Obama, the African Colonial

Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama's skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.

Kenya: Special Report: Sleepy Little Village Where Obama Traces His Own Roots
By John Oywa, 15 August 2004

Nairobi — His sudden rise to stardom has stunned many. Analysts toast him as one of the most brilliant and popular black politicians in the United States in recent times.

Others taunt him as a “skinny kid with a funny name,” whose Kenyan father herded goats and lived in a remote village in Siaya, Nyanza province.

With his cousin Yusuf Okoth Obama, when he visited his father’s home in Alego, Siaya, 10 years ago. e

But excited admirers both in Kenya and the US celebrate him as a political superstar and a beacon of hope for his people.

As a front runner in the United States Illinois Senate campaigns, Barack Obama Jr has raised a cloud of excitement in the international political arena.

After delivering a well received public speech at the National Democratic Convention in Boston last month, there are some Americans who now believe he is a future candidate for the White House.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, as it were, in the sleepy village of Alego-Kogello where Barack Obama Snr grew up, they call the prospective Senator “Wuod Sarah”, Dholuo for “the son of Sarah”, Sarah being his foster grandmother.

Obama’s real grand mother - the late Habiba Akumu separated with his grandfather, thus forcing Sarah to step in to care for him.

Agitated villagers are waiting in awe. What if Obama wins the Senate seat in the November 2 elections? Will he return home with bags of dollars? Will the rocky road leading to their village be tarmacked? Will their mud-walled schools where Obama’s father and cousins once schooled be improved?

As the US senate campaign hots up, Obama mania is sweeping through Alego.

Villagers here now buy newspapers to read every tid bit they can find about their American kin. The rest have their ears glued to battered transistor radios to keep abreast with the latest information about Obama Jr’s political exploits.

Everyone you meet in the area wants to be associated either with Obama Jr, his father or even distant relatives.

Newly-born children and oxen, are being named after him. There are even suggestions that a village path leading to a local market be named after him.

With his father, the late Barack Obama senior (second left, in glasses), his step mother Keziah (seated, left) and step brothers Malik , Sadik and sister Auma.

To these simple villagers, news that Obama was causing a political stir in the world’s most powerful country is a miracle. “Ma en hono maduong” (this is a big miracle), says 50-year-old Martin Onyango.

“Wamor kod wuod Sarah. Otingo’ nying Kenya malo” (We are happy with Sarah’s son, he has elevated Kenya’ name),” says Onyango as he chews sugarcane.

Some of the people of Alego believe Obama’s rising fortunes will translate into increased employment opportunities, better roads and education opportunities. A few are even optimistic that even the dusty Nyang’oma-Kogello market will be upgraded to a big town, complete with an airstrip.

“We don’t expect a whole Senator to drive to his home village. We expect him to fly direct and land at Nyang’oma,” says George Onyango, a 20-year-old barber.

The prospective Senator’s sister-in-law Fauziah Anyango, wife to his step-brother Malik Obama, told the Sunday Nation that she was eager to meet her heroic in-law.

Said she: “I have not met him but I pray that he wins the Senate seat. His victory will not be for us, but for Kenya and Africa.”

A Sunday Nation team that set out to trace Obama’s roots was surprised to find that, unknown to many, Obama has actually been to this village twice. First in 1983, when he had come to mourn his late father, Barack Hussein Obama, who had died in Nairobi in 1982; and again in 1995 when he brought home his young bride to show her his roots.

During both visits, the villagers paid little or no attention to him. He managed to slip quietly into the village, pray at his father’s graveyard and meet a few relatives and villagers.

Family members told the Sunday Nation that they taught his bride how to use traditional pots (Agulu) to fetch water from a nearby stream.

Obama Jr and his bride spent nearly a week sleeping in a tiny room in his foster grandmother’s old brick house and ate traditional foods.

The ropes from which he hung a mosquito net at his grandmother’s house still dangle in the bedroom.

Photographs taken during his visit to Alego and those taken during his wedding in America have filled three albums.

In one of the photos, a slender, young Obama is seen boarding a matatu (commuter taxi) to Kisumu, from where he and his fiancee would fly to Nairobi and then back to the US.

We were informed that Obama’s foster grandmother, Mama Sarah Ogwel, who brought up his father, had actually travelled to the US to visit several times.

Mama Sarah told us: “He is very enthusiastic about his relatives here. He keeps on sending people to find out how we are faring.”

And whether or not he wins the Senate seat, the 43-year-old Harvard University trained lawyer is expected back in Alego to build his “Simba” (a young man’s hut) in line with Luo traditions.

Barack has deep roots here. He once told me he has two homes - Kenya and the United States, she says happily.

Ever since the news of Obama’s Kenya connection was known, Mama Sarah has been receiving a stream of visitors. They now average about five a day.

Most of these visitors are journalists, both foreign and local (like ourselves), who have turned the home upside down while tracing Obama’s roots.

To cater for these many uninvited guests, the family is putting up a guest house just next to a house built for his father’s first wife, Keziah Obama.

Keziah, who hails from Kendu Bay in Rachuonyo district, lives in Britain with three of her four children.

One of her sons, Malik Obama, is a frequent visitor to the USA but is currently in Kenya though he had travelled to Nairobi when we visited.

While she welcomes visitors, Mama Sarah is getting a little fed up with the disruption they have caused in her life.

The day before the Sunday Nation team arrived, she had played host to a crew from CNN.

Lamented Mama Sarah as we prepared to interview her: “I can’t live here in peace. I have been talking to visitors for several hours a day. I have been interviewed a thousand times and I am tired.”

Tracing Obama’s home was a simple task. The home, located some 60 km from Kisumu town, is well known in Alego. Almost every villager you meet is ready to offer a tip on how to access the home.

To reach the home, one turns off the Kisumu-Siaya road near Ng’iya shopping centre and drives towards Obama’s village market, Nyang’oma-Kogello. From there the home is just a stone’s throw-away.

By local standards it is a vast well kept compound with Sarah’s battered brick house sitting imposingly at the far end.

Two cemented graves, one for Barack Obama Snr and the other for his father Mzee Hussein Onyango Obama, who was born in 1870 but died in 1975.

The Obama family are among the few Muslims in the locality.

The prospective Senator’s grandfather was called Hussein Onyango Obama. He worked as a cook and spent most of his working life in Nairobi.

According to Mama Sarah, Obama Jr used his two trips to Kenya to try to unravel his roots. He spoke to many villagers and relatives through an interpreter.

The candidate’s best-selling autobiography, Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, was compiled with information gathered from relatives and villagers in Alego.

The story revolves around Obama’s quest to find out more about his father, described by many as a brilliant economist who returned from the United States to take up a civil service job in Kenya. He was was later killed in a road accident in 1982, just when he was poised to take up a top job at the Central Bank.

According to the family, Obama’s father travelled to America to study at the University of Hawaii in 1959. While there, he worked for an oil company and married his second wife, a white woman, named Anna Toot, and their union produced Barack Obama Jr.

Obama’s book says Obama Snr left his family in Hawaii after winning a scholarship to study in Harvard when his son was two years old.

The marriage later broke up after Anna’s father opposed it, according to Mama Sarah.

“Anna’s father was furious about the marriage and threatened to have Obama Snr expelled from the university. Our son sent us letters, pleading that we intervene to save the marriage,” remembers Sarah.

Families, it sometimes seems, are just a vast web of potential embarrassments…interspersed, no doubt, with the occasional opportunity for pride.1 Honor and shame, as much as love or liking, are what bind us to our kith and kin. The teenager rolls her eyes as her mother gets up to dance at the wedding; grandparents flush when their friends ask about the grandson who just “came out” in Sunday school; a wife looks down disconsolately as her intoxicated husband rises to make the after-dinner speech. We can all evoke such moments.

As for the upside: remember Aunt Rose kvelling—that wonderful Yiddish word, derived from the German Quelle, a spring, which gives just the right sense of gushing with pleasure—over her nephew’s medical degree, or those “Proud Parents of an Honor Student” bumper stickers. You may not love or like, or even know, Mary-Jane, but her kinship, once avowed, can bring you a warm glow when she wins an Oscar. “She’s my cousin,” you say to anyone who will listen. (You may not reclaim her when the stories about her rehab turn up in the tabloids, but you feel a moment of panic when your coworkers gossip about her. Do they remember Oscar night?)

Still, in the United States, it’s easy to escape your wider family. Families have contracted; the claims of kin are increasingly optional. Ancestor hunting is one of the more harmless addictions enabled by the Internet, but many Americans still couldn’t give the maiden name of both their grandmothers. In much of the rest of the world—as for most of human history—the web of kinship is rather stickier. It doesn’t just tell you who shares your “blood”; it helps fix who you are and explain why you are the way you are.

In rural Africa, certainly, things are still pretty much as they used to be everywhere. People keep track of their significant relatives and ancestors, in accordance with local rules of kinship. In most African societies, the tracing is patrilineal, running, like surnames in England, through the paternal line. Of course, mostly the people who will listen to these family histories are already family, or contemplating marrying into it. For these stories to gain a wider audience, a relative would have to achieve something truly worth kvelling over.

The British documentary maker Peter Firstbrook stepped into one of these large patrilineal clans when he arrived in Kenya, in late November 2008, to scout materials for a film about the president-elect’s Kenyan background. As he got to know the relatives of the new leader of the free world, they told him who they were in the way that was most natural to them: by connecting themselves backward in time to their ancestors.

The Obamas are Luo, belonging to an ethnic group that is now centered in Nyanza, in Western Kenya, near the shores of Lake Victoria. In the Luo past, family history was oral history, but these days, the Obamas know, an important family should have its lineage recorded in print (as grand Europeans have studbooks like the Almanac de Gotha). So they were delighted when Firstbrook decided that the materials he was accumulating would make the most sense as a book. Which isn’t to say that his notions about family narrative were identical to theirs.

Many years ago, the Belgian anthropologist Johannes Fabian identified a tendency he called “the denial of coevalness.” “The history of our discipline,” he wrote, reveals the use of time for “distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer.”2 But this isn’t just a professional deformation of anthropologists: presented with an African—and especially a rural African—setting, many in the West instinctively turn to thoughts of the ancient human past. Firstbrook is no exception here. He begins a timeline that appears toward the end of his book with this item:

2.4 million BC…. A manlike ape or hominid called Australopithecus africanus lives in East Africa Is it fussy to observe that the Obamas have no special claim on A. africanus just because they happen to live on the continent where the species disappeared two million years ago? Although the book blessedly avoids extensive discussion of prehistory, it does insist on recounting—on the basis of academic historical and anthropological accounts—the migrations of the Nilotic ancestors of the modern Luo people. Firstbrook flies north from Kenya to Juba, in southern Sudan, in order to visit the vast swamp north of the Imatong Mountains called the Sudd. “Historians and anthropologists,” he tells us solemnly, “believe the southern part of the Sudd to be the ‘cradleland’ of Barack Obama’s ancestors.” As it turns out, though, they left in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Imagine a book about Bill Clinton’s family that began with the migration of the Franks—apparently Clinton has Frankish ancestry—in the fourth century: “Historians believe the middle and lower Rhine valley to be the ‘cradleland’ of William Jefferson Clinton’s ancestors.”

Fortunately by the third chapter, we are in real family history, following the life of Opiyo, the President’s great-great-grandfather, who was born in the early 1830s in Kendu Bay, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Because Firstbrook was able to recover few specific details about him, he uses this chapter to introduce Luo traditions of birth, marriage, the building of family compounds, funerals, and so on. Opiyo is a name for a firstborn twin, and given that the Luo consider twins “a bad omen,” his life would have begun with the careful carrying out of rituals to keep away harm. Despite this, he “grew to be a strong and respected leader among the Luo of south Nyanza.”

Firstbrook calls this man Opiyo Obama in the chapter’s heading…which would probably have come as news to Opiyo. According to the Luo naming system, he should have been known by the combination of his own personal name and that of his father, which was Obong’o.3 In fact, the President inherited the name Obama because it was the personal name of Opiyo’s son. When the President’s grandfather took the name Onyango Obama, he was simply following Luo tradition. “Onyango” was his personal name, “Obama” was his father’s. It wasn’t the name of a family.

The breach of naming traditions came in the generation that followed, when Onyango’s son Barack took the name Obama. In the colonial period, the father’s second name came to be treated like an English surname. The idea of an Obama family, defined by a shared family name passing from father to son, is a colonial innovation. Of course, the President’s patrilineal kin thought of themselves as a family. That’s why they had all this genealogical information. But they wouldn’t have thought they were linked by a name.

Breaking with tradition, in any case, got to be something of a habit among the President’s immediate ancestors. Onyango Obama, born in 1895, chose in his twenties to call himself Hussein, taking the name when he adopted Islam. His family, who had become Seventh-Day Adventists, were scandalized, and some speculated that he chose Islam because he thought “Muslim ladies” were more submissive. Others noted that Islam, like Luo tradition, permitted polygyny. Whatever Oyango’s reasons, the man, Firstbrook observes, “seems to have taken satisfaction in being different.”

His failure to conform may have had something to do with his service, during World War I, in the King’s African Rifles (KAR) Carrier Corps, where casualties were astonishingly high. Of 165,000 African porters, more than 50,000 died, a death rate higher than the average on Europe’s bloody western front. When he returned, he declined to reside in his father’s compound, but settled instead into an army-issue tent. “People thought he was crazy,” Firstbrook observes. Onyango’s personal style, too, was different from the rest of the family. Unlike them, he ate at a wooden table with a knife and fork, wore European clothes, and was obsessive about cleanliness. He admired the British, Firstbrook says, “especially their discipline and organization,” and by the mid-1920s, he was making a very good living as a cook for British families in and around Nairobi.

It was his fourth wife, Habiba Akumu, who first bore him children, including, in 1936, Barack Obama père. But Onyango had a notoriously violent temper, which he took out on the women and children of his household, and they soon drifted apart. In 1941, he married again, to Sarah Ogwel, who, as “Mama Sarah,” has become something of a family spokesperson and matriarch. Theirs was the longest lasting of Onyango’s marriages. “The difference between Mama Sarah and these other women,” her brother explained, “was that Sarah would not talk back to him.”

That Onyango ended up living not in Kendu Bay but in a village some fifty kilometers away called K’ogelo was the result of one of his legendary displays of temper. In 1943, two years after returning from a second stint in the KAR, Onyango was back in Kendu Bay working for a local British colonial officer. The officer suggested that Onyango organize a soccer competition and supplied a trophy. Onyango thought that the cup should be named for him; the local chief did not. A furious exchange of insults ensued, in which the chief called Onyango a jadak (settler), on the grounds that his great-great-grandfather, Obong’o, had been born elsewhere. Onyango, with magnificent pique, set off with his family back to that ancestral village.

Unsuprisingly, neither Akumu nor Sarah was delighted at the prospect of being uprooted from the only home they had known. Unsurprisingly, he took no notice of them. The move created the division in the family between the Muslims in K’ogelo and the Seventh-Day Adventists in K’obama. The division persists to this day; the soccer trophy seems to have been lost.

Not long after they arrived in K’ogelo, Onyango and Akumu had their last row. She felt in fear of her life, and walked back to Kendu Bay, leaving her children behind, to be raised by Sarah. Despite the fact that Sarah had two sons of her own, Barack was the son whose education became the family’s priority. His father went to considerable expense to send him to the Maseno boarding school, then (as now) one of the best schools in the country. But Barack left Maseno before his final year, having run afoul of a harsh headmaster. Onyango proved even harsher: he beat the returning prodigal with a stick and sent him away. “I will see how you enjoy yourself, earning your own meals,” he said.

By the mid-1950s, Barack was working for the Kenya Railway in Nairobi. While visiting his relatives in K’obama, he reconnected with Kezia Nyandega, a young woman he had known as a child in primary school. She recalls the first time they danced together at a Christmas party in Kendu Bay in 1956: “I thought, ‘Ohhh, wow!’ He was so lovely with his dancing. So handsome and so smart.” The attraction was apparently mutual and she became the first of Barack Obama Sr.’s four wives.

1 Message to my own family: you are a splendid exception, of course. I am proud of every one of you. ↩

2 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 25. ↩

3 Firstbrook visited the grave of Opiyo's son, whose headstone, which was added relatively recently, is reproduced in the book. There he is called "Obama K'Opiyo." In his comment on the visit, Firstbrook appears to conflate the two men, since he refers to him both as the great-grandfather of the President and as having been born around 1830. But the family tree at the front of the book says it was great-great-grandfather Opiyo who was born around 1833. As a result of this confusion, when he takes up the life of Opiyo a few chapters later, a less than careful reader might lose track of the fact that it is the President's great-great-grandfather that is under discussion. In other words, the man called, on the gravestone, Obama K'Opiyo is not the man Firstbrook calls Opiyo Obama, but his son. ↩

«12»1 Message to my own family: you are a splendid exception, of course. I am proud of every one of you. ↩

2 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 25. ↩

3 Firstbrook visited the grave of Opiyo’s son, whose headstone, which was added relatively recently, is reproduced in the book. There he is called “Obama K’Opiyo.” In his comment on the visit, Firstbrook appears to conflate the two men, since he refers to him both as the great-grandfather of the President and as having been born around 1830. But the family tree at the front of the book says it was great-great-grandfather Opiyo who was born around 1833. As a result of this confusion, when he takes up the life of Opiyo a few chapters later, a less than careful reader might lose track of the fact that it is the President’s great-great-grandfather that is under discussion. In other words, the man called, on the gravestone, Obama K’Opiyo is not the man Firstbrook calls Opiyo Obama, but his son. ↩

Meanwhile, he was getting caught up in the whirlwind of independence activism. These were the years of Mau Mau and many Kenyans—Onyango among them—were subjected to the indignities of interrogation and detention. Barack, too, was arrested, at a meeting of a banned independence organization. He was released at the insistence of his white employer, who assured the police that Barack had nothing to do with Mau Mau. Oyango had declined to pay his son’s bail: he took Barack’s political activities to be yet another instance of his irresponsible ways.

Firstbrook describes clearly the wider historical background to the Obamas’ progress through twentieth-century Kenya. We see the arrival of British colonial rule in East Africa and the competition between British and German colonization efforts in East Africa, which World War I decided in Britain’s favor. We learn how the two world wars affected life in Kenya, uprooting men like Onyango Obama; we watch the emerging independence movement and the Mau Mau uprising, in which tens of thousands of Kenyan Africans, many of them children, were killed, as well as a relatively small number of European settlers.4 We see the coming of independence and the rising conflict between the leaders of the Kikuyu and Luo communities. Barack Sr. became a close friend of the leading Luo politician of the independence generation, Tom Mboya, and his destiny was tied, for the rest of his life, to the fate of the Luo political leadership.

In 1959, Tom Mboya announced the “Airlift Africa” program, with fund-raising assistance from African-American public figures such as Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier, as well as various white liberals. The aim was to allow future Kenyan leaders to study on American campuses. Obama, having left high school without doing his final exams, didn’t get one of these scholarships. But eventually he prepared for and took the exams, and, with the financial assistance of two American women who were living in Nairobi, he was able to study at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu. Firstbrook adds, “The records of Barack’s move to the United States are incomplete, but it seems that he also received some funding from Jackie Robinson.”

In 1960, in his second year at the university, Barack met Ann Dunham, the daughter of a furniture salesman from Kansas who had lived in several American cities with his wife since World War II. The two young people began dating, and Barack evidently felt no need to mention his wife and two children back in Nairobi. Soon, Ann was pregnant, and—over Onyango’s long-distance objections—the two got married, with only her parents as witnesses. Six months later, she gave birth to her now-famous son.

Barack Obama Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1962 with a degree in economics, and took up the offer of graduate education at Harvard. Ann—who had dropped out early in their marriage—stayed in Honolulu and returned to college. In Cambridge, Barack was soon exploring new possibilities. As one of his Kenyan fellow graduate students put it: “The women liked this man.”

Of course, in the world from which he came, having a wife or two was not a reason to avoid other women. There is some uncertainty about whether Obama visited his American wife and child in Hawaii in the three years he was at Harvard: one of his friends from the period recalls him boasting about his son and visiting him “more than once.” In Dreams from My Father, his son remembers only one visit, years later, in 1971, when he was ten years old. In 1964, Ann Dunham filed for divorce. By then, Barack had taken up with Ruth Nidesand, a teacher of Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry who became his third wife. A year later, he gave up his doctoral studies and returned home.

The young Obama had left a colony. He returned to a country. Jomo Kenyatta was the president of independent Kenya, and Tom Mboya was minister of justice and constitutional affairs. Barack, who published a paper, “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” in 1965, focusing on the perpetuation of colonial-era inequality in the postcolonial nation, found a highly paid position in Kenya’s Central Bank.5 His very active social life included countless parties with some of the leading figures in the government, although, Firstbrook writes, he was keener on ordering rounds of drinks than paying for them.

Then, in 1969, Mboya was assassinated, and Nairobi exploded in ethnic rioting, amid suspicions that the killing was the work of Kenyatta and his Kikuyu supporters. Over the next six months, interethnic relations in Kenya deteriorated, culminating in an extraordinary speech by Kenyatta that referred to the Luo in his audience as “writhing little insects…who have dared to come here to speak dirty words.” There were more riots; police massacres brewed more enmity. And Obama suffered the fate of many Luo in the period. While Mboya had been alive and in power, he had had a protector. Now, he was going to have to fend for himself.

He did not have the habits or the temperament to succeed on his own. He was a party-loving, hard-drinking man—nicknamed “Mr. Double-Double” because he liked to order two double whiskies at once; his binges meant he didn’t always show up for work. He was a loud, frank critic of a government that had made it clear that it was not going to tolerate “dirty words.” And the first problem exacerbated the second, since he was especially prone to making verbal assaults on the government when he was in his cups.

In the last decade of his life, Barack Obama Sr. slid slowly into the abyss. He was fired from a series of jobs. He had, as Firstbrook puts it, “a reputation for having a massive ego and a big mouth, both of which grew alarmingly when he started drinking.” He was also, according to Ruth’s son Mark, abusive to his wife and children, and Ruth eventually left him, taking her sons with him.

For all that, in 1981, he married a young Luo woman—apparently the women still liked this man—and in the summer of 1982, Kezia, the last of his wives, gave birth to George, the last of his sons. A few months later, Obama was dead in a car accident. He had set off home at the wheel after an evening spent drinking in a downtown bar in Nairobi and driven off the road into a tree.

This being Kenya, there were suspicions among his circle of friends that he was yet another Luo big man assassinated by the government. But Barack had a history of driving drunk and getting into accidents. Mama Sarah told Firstbrook, “We think there was foul play there.” Charles Oluoch—President Obama’s cousin—offered one family theory: his uncle had been poisoned in the bar: “They put something in your drink and they know you will be driving. At a certain point, you will lose control. It will look as if it was an accident.” Firstbrook passes this on as a “very serious accusation,” and you can see why the Obamas want to believe it. It makes the stupidity of death in the last of a series of alcohol-fueled accidents easier to accept: it also suggests that Barack Obama Sr.—a drunk who had talked himself out of one job after another—was still important enough to be worth killing.

Learning what President Obama’s father was like hardly makes one feel that our president would have been better off if Barack Obama Sr. had stuck around. Indeed, the son’s isolation from his father and grandfather—and his immersion in his mother’s happier and much more helpful family—must be part of what explains the contrasts between his persona and theirs. He is inclined to caution and self-restraint; they tended to be impulsive. He is slow to anger; they ignited like flash paper. They were men who desired many women and honored none; the President’s marriage seems a model of love and respect. What the three generations of Obama men have in common is intelligence, charm, ambition, and pride. But no doubt his Dunham ancestors could lay claim to those traits, too.

So don’t turn to The Obamas for enlightenment about the hidden motives of presidential policy making. The appeal of this book is, rather, like that of those centuries-spanning sagas that James Michener used to publish. At its best, Firstbrook’s book uses the glamour of the Obama name to invite readers to learn about a not-atypical East African family, and so gain insights into Kenyan history. The mistake would be to regard this family history as a fount of insight into our Obama.

The epigraph to Firstbrook’s prologue is the Luo proverb “Wat en wat,” which means (so he tells us) “Kinship is kinship.” Actually, though, things aren’t that straightforward. One Obama tradition the President has continued is of the son whose father provided a superfluity of reasons for embarrassment. Meanwhile, back in Kendu Bay, the Obamas take pride in their far-off kinsman. Barack Sr.’s sister Hawa Auma—who makes perhaps two dollars a day selling charcoal—may not be rich in the things of this world, but she can kvell over the fact that she is the aunt of the most powerful man in the world.

4 No one now believes the official British figures that 11,503 Kenyan Africans were killed; as Firstbrook writes, the death toll of thirty-two European settlers is widely accepted. Caroline Elkins in her controversial Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005) estimates that more than a million Kenyans were detained and that a hundred thousand may have died. ↩

5 A more in-depth discussion of this work, and of this period in Barack Sr.'s life, can be found in Chapter 1 of David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Knopf, 2010). ↩

«12»4 No one now believes the official British figures that 11,503 Kenyan Africans were killed; as Firstbrook writes, the death toll of thirty-two European settlers is widely accepted. Caroline Elkins in her controversial Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005) estimates that more than a million Kenyans were detained and that a hundred thousand may have died. ↩

5 A more in-depth discussion of this work, and of this period in Barack Sr.’s life, can be found in Chapter 1 of David Remnick’s The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (Knopf, 2010). ↩

http://web.archive.org/web/20090330011544/http://www.seattlechatclub.org/museum.html

Baby Sitting Barack Obama on Seattle¹s Capitol Hill
by Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson
Seattle Museum of the Mysteries
1/28/09

Mary Toutonghi, 2009

A simple act of of kindness confirms President Barack Obama residence as an infant in 1962 on Seattle¹s Capitol Hill.

As we were researching the residence of the Capitol Hill apartment that Ann Dunham and her son Barack Obama had lived in 1961 to 1962, (1) - a residence that certainly wasn¹t Abraham Lincoln¹s log cabin but none the less historical, we were also able to find one of the former residents listed in a directory- Mary Toutonghi. Much to our delight it turned out Mary actually knew Ann Dunham and had baby sat baby Barack for two months giving insight on his first year and what it must have been like for Ann Dunham as a single parent.

Mary Toutonghi who now lives in Soldatna Alaska, (2) recalls Barack as ³a really alert baby, very happy and a good size². She does not remember him ever crying (although she adds she is sure he likely did but does not remember any undue fussing). She recalls as best she can the dates she baby sat Barack as her daughter was 18 months old and was born in July of 1959 and that would have placed the months of baby sitting Barack in January and February of 1962.

During our first interview, Mary referred to Stanley Ann Dunham as ³Anna² not knowing that it was the same name as what was listed in the Seattle City Directory. This verified for us that indeed Mary had known Ann Dunham. Anna was obviously confident enough with Mary to have her baby sit her son Barack and confide in her about her future plans. Mary strains to remember the days back over forty five years ago and relates that she did not know why Anna was in Seattle but remembers she was ³anxious to get back to her husband². ³She told me they would be going to Kenya when she finished her education which she had promised her parents when she had married, but because her husband had an obligation to his tribe she realized he would have to take another wife that was a full blooded Kenyan². Mary commented that ³I don¹t think I could have been that brave.²

Mary explained most of the people in the apartment house were Seniors and were retired so it was most likely she was the only one in the house able to baby sit Barack. Mary was a stay at home mother while her husband was taking classes at the nearby Seattle University. She lived directly below Anna and Barack in the level she calls the basement. She remembers the windows in their basement apartment being at chin level and she had a great view of the yard and trees. One day she recalls with laughter, a squirrel had fallen through the one of the ground level windows and after quickly scampering up its tree scolded the family for a good hour.

Mary goes on to relate after we sent her a 1937 photo of the apartment from Washington State Archives, the apartment Anna and Barack lived in was the on the first main floor and the windows looked out over the street. Anna and baby Barack¹s apartment in the photo were the three paned windows on the far right corner of the building above the garage. The main floor had been divided into four studio apartments about 500 square feet each- indeed, a tiny apartment compared to the White House. The first house of Barack Obama no longer exists having been torn down in 1985. An apartment complex now is on the block along with twin residential towers ³Capitol Park² owned by Seattle Housing Authority.

Mary also laughs when asked for pictures saying ³We were in survival mode and not taking pictures². Mary remembers Anna as ³very mature who never complained and met her obligations². Anna was taking night classes at the University of Washington and according to the University of Washington¹s registrar¹s office her major was listed as History. She was enrolled at the University of Washington in the fall of 1961, took a full course load in the Spring of 1962 and had her transcript transferred to the University of Hawaii in the Fall of 1962.

Along with the Seattle Polk Directory, Marc Leavipp of the University of Washington Registrar¹s office confirms 516 13th Ave. E. was the address Ann Dunham had given upon registering at the University. Today, when one looks back to the small apartment in 1962 in which a kind neighbor helped care for our nation¹s leader and a struggling mother strived to get an education, its inspiring to know that even small gestures in the most difficult of situations can help a baby rise from humble beginnings to achieve greatness.

Ann Dunham later received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Univ. of Hawaii.

Mary Toutonghi now lives in Soldatna Alaska and was 2001 President of the Alaska Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

And one little baby grew up to achieve the audacity of hope.

Permission to copy this article is granted provided full context is posted and credited to authors.

Mary Toutonghi photo courtesy of Mary Toutonghi and Jenny Neyman.
House photo was provided by: Washington State Archives, Puget Sound Branch, King County Assessor Property Record Card collection photograph (1937).
1. Barack Obama: from Capitol Hill to Capitol Hill by Charlette LeFevre, www.capitolhilltimes.com
2. Obama baby sitter awaits new era ‹ Soldotna woman eager for former charge¹s reign By Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter, Soldotna AK, 1/20/09

http://web.archive.org/web/20140323003032/http://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/DN2/Obama—the-bright-economist-who-lived-on-the-edge-/-/957860/1211042/-/lkp22l/-/index.html

Sunday, July 31, 2011
Obama, the bright economist who lived on the edge

Shem Arungu-Olende had just returned from the United States in mid-1970 when he received a telephone call from his old friend Barack Obama. Olende, an electrical engineer with a passion for economic analysis, had recently concluded a year’s stint as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had come home to consider his options.

The two men had known each other several years earlier when they had discovered they shared a fascination for mathematical programming. Now Obama was calling to offer him a job.

“He said he was setting up a consulting firm and he wanted me to work with him,” recalled Olende, who would later become the secretary general of the African Academy of Sciences.

“He said we’d make a great team. And you know, I was interested.”

But as the two men talked, Olende was shocked to learn of Obama’s circumstances. When they had met five years earlier Obama had recently returned from Cambridge.

With his Harvard degree and elegant bearing, not to mention his attractive white wife, Obama seemed set to become a powerhouse among the newly emerging cadre of elite Africans who were slowly assuming control of the country’s power structure. But here was Obama now without a job and his checkered employment record a matter of some talk in Nairobi circles.

As Olende caught up with other old friends, he heard hair-raising stories about Obama’s explosive domestic life and inexplicable behaviour on the job. Nonetheless, Olende liked Obama and seriously considered teaming up with him. As it turned out he wound up taking a job with the United Nations, where he would remain for the next three decades. But he worried that Obama’s reckless ways would eventually lead him into deeper trouble.

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 organising rigours 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 favourite 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 [US President] 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.”

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.”
But things didn’t get better. They got worse. One night Obama returned from the bars in his usual ill humuor, 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 neighbour. 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 behaviour 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 lawyer. 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.”

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 Centre 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 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.”

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 archive 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 favoured 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.”

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 was 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.

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