Yes, Mark does not deserve to be trashed.
BTW, I tried pasting the URL of that second link into I.E. Google search bar.
Then in the result that has the nation.Co link, I clicked the green down arrow to get the cache.
Then it comes up and can read it.
Here’s an excerpt:
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.