eyes bored into me, and I heard a thunderous voice saying only that it was time, and my entire body began to shake violently with the sound, as if I were breaking apart.”
17
One thing Obama is clear about—whatever the truth about his father, he cannot let go of the man.
Thus finally we come to the grave scene, Obama weeping at his father’s grave. There Obama found a solution that was both creative and, in a way, frightening. Forced to confront the knowledge that his father was a deeply flawed individual, Obama split his father into two: bad Obama and good Obama. He rejected bad Obama, the drunk, the wife-beater, and the deadbeat dad. But he embraced what he took to be good Obama, namely, the stylish dresser, the charismatic speaker, and most of all the intrepid anti-colonialist. Obama changed that day, and emerged as a very different person. It is this Obama, remade in his father’s image, that we see today in the White House.
CHAPTER FOUR
MOMMIE DEAREST
It wasn’t a race thing. Barry’s biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment.
1
—Keith Kakugawa,
Chicago Tribune
I
t is a terrible thing to be abandoned by your mom, especially when you have already been abandoned by your dad. Those were my thoughts about young Barack Obama as I got off the plane at Jakarta Airport. I was there to see the place where Obama spent four years, from 1967 to 1971, between the ages of six and ten. But all I could think about upon first landing was the scene that had occurred there more than forty years ago. In 1971, Ann Obama sent her 10-year-old son, by himself, back to America. As Obama described it in
Dreams from My Father
, an Indonesian copilot led him to the plane as his mother, step-father, and stepsister Maya all stood by at the gate.
2
Ann wasn’t going with him. And while she would return periodically to visit, she basically stayed in Indonesia for the rest of her life. During that period she was quite the globetrotter, making trips to China, Thailand, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Morocco, and Ghana.
“My father left my family when I was two years old,” Obama told a group of young people in September 2009. “I was raised by a single mother.” This is what he consistently said on the campaign trail. But it is actually a half-truth. His father left the family before he was born. Moreover, from the age of ten until he left for college, Obama was raised by neither his father nor his mother. That responsibility fell to his maternal grandparents. Keith Kakugawa was a close friend of young Obama at the Punahou School in Hawaii. Kakugawa is profiled in
Dreams from My Father
, where Obama portrays him as obsessed with race, and most of their conversations as revolving around racial issues. Kakugawa, however, said that they almost never talked about race. Obama, he said, faced a different crisis. “Everybody said they always saw him smiling and happy. I didn’t. I got to see the turmoil. I got to see how he really felt. He felt abandoned. He felt his father abandoned him and his mother was always pursuing her career.” In another interview, Kakugawa recalled of Obama, “What was upsetting him—that his mother took off again. Seems like she never has time for him anymore.”
3
It was only in 1995, when she was dying of cancer, that Ann Obama finally returned to Hawaii. Her daughter Maya was there at her deathbed, but her son Barack Obama didn’t bother to show up. She had abandoned him when he was young, and he returned the favor toward the end of her life. My cameraman shook his head as I told him what happened. “It’s a very sad story,” he observed. “Yes,” I said, “and we are now paying for it.”