The Other Barack (30 page)

Harvard's decision was disastrous for Obama. Over the past five years he had worked determinedly toward a single, overarching goal. He had left
his country at its most critical historic juncture and repeatedly put aside family and personal concerns in order to obtain the PhD that would serve as the cornerstone of his life's achievement. In passing all his exams alone, he had attained heights that had eluded countless others. But now he had been abruptly kicked out of Harvard and ordered to leave the country without so much as a chance to appeal.

As Obama wrestled with immigration authorities, however, one thing lightened his burden immeasurably. Her name was Ruth Beatrice Baker. A tall twenty-seven-year-old with a crown of wavy blonde hair, Ruth had graduated from Simmons College in Boston several years earlier with a major in business and had a good head for numbers. A large-boned woman and the daughter of a Jewish salesman, Ruth had a tentative manner that bordered on shyness. But bored with several years of secretarial work and less than enthusiastic about her current job teaching elementary students, she was open to something different when she met Obama, wearing his crisp white shirt and pressed gabardine pants as he was bumping out a rhumba at a festive summer party of Nigerians. Ruth was swept into the gyrating line of dancers, and the attraction between them was instantaneous. This was different, all right. This was about as different as it got. The following day Obama came knocking at her door and asked her for a date.
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Over the next month they carried on a passionate affair. They went dancing at the hottest clubs around Cambridge. They spent languid summer afternoons in his apartment and ambled the banks of the Charles River. And slowly, Ruth Baker—an insecure Newton girl who had been a member of the Brookline High School's honor society in her graduating class of 1954 and an honor board representative in college, a girl who had always obligingly done what was expected of her—did the unexpected. She fell in love with an African man.

Although an enthusiastic lover, Obama was distracted by his battle with Harvard. With his orals and written exams now behind him, Obama was eager to get his dissertation launched. His topic, “An Econometric Model of Staple Theory of Development,”
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would not only be germane to the agricultural issues now being debated in Kenya, but it would also allow him to practice the econometric skills he had so painstakingly learned at school. Obama telephoned the immigration office repeatedly in an effort
to get it to reverse its decision, but neither INS nor Harvard would yield. Unwilling to abandon his dream of earning a Harvard PhD, Obama stalled and said he did not have enough money for an airplane ticket home. When INS insisted that he go, Obama came up with the funds and bought a one-way ticket to Kenya in early July. As he said a passionate farewell to a moist-eyed Ruth, he urged her to come visit him in Kenya. “Come,” he whispered, kissing her hard. “We'll get married,” he added. And she heard him.

Ruth knew that Obama had two young children back in Nairobi. He had told her that she would need to take care of them if she joined him. But she did not know then that Obama also had a toddler son in Hawaii or that he had made the same invitation to other girls he had met in the United States. All that would come later. What she knew was that the life that yawned before her in Boston seemed flat and uninteresting, a life of nine-to-five jobs and phones that did not ring and nights alone in front of the television set. So she considered what Obama had said. She weighed the pros and cons with her closest girlfriends. She tentatively mentioned it to her parents, who, horrified, contacted the INS and begged them to stop her.
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In the end Ruth, who had not only never been outside the United States but who had also never before flown on an airplane, decided to follow her lover to Africa.

“I was in love with a capital L and that was it,” she declared. “I knew that I did not have the strength to make something of myself in America, to make myself someone special. So, I thought if I went to Africa my life would turn out differently.”

She was right. It did.

When Barack Obama returned to Nairobi, he found his homeland almost unrecognizable. In the five years that he had been gone, Kenya had been transformed from a beleaguered colony choked by imperial regulations and restrictions into a proudly independent nation churning with excitement as the transfer of political and financial power into African hands was finalized.

As Obama had foreseen, the Lancaster House conference of 1960 in London had proved to be a pivotal juncture in the country's march toward freedom. British authorities had stunned the Kenyan negotiating team with the announcement that they were abandoning their gradual plan of decolonization and intended instead to promulgate internal self-government and move swiftly toward independence. The White Man's Country was to be white no more.

The following year Jomo Kenyatta was released from detention and declared president of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), one of the two dominant political parties that would briefly wrestle for control in the country's first year of nationhood. In a series of conferences in London over the next two years, British and Kenyan negotiators gradually hammered out an independence constitution that was designed to establish a central governing authority as it also attempted to prevent the domination of any one regional or ethnic group. As the government began a gradual process of moving impoverished African families onto estates once owned by whites, many settlers who felt betrayed at the decisions being made back in London began to flee.

At midnight on December 12, 1963, just eight months before Obama returned, the transfer of power became official. Standing next to Prime Minister Kenyatta, the Duke of Edinburgh and Governor Malcolm MacDonald watched as the Union Jack was pulled down and the black, red, and green flag of Kenya was hoisted overhead to wild cheering and song. As more than half a century of colonial rule came to an end, thousands of Kenyans celebrated with dancing and fireworks that lasted until dawn.
Uhuru
, at last.

Kenyatta would embrace many of the principles of British rule, such as economic growth and privatization of land, but he also endorsed a number of highly symbolic changes that would gradually recast the face of the nation. The hated signs, for one thing, had to go immediately. Those signs, declaring, “No Africans or Dogs Allowed,” had long hung at the doorways of many of the city's finest hotels and restaurants. But now they were nowhere to be seen. After six decades of being excluded from whites-only establishments, Africans were now permitted to pull up a chair at the table. The elegant housing estates to the west of the city center, once the exclusive province of the wealthiest colonists, were slowly dropping the color bar. Even the toniest social clubs, such iconic British retreats as the Muthaiga Club and the Nairobi Club, were grudgingly cracking their doors to admit a handful of the new African elite. And resentful settlers who had once named their dogs Kenyatta or Odinga now faced penalties for their insolence.

Even the city's streets were hard to recognize. As Nairobi had grown from a barely inhabited swampy outback to a modern metropolis bustling with human traffic, the imperial government had carved its identity on the city's soul with a series of street and place names that memorialized its own illustrious history. One of the first things that the uhuru leaders did in the wake of independence was to eliminate those names, peeling them off the city's face like a mottled scab, making way for the fresh, new skin underneath. The broad boulevard that splices the city's heart, long known as Delamere Avenue, was rechristened Kenyatta Avenue. The intersecting crossroad of Princess Elizabeth Way became Uhuru Highway, and Connaught Road was transformed into Parliament Road. Coronation Avenue, a tree-lined thoroughfare framed by some of the county's most important government offices, was crowned Harambee Avenue. So confusing were
some of the changes even to those who had not been away from the city for years that the
Daily Nation
newspaper published a guide to the new street names, proclaiming, “There's no need to get lost!”
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When Obama stepped back on Kenyan soil in August of 1964, Kenyatta had already managed through the deft use of a series of constitutional amendments to eliminate some of the checks on his authority and was preparing to go even further in strengthening his political power base. In that same month he announced his intention to replace the constitution with a presidential republic, a structure that would provide him with sweeping executive powers. Less obvious, he had also made critical progress in vanquishing his political opposition and cementing the one-party structure that would enable him to rule nearly unchallenged for close to fifteen years. By the end of the year the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), which had formed in large part to counterbalance just such a highly centralized government, saw many of its members defect to Kenyatta's dominant KANU in response to the amendments and some political arm twisting. KADU ultimately disbanded. When the country celebrated the first anniversary of independence in December 1964, Kenyatta was named president of the new republic. He was the undisputed head not only of the nation and the new government but also of the dominant political party.

The next task was to put Africans in positions of power that whites had long dominated. “Africanization” was the mantra of the day, a potent slogan that Kenyatta had employed when promising to return the country to its people. What it meant was that the country's institutions—its economy, industry, and political structure—would be reclaimed from Europeans and Africans installed into every aspect of national life. At least that was the idea.

Obama was swept up into a surge of young men and women who returned from schooling overseas and were confronted with the task of creating a nation of their own. Although it would take years to alter some of the social and economic structures that were colonial legacies, thousands of the 56,000 Europeans who were in the country at the time of independence had already fled, apprehensive about how the new government might treat them. So too did a large portion of city's nearly 177,000 Asians, who had long dominated the local business scene.
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It was an
intoxicating moment, a time when seemingly only the breadth of one's ambition limited one's possibilities. With thousands of jobs in civil service and private industry that needed to be filled and only an estimated 600 Kenyans with college degrees from overseas qualified to fill them, getting a job was largely a matter of showing up.
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“You could literally choose what job you wanted,” recalled Hilary Ng'weno, a Harvard graduate from the class of '61 who was appointed the first Kenyan editor of the
Daily Nation
and later launched a journal of political news and analysis called the
Weekly Review
. “It was tremendously exciting and for any educated person particularly so.”

Within weeks of his return, Obama landed a post as a management trainee in the finance department of Shell/BP on Harambee Avenue. Although Obama envisioned himself as a government economist, the Shell job was a plum opportunity that would provide him the kind of basic training he needed to assume a government post. Obama was one of many young Africans striding down the company's black linoleum floors, and within months he was promoted to the post of management accountant. His job was to provide financial reports on the company's performance and its information systems.
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In the haste to “Africanize” in the post-independence years—or at least to appear to endorse that process—many corporations positioned Africans in jobs for which they were ill-prepared and would later be accused of using them as window dressing while giving them work of little substance. Shell's Nairobi office, however, had promoted a number of able Africans early on and was regarded as being largely cooperative in the process of nationalization.

For those blessed with a college degree, the possibilities were profound. Flush with the salaries their newfound corporate and civil service positions provided, many young Africans found their lives transformed. With directives from then Minister for Home Affairs Oginga Odinga lifting the color bar at many downtown establishments, many young professionals adopted an upscale urban lifestyle unimaginable in the Kenya of their youth. They drove elegant cars with thick white-walled tires. Their favorite vehicle of the day was the plump Peugeot 403 saloon car, nicknamed the “Nization” in honor of the Africanization of the roads. They shopped at the fine clothing stores on Government Road, where the shelves were heavy with lush Oriental silks and Egyptian cottons. And
they clinked glasses of fine amber whiskey at the New Stanley and the Norfolk, two of the city's premiere hotels that had long refused them. So palpable was the change in the very feel of the city that one young British man teaching in Dar es Salaam was moved to ask a cab driver to what he attributed the lighter mood. “The driver said, ‘Well, that's easy,'” recalled John M. Lonsdale, who later would become a professor of Modern African History at the University of Cambridge in England. “‘You no longer call us baboons.'”

Nowhere did the members of this new urban tribe have a greater impact than when they left the capital. For when they wheeled their sleek automobiles down the dusty roads of their ancestral homes, where a car itself was an astonishing sight, the villagers gaped with open mouths. “We called them the Nairobi men,” sighed Manasseh Oyucho, the principal of the Senator Barack Obama Primary School in Kogelo, still impressed by the memory. “They spoke English and they wore suits and they had beautiful cars. They were working in groups of very smart people and we all wanted to be just like them. We wanted to be just like Obama.”