And Then Life Happens (5 page)

For them, ballroom dancing was more than just a hobby. Soon they participated in contests held in the various African social halls around Nairobi. And often the two of them were the winners. Abongo was born, and they went on dancing. If no babysitter was available, they wrapped the little one in a warm blanket and took him along in a Moses basket. While his parents enjoyed themselves on the dance floor, Abongo slept peacefully, looked after by the many friends who loved to watch his parents.

My mother had agreed to the temporary separation from my father only because she had firmly believed that there was something special between her and the man she loved. She had been willing to wait for him, and she had assumed my father would feel the same way.

But now he would no longer belong to her alone. On that fateful day, she had to swallow her despair. Because there had also been several previous wives in my grandfather's household, in which Sarah now lived, she knew that her tears would not be met with understanding. And even my grandmother would have been able to console her only far from my grandfather's eyes—in the cooking hut, for example, where the two of them could talk to each other undisturbed. For the cooking hut was exclusively the domain of women, and men were traditionally not allowed to enter.

Without long hesitation, my grandfather made his decision: He would give his son permission for a second marriage. In matter-of-fact terms, he informed my mother of this, too. She was not asked, although her husband had requested her consent in his letter. But even if she had been asked, she would not have been able to oppose my grandfather's decision. His word was final. As much as it hurt, she had to accept the inevitable.

A short time later, after my grandfather had answered his son, my father married eighteen-year-old Ann Dunham, who, like him, studied at the University of Hawaii. She was an anthropology student.

On my grandparents' compound, life took its usual course. My father continued to write to my mother, and he still sent clothing and gifts for us children. If no one had known that the weighty letter was in one of my grandfather's trunks, they could have assumed that it had never existed.

*   *   *

When my father earned his bachelor's degree in Honolulu, he was offered the opportunity to pursue a doctorate at Harvard University. There was a new decision to make. Ann decided not to follow him to Harvard. She stayed behind in Hawaii with Barack Jr. and resumed her anthropology studies.

Years later, when I met Ann, I asked her why she had stayed in Hawaii at that time. She explained to me that, although my father had asked her to come with him, she had not wanted to go. She had loved him, but she had feared having to give up too much of herself. She had married my father when she was very young and naïve, without realizing how hard it would be to bridge the great differences between them.

Ann was an independent spirit and a dreamer, who wanted to contribute by her own efforts to making the world a better place. She was also the type of woman who felt most at ease in comfortable sandals and casual clothing. Rather than devoting hours to her appearance, she preferred to discuss political events with like-minded people. My father appreciated her sharp intellect, but he himself placed great value on external appearance, not only for the sake of following social conventions, but also because he loved to dress particularly well. When we met, Ann told me that my father often bought her “useless” things, such as makeup, high-heeled shoes, and dresses that were not her style. She wore them reluctantly and only because he liked to see her in them. I had to smile at her words. From his journeys abroad, my father always brought me back the most beautiful dresses, which made my friends envious.

At that point, Ann must have known that she would never be able to be the wife my father desired. If she had gone with him to Harvard, sooner or later she would have had to change for him and give up her individuality to be that woman—at least, that is what she feared. Would her fears actually have come true? Would she actually have had to give up so much of her own identity? Would she have begun to hate my father and thus destroyed the wonderful memories she now shared with me?

As we spoke to each other, I sensed how important it was to her to make clear to me that my father, regardless of his fondness for high-heeled shoes, lipstick, and a fine wardrobe, had been a caring and highly intelligent man. Clearly, however, the two of them had come up against unbridgeable differences, which went beyond the question of clothing and had to do with their very distinct cultures. I could easily put myself in Ann's shoes. At that time, I was living and studying in Germany, and every day I was confronted by the difference between how the Germans perceived me and how I viewed myself. They often saw in me only the exotic creature from Africa, from whom they expected a very particular way of behaving, instead of recognizing me as an individual. The experience of living in Germany had made preserving my own identity into a very real and personal matter for me, too.

*   *   *

The conversation with Ann took place in Maryland in 1990. We had come together there to celebrate the wedding of Abongo, who had in the meantime become a Muslim and taken the name Malik. Our father had died almost ten years earlier, in 1982.

The circle of wedding guests was not very large; most of us, sitting together in Abongo's home, were close family members. His bride, Sheree, had a daughter, Hanifa, who was among the guests. Barack and his girlfriend, Michelle, as well as Barack's sister Maya, Ann's daughter from her second marriage to an Indonesian man, had also come. I myself had brought my then-boyfriend, Karl, from Germany. My mother, Kezia, had been living with Abongo for a month to help him and Sheree with the preparations.

The wedding ceremony took place at Abongo's house and was performed by a Muslim cleric.

It was, incidentally, not the last time we were to meet in this family grouping. With the exception of my mother, Sheree, Hanifa, and Karl, we saw each other again a couple of years later in Chicago, at Barack and Michelle's wedding. Toot, Barack's maternal grandmother, who had not been at Abongo's wedding, was also there that time.

Because Abongo's wedding brought together almost exclusively close family members, it was easy for us to speak openly with each other. Many stories of the past were told, and everyone shared memories of my father, who connected all of us.

With the exception of Abongo and me, the other siblings had spent most of their lives apart from each other. And yet we all felt very close. At that moment, it didn't matter that we had different mothers or fathers. For me, Maya was the little sister I'd never had and Ann the “little mother” (as the Luo call the father's second wife) we had wanted to meet for years.

To my surprise, our mothers immediately had a similarly intimate connection. Although they had never seen or spoken to each other before Abongo's wedding, they did not give the impression that this was their first encounter. Even before the day was over, they were sitting close together, holding each other's hands, reliving the wonderful times they had spent with our father and assuring each other what a great man he had been.

With fascination, we children watched our mothers—one from Africa, the other from America, one black, the other white—and listened to their conversation. Soon we contributed our own experiences with our father to their exchange. We fondly called our father “the old man.” Still, we children were harder on him than our mothers were. With the anecdotes that we shared, old feelings of loss, disappointment, anger, and pain welled up. Many tears flowed, tears for neglected opportunities and for the fragmented family we children symbolized.

I will never forget one image from that evening: my mother and Ann, the two of them almost the same age, crying in each other's arms. And since that day I often wonder what an extraordinary man my father must have been that two women who came from completely different worlds clearly still loved him even after so many years, although much in their respective relationships had gone so differently from what they had expected. In light of these memories, I cannot help thinking how large the hearts of these two women were that after all that had happened they were able to embrace each other without ill feeling.

*   *   *

Little Barack was two when Barack Sr. left Hawaii. He would not see his father again until he was ten years old, at a time when Barack Sr. was living in Kenya again and was married to his third wife, Ruth.

Ruth Baker was the daughter of a Boston family. My father met her during his time at Harvard. In contrast to Ann, Ruth was willing to leave everything behind to follow him to another country. I cannot say whether my father planned at the time to live with her in Kenya. I was told that he had actually returned from the United States alone with the intention of living once again with my mother, brother, and me. But then Ruth unexpectedly came back into his life.

Besides love, what induced her to follow my father might have been the feeling that her fate was now to be by his side. It was the early 1960s. As a young white American woman from an upper-middle-class family, she had alienated herself from them by crossing the “color line” and beginning a relationship with a black man. Did she have any choice but to take this step and go to Africa?

Having arrived in Nairobi, she supposedly began searching for my father, whose name was all she knew. It helped that the group of students who had returned home from the United States was quite small. They all seemed to know each other. On top of that, the name Obama was not common. We were practically the only family in Kenya with that name.

Ruth found my father. She traveled as far as Kisumu, a city on the shores of Lake Victoria, and from there a messenger was sent to Alego to fetch Barack, who was visiting his family—at least that is how Ruth's reappearance was later recounted to me.

But what I have never learned is whether she knew at the time that my father already had a wife and two children in Kenya. My attempts to talk to her about that have failed. After their painful divorce and the hard work of building a new life for herself and her sons, she must have decided never to look back at the time she spent with my father—in stark contrast to Kezia and Ann.

Ruth's appearance in our lives back then presented my father with the choice of either staying with my mother or leaving with Ruth. He did not make that difficult decision on his own. As before, while my mother had little say in the matter, he asked his father for advice. My grandfather reminded him how he had once had to fight for the hand of my mother. It further complicated things that both my father's father and my mother's father were Luo elders, so they knew and respected each other.

Barack, my father, thus had to think carefully about what he would do now. He knew that Ruth had taken the long journey from America to Kenya and would definitely not give up her love so easily. My grandfather ultimately suggested marrying Ruth and living with her in Nairobi, almost four hundred miles from Alego. There, because of his education, my father had already gotten a good job. His first wife, my mother, would live with my brother and me on the homestead. This suggestion was absolutely in keeping with our tradition. Ruth would become the second wife, and everyone could go on living “happily” with this solution. That was how my grandfather imagined it. That was all right with my mother. She had previously accepted Ann as her husband's second wife; to avoid at all costs the breakup of her small family, she was now prepared to accept Ruth, too. But in contrast to my mother, Ruth was by no means willing to share her husband with another woman.

After days of discussions came the decision. My father decided to go to Nairobi with Ruth. But with her he opted for a Western marriage, which did not allow him to have more than one wife. The ensuing separation from his first wife, my mother, was akin, in a way, to a divorce. And that meant that she had to leave our compound and return to her family in Gendia, in Kendu Bay.

With his departure from a traditional Luo marriage, the tug-of-war between two cultures began for my father on a personal level. It would accompany him for the rest of his life.

*   *   *

For my mother, this decision was life-shattering. She had assumed that she would certainly be favored as the first wife. In her eyes, my father had to respect tradition and allow her to remain with his parents in the countryside. But not even that option remained for her.

It is not inconceivable that there was already a deep rift between my father and my mother at that time, after his years of absence and due to his relationship with Ann. Perhaps he thought he would be happier with Ruth.

So it happened that my father left us for a second time. Ruth and he set off to begin a new life in the Kenyan capital, while we children and our mother moved in with her family in Gendia. At the time, she was twenty-two years old, my brother Abongo six, and I four.

After my mother had to leave Alego, she went through an incredibly difficult time. As a young girl, her prince charming had appeared before her and enchanted her out of a mundane life. Now, only a few years later, she returned to her own family, cast out and without prospects for the future, dependent on her relatives and their support.

Years later, my mother told me how inconsolable she was after the separation.

“I almost went mad,” she said, describing to me her state back then. “I was devastated and ran naked through the house, panic-stricken and confused.”

The woman who, in order to please her husband, had always dressed well and carefully maintained her appearance, not only to go dancing but also in everyday life, now neglected herself, stopped washing herself and refused to do her hair or change her clothes. She was embittered. For years she had waited for her husband, only to be cast out by him now, on his return. Where would she go from here? Her situation did not allow her to pay for her two children's sustenance and schooling. But in the sixties, a good education was the highest goal to which parents aspired for their children. Up to that point, her husband and his family had provided for their financial needs.