The Other Barack (11 page)

Over the next two years the British brought their military might to bear upon the rebels and by 1955 eventually gained the upper hand. But they did not lift the state of emergency for another five years. The net result was
a staggering degree of human dislocation and suffering, as legions of Mau Mau suspects were detained without any trial and often brutally tortured in detention camps. Although the government put the number of those Kikuyu detained at 80,000, historians have subsequently reported that the actual tally more likely ranges from 150,000 to 320,000.
²²
The estimated number of Kikuyu rebels who died in the war also varies widely. Although the official tally rests at 12,000, Oxford historian David Anderson estimates that in fact more than 20,000 Kikuyu fighters died. But Caroline Elkins, a Harvard historian, contends in her Pulitzer Prize–winning book,
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
, contends that the figure was far higher than Anderson's. She concludes that the colonial government launched “a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dead.”
²³
Whatever the final numbers, the Mau Mau war was, by any assessment, as Anderson writes in his book,
Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
, “a story of atrocity and excess on both sides, a dirty war from which no one emerged with much pride, and certainly, no glory.”
²⁴

Working in Mombasa nearly three hundred miles away on the Kenyan coast, Obama was far removed from the crisis gripping the highlands, though he was surely keenly attuned to the ongoing conflict. He also had some pressing problems of his own. The first job he had landed, working as a clerk for an Arab merchant, came to an end when Obama quarreled with his boss and angrily quit without being paid. He managed to find another job, although at significantly lower pay. Onyango learned of his son's difficulties from a Mombasa relative, and when Obama came home for a visit, Onyango railed at him for his impetuous behavior. The headstrong Obama insisted that he was now employed in a job that paid much more money, but when Onyango demanded to see his wage book, Obama could only stand silently before him. His father ordered him away, saying he had brought shame upon him.
²⁵

Uncertain where to turn in 1954, Obama headed to Nairobi, where he had friends from his school days and hoped that he would find another job—and perhaps some adventure. In a few weeks Obama again secured work as a clerk, this time with an Indian law firm, but he soon found the churning life of the city far more consuming. During the emergency years
many city residents vented their frustration with chronic unemployment and low wages through the evolving trade union movement. Although the Kenya Labor Department closely monitored the formation of employee organizations to ensure they were not being used for political ends, it discreetly encouraged the growth of collective bargaining in part to counter the extremism of the radicals' appeal.
²⁶
Generally, the government hoped to encourage the development of a middle class that would have a tempering influence on African politics and might eventually serve as a bulwark against radical elements such as Mau Mau.

When Obama arrived in the city, one young man's name was inextricably linked to the emerging trade union movement: Tom Mboya. He was, like Obama, a Luo, and a very ambitious one at that. The two men would develop a friendship, drawn to one another by their deep ethnic roots and rapidly developing political passions. Six years older than Obama, Mboya would act as Obama's mentor during a critical juncture in his life, a kind of benevolent father figure of the sort that Obama had never had.

The son of a sisal plantation overseer from Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, the engaging and polished Mboya had already established himself as an officer with the Kenya African Union and was a prominent union activist by the time Obama arrived in the city. Only twenty-four, the moon-faced organizer had begun his career three years earlier as a sanitation inspector for the Nairobi City Council when an incident occurred that would become a favorite anecdote reflecting the racist attitudes of the time. Mboya was alone in the city health department testing milk samples when a European woman entered. As he turned to greet her, the woman stared directly through him and loudly asked, “Is there
anybody
here?” Highly offended, Mboya could not contain himself. “Madame,” he said, “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”
²⁷

Mboya had long been an admirer of Kenyatta but had decided he would find greater opportunity as a young man in labor organizing rather than the more conventional political routes.
²⁸
Although he would evolve into a liberal internationalist with decidedly capitalist leanings, as a young man he was a devout champion of the working man. Obama would wind up farther to the left than his mentor, ardently defending aspects of a socialist model in the early years of Kenya's independence. But in the 1950s they found common cause in their conviction that
Africans had a right to self-determination and that the era of imperial rule must come to an end.

Mboya's rise was as meteoric as would be his end. When Kenyatta was sent to prison in 1953 and dozens of other KAU leaders were arrested, Mboya was unexpectedly snapped up to fill the party's empty acting treasurer's seat. Several months later he was made the general secretary of the prominent Kenya Federation of Registered Trade Unions (KFRTU), and his rapid advance was much talked about in the African sections of the city. In the years leading up to independence, Mboya's passionate and sophisticated articulation of Kenya's political ambitions would usher him to the highest ranks of the Kenyan government and make him an international celebrity on the emerging Pan-African scene.

But Mboya was also an eligible young bachelor who liked to pull on his immaculate white tuxedo and escort some of the city's beautiful young ladies to dance competitions around town. A resident of the Kaloleni estate, a neighborhood populated by middle-class and educated Africans, most of whom were Luos, Mboya invariably drew a crowd when he appeared at parties and dances there. It was at one of those that he apparently met Obama, then living in the nearby African estate of Shauri Moyo. They were both excellent dancers who could invariably be found twirling across the dance floor to the guitar bands that were popular. Each of them sported a highly polished Western appearance, although Obama took some years to master the tailored poise that Mboya so artfully cultivated. They also shared a certain haughtiness, off-putting to others but a characteristic that apparently echoed positively between the two of them. Mboya's biographer, David Goldsworthy, wrote that Mboya was so aware of his own abilities that at times “lesser men were treated with contempt.”
²⁹
Goldsworthy could be describing the young Obama at his most withering.

Although Obama was not particularly interested in holding political office himself, he was absorbed in the political conversation of the day. And for that, Kaloleni was the place to be. He attended many of the evening debates there that featured the emerging nationalist heavyweights such as C. M. G. Argwings-Kodhek, then the only African lawyer and a prominent champion of human rights; Apolo Milton Obote, a vocal construction worker from Uganda who went on to become prime minister
and president of his country; and Mboya, who was becoming an increasingly powerful orator. Obama, as ever, took his contrarian viewpoints with him. “Obama was not somebody to be brought easily into anything,” explained Were Dibo Ogutu, the longtime national secretary of the General Chemical Allied Workers Union in Nairobi. “As a young man he would ask many questions even of those large men before he would accept their policies or ideas. But the one thing he really believed in was that the majority mattered. He very much believed that the people needed to be listened to.”

Mboya left Kenya in 1955 to attend Ruskin College in Oxford, England, and on his return he and Obama got to know one another well. They had both attended tempestuous labor organizing meetings after national political parties were banned in 1953. Mboya had developed a more worldly manner during his time overseas, and his vision for Kenya's future was more defined. Although he assumed a more paternal role toward Obama, the two men maintained their friendship. As Obama struggled with the question of where he fit into the churning political scene, Mboya became a cherished elder—albeit only by six years—to whom Obama regularly turned in the years to come. Obama was one of many who dropped into Mboya's house for a drink to talk of the turbulent politics of the time, and they shared many of the same friends who would go on to hold key posts in both government and private enterprise.

They also had in common a deep rootedness in the red soil of Luoland. Obama regularly returned to Kendu Bay, the lakeside town nearby to the village of his birth and famous for its musicians and exuberant dances. Kendu Bay was a prominent port that drew steamers from as far away as Uganda and Tanzania. The eclectic mix of traders and travelers who stepped onto the town's piers contributed their favored rhythms to the musical mix there. A far more subdued locale today, Kendu Bay was once considered the entertainment capital of the region and was home to the popular “Kendu Show,” a well-attended local event that showcased bands and musicians from across the country.

In nearby Kanyadhiang, the Social Hall on the road leading into town hosted a succession of evening dances and competitions. Obama, who often returned to his childhood home on the weekends, was a regular at the lantern-lit events and often claimed the evening title for best dancer.
On one legendary occasion when he was still a teenager, Obama and another young man were chosen as the two finalists in an evening competition. As a packed audience watched intently in the dim light, the two of them performed alternately one after the other before an informal panel of judges. First a rhumba, then a chorus dance or tango, then a dance of their choice. The dueling dancers kept at it for over an hour, their brows streaming with sweat. In the end, Obama was declared the winner.
³⁰

Many elderly residents there remember his lithe form bumping out a rhumba or twirling his partner in the fast paced
mach
dance, his everpresent Sportsman cigarette angled rakishly from his full lips. Two of his favorite songs were “
Simbi Nyaima
,” named for the crater lake a few miles from Lake Victoria, and “
Kiduogi Dala
,” or “Can't You Come Home.” Obama's movement was astonishingly fluid, his limbs always in syncopation with the music. As his neighbor Obama Madoho described it, “he seemed to be boneless.”

“Barack was the best dancer in the whole region for a while,” recalled Alfred Obama Oguta, an elderly cousin from Kanyadhiang. “He was very, very proud of that. After all, what lady did not want to dance with a man who could move like
that
. If he asked someone to dance, she would never turn him down.”

Another common style of dance event was held in a makeshift hall in the village square, where papyrus mats served as fencing secured by a temporary gate. The dance floor was bare earth that became so dusty during the hot season that revelers would be prompted to declare at a song's end, “
amiel ma buru ema dum!
” or “I have danced until I kicked up dust.” Posters were placed around town announcing the impending event and couples would start practicing weeks in advance. The most popular dances were held during school holidays in August and December, and many young men would journey back home from their jobs in nearby villages or Nairobi to attend. The entrance fee was one Kenyan shilling. At one of these dances in Kendu Bay on Christmas Day in 1956, Obama, then twenty, met his first wife in the midst of a pulsing rhumba.
³¹

Grace Kezia Nyandega was sixteen years old, a shy young woman with a beatific smile from the village of Gendia. As she stood nervously at the edge of the crowded dance floor wearing her holiday outfit of a peppermint pink skirt and a crisp white blouse her eyes fell upon Obama. “I was
looking for someone who could dance, and then I saw him,” exclaimed Kezia, a seventy-one-year-old grandmother living in the suburban town of Bracknell outside London. “He was such a lovely boy. So smart. And he could dance like no one else. We danced all night.”

Kezia's escort to the dance was a cousin of Obama's named William. The following morning Obama dispatched William to her house to ask if he could formally introduce Obama to her. It is a Luo custom that in certain delicate matters a go-between is used to negotiate between two adults, as a direct encounter is regarded as far too aggressive. In the first stage of a relationship between a man and a woman, both sides generally have a family member serve as a go-between, called a
jagam
, to communicate between the two parties in order to get information about the other person, such as their habits and tastes. They could also serve as important witnesses later if the dowry, which was usually presented in the form of cows and other gifts, had to be returned for some reason. After the go-betweens finished their investigations and both sides accepted an introduction, the man was permitted to visit the girl.
³²

But on hearing William's proposal, Kezia refused. “I was very shy with men, so I said, no, no, no,” recalled Kezia. “But William came back the next day and the day after that. Finally, I decided to go with Barack. I did not tell my parents because I knew they would say no, as I was so young.”

When the couple arrived in Nairobi, Obama took Kezia to meet his father, who was working as a cook for an American family living in Muthaiga, one of the toniest suburbs reserved exclusively for whites. The head of the family was Gordon Hagberg, the public affairs officer with the Nairobi office of the U.S. Information Service (USIS) office, a division of the State Department dedicated to public diplomacy. By coincidence, Hagberg was well acquainted with many of the city's rising young nationalists, for he had been in lengthy discussions with Tom Mboya about a possible scholarship program for Kenyan students. Onyango walked the young couple outside Hagberg's house so that he could examine his son's choice of a bride, and he was not pleased. Although Obama was only four years older than Kezia, Onyango declared that the girl was far too young to marry. “He told Barack, ‘Why do you bring someone so young? She is like a babysitter. Go find someone older whom you can marry,'” said Kezia. “He told everyone Barack had chosen a babysitter.”