It’s too early in the day for a headache...
August 31, 1961. He’s got a birth year of 1934.
That makes him 27 three weeks after the Hawaii Miracle Birth. But the LFGBC SHOWS HIM AS 25. (As does the document with the ‘per grandmother’ notation)
April 21, 1964. His birth year shows as 1936.
You need time to absorb all this you say? I need a shrink or a drink.
THE BOLD AND RECKLESS LIFE OF...
The crowd at Makadara Hall had been waiting for nearly half an hour. It was a humid Sunday in 1957, and over a thousand men and women were eager to see their political hero, Tom Mboya, take the stage. Craning for a glimpse of the presumed next president of the Nairobi Peoples Convention Party, the crowd churned against the sheet-metal walls that framed Nairobi’s largest social hall, chanting bits of song, ever watchful of the European police officers stationed at the doorways.
Mboya was often late, but he always showed up at this weekly event, easily one of the city’s most popular political meetings. Just as the crowd was growing impatient, a figure stepped on the stage. But it was not Mboya in his trademark red windbreaker. It was a woman. More astonishing, it was a mzungu. She was barely over five feet tall, her floral skirt falling just above her pale ankles, a tentative smile playing across her angular face. The crowd grew abruptly quiet, uncertain as Mboya appeared on the stage behind her. What did this mean? Surely, this could not bode well.
But when the white woman began to speak, with Mboya acting as her interpreter, they listened. Her name was Elizabeth Mooney. And she had come to change their lives.
The forty-three-year-old Texas native was a literacy teacher who the Kenyan government had employed under a U.S.-sponsored program to teach Kenyans how to read and write. In the four months since she had arrived, Mooney had had difficulty spreading word of her program. And so when the immensely popular Mboya, an ardent advocate of education, had offered to let her appear on stage, Mooney jumped at the chance. Mooney made good use of her few minutes, explaining to the impatient crowd how easy it could be to learn how to read and write and exactly how her classes were taught. Although her appearance prompted much fluttering in the U.S. Consulate office and a reprimand in one of the local papers—both parties were distraught at the impropriety of her appearing on stage with such a high-profile politician—her mission had been accomplished.
Her words that day turned the tide in her favor, and the numbers in her classroom tripled the following week. During her two-year stay in Kenya, Mooney would change the course of hundreds of Africans’ lives, but none so completely as that of a young man named Barack Obama. In a matter of months Mooney not only helped give focus to his wandering ambition, but at a time when many doors seemed closed to him, she provided the critical assistance that ultimately put him on a plane to America, thus planting the seed of a political upheaval to come a generation later…
They had crossed paths several times in the city, for Obama often attended Mboya’s afternoon addresses. But one afternoon, not long after her appearance at Makadara Hall, Mooney happened to visit the cramped office of the Indian law firm where Obama worked as a clerk typist taking dictation. This time they began to talk. Eager to staff her Spartan office on Ribeiro Street in the heart of Nairobi, Mooney observed that Obama was both fast and accurate at the keyboard as he worked. She promptly offered him a position as her secretary, and Obama started work for her a few days later…
Over the course of long hours spent poring over the evolving texts with Obama, the serious-minded Mooney gradually warmed to Obama’s ironic sense of humor. In Obama she found a keenly intelligent student bristling with potential, one who also happened to have a powerful magnetism with women. That he was desperately eager to perfect his English and advance the rudimentary social skills the Old Man had taught him may have drawn her to him even more. At the time they met, Obama was just coming into his manhood. Obama was now a young father, for early in 1958 Kezia had given birth to his first son. They named him Roy Abongo Obama,although he later assumed the name Malik. Kezia took care of the baby almost entirely herself, but Obama was aware of his responsibilities as the father of an infant son. Mooney had no children of her own, but she delighted in young people and took a great interest in Obama’s small family.
Although not a tall man, his broadface and often earnest expression gave Obama a commanding appearance. Alongwith his elegant demeanor, he possessed an intense physical allure. The same fluidity that drew admiring stares on the Kendu Baydance floor of his youth was now present in an everyday grace of movement. The power of his appeal, however, had as much to do with his aura of self-confidence and ebullience as it did with his physical attributes, at least as a young man. And then there was the trumpeting voice, now matured, that could snap a sleepy room to attention from a corridor away. Obama, clearly, wasnot to be passed over.
What Obama found in Mooney was more complex. Part of her appeal for him was certainly the job. Working at the Literacy Center provided both social standing and the opportunity to rise. But Mooney and Obama also spent time together outside the office, enjoying rural drives and attending some of the popular evening dances. And that association brought a different kind of benefit for Obama. Among a certain kind of African man, just keeping company with a white woman provided considerable social status. Doing so was a bold act, the behavior of a man who no longer intended to blindly knuckle to European social mores.Although certain elements among both the colonists and the Africans disapproved of interracial unions, others felt it was high time that things began to change. C. M. G. Argwings-Kodhek, the lawyer who squared off with Mboya in colorful political debates, had openly thrown down a gauntlet when he married a white woman while he was studying outside the country in the early 1950s, a time when, in Kenya, it was against the law to do so. Kenyatta had also married a white woman in England, although he did not bring her home until after independence. And if others speculated about the precise nature of the relationship between Mooney and Obama, well, all the better from Obama’s point of view.