The Other Barack (32 page)

He also wanted to use her to impress other people. As with his Harvard degree, Obama did not hesitate to brandish his pretty white wife with the Boston accent. At times Obama jokingly refused to let a friend pull up a stool next to him at a bar, saying, “You can't sit next to me. Don't you know that I'm married to a
mzungu
, you stupid African.” And when he encountered a colleague who was married to a white woman, Obama would throw his arm around his shoulders, exclaiming that he was “my in-law.”
⁷

Obama eventually took Ruth to the village that he considered home. Together, they drove the hundreds of kilometers from Nairobi to Kanyadhiang, past fields of maize and millet and scrub dotted with the traditional Luo homesteads of thatched dwellings and finally around the gentle curve of the Winam Gulf into Nyanza province. As Obama's azure automobile glided into the village amidst a cluster of scrappy huts, a crowd of dozens of Obama relatives peered excitedly into the car window eager for a glimpse. Men and women alike watched intently as the passenger door swung open, anxious to catch the first glimpse of the lady's legs. If her legs were small, she would surely have small, possibly weak children. But if her legs were big, she would deliver strong and robust offspring, or so the local wisdom would have it. Fortunately, Ruth's legs easily made the grade. “Ruth had the most beautiful legs of any white woman anywhere,” declared Charles Oluoch, Obama's cousin. “People in the village still talk about them.”
⁸

With her direct manner and broad smile, Ruth won the villagers over easily. There is a black-and-white photograph of that day, a cherished family possession, perched on Oluoch's mantel. It shows a line of grinning Obama relatives posing in front of the dashing Fairlane with Obama and Ruth, who is wearing a short summer shift with her blonde hair cropped close as she is standing in the middle. But if Obama's family was impressed by her calves and her warmth, they had only seen the half of it. Sometime later, when Obama and Ruth visited Kogelo, the time came when some water was needed for cooking. It was Ruth herself, a
mzungu
with a college degree, who took the pot and headed down to the River Awach to collect it. Many in the village still shake their head at the memory. “He came and dragged me to his house so I could meet his white wife. He wanted to show me how he could talk to the white lady,” said Dora Mumbo, ninety-two, a retired teacher from the Nyang'oma Primary School. “He was so proud of her. When I asked Barack why he had married her, he said she had agreed to cook for him. She agreed to so many things. She was a real lady that she could take that pot to the river and get water.”

The couple moved into a stately home in Rosslyn, a predominantly white neighborhood in Nairobi that was lush with sprawling purple jacaranda trees and trim green hedges. Like many of the spacious estates located northwest of the city, Rosslyn had long been the exclusive province of Europeans. Now a handful of Africans were trickling in. Not all family members were so pleased with Obama's new domestic situation, however. Hussein Onyango stormed into the house one morning and adamantly insisted that Obama take his first wife Kezia into his home along with their two children. If his son could not respect his first wife in such a way, then at least he could establish a separate home for her as any good Luo would do.
⁹

But Obama refused. Obama was an educated man now, and though he was eager to have his children join him, he told his friends he had no intention of living “like an African” with multiple wives at a time.
¹⁰
Although Ruth agreed to have the children live with them, as she had promised Obama she would back in Cambridge, she was horrified at the notion that his first wife would join them as well. She would just as soon not meet Kezia at all. But the proposal was only one of many aspects of life
in Nairobi that she was finding difficult, as did more than a few other white women who had met their African husbands in the West.

These young women were quickly learning that husbands who had seemed highly Westernized back home soon reverted to deeply ingrained tribal customs when back on African soil. Kenyan men generally went out drinking at bars or nightclubs without their wives and were absent for long periods of time. They did little in the way of domestic chores, and many presumed broad sexual freedoms, taking mistresses or even second wives as due course. Young women, who had expected a position of some respect in their new marriages, suddenly found that they had quite lowly status. As Celia Nyamweru, a young British graduate student doing field research in Kenya in the mid-1960s, wrote in an essay on her experiences, “Often these young women received fairly rude awakenings when marital relationships that had started happily between graduate students or young professionals had to be renegotiated under circumstances where most of the power lay on the husband's side.”
¹¹

Helga Kagumba, who met her Luo husband at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, before moving to Nairobi, puts it more bluntly. “For some of the white woman here, it was hell,” declared Kagumba, who socialized with Obama in the early 1970s and later moved to Achego with her husband. “You were not equal here. You were a commodity, a second-class citizen. You were not to ask your husband where he is going. So for a lot of the foreign wives who came here it was a disaster. When their husbands took other women, their marriages ended and they fled. We tried to help them, driving them to the airport and getting them fake passports so they could get out. They were afraid their husbands would track them down and kill them.”

These young wives also ran headlong into the African tradition of extended families. Now that they were flush with a big job and a Nairobi home, many of the new African elite in Nairobi found a succession of siblings, cousins, and acquaintances showing up at their door, sometimes planning to stay for long periods. So it was in Obama's various households. His children, then called Roy and Rita, moved in soon after he returned. His sister Zeituni and cousin Ezra would live with the couple periodically while they attended schools in the city. Later, his mother's son from another marriage would move in. At the same time, a succession of
other family members dropped in for shorter durations, many of whom Ruth could not begin to identify.

Nor were these young wives the only ones who found the situation stressful. For the Kenyan men, the demands of their new lives were also profound. On the one hand, they were urban professionals under pressure to provide for a vast extended network of family members back home who still had very little. But they were also still deeply rooted in the culture and ways of the bush, and what their role was in either locale or exactly how to bridge the gap was not always clear. Were they Kenyan villagers or downtown professionals? With one foot firmly placed in Luoland and another on Harambee Avenue, Obama in particular struggled to find his balance. Of the pressures facing this new and somewhat dislocated class of Kenyans, Andrew Hake, author of
African Metropolis: Nairobi's Self-Help City
, wrote, “It is no wonder that there were some, living lives of insecurity and tension, heavily mortgaged and uncertain which of their friends they could trust, who succumbed in one way or another to such intense stress.”
¹²

In their first few months together Obama and Ruth lived much as they had in Cambridge. Ruth got a job as a secretary at the
Nation
newspaper while Obama applied his new econometric skills to the job at Shell. After work, they often went dancing at the new Starlight nightclub, the city's hotspot, featuring Congolese music and an eclectic crowd reflecting Nairobi's increasingly diverse population. Well aware that his moves were electrifying, Obama could not resist twirling Ruth extravagantly across the center of the dance floor as a small crowd clapped in appreciation. Some nights the couple danced until the early hours of the following morning. So bleary-eyed was Ruth by the time she got to work that her bosses let her go after only three months. “We were out all night so I wasn't getting any sleep,” sighed Ruth. “I was exhausted. Oh, God, I was in a mess you know. I could not focus on anything.”

However, Ruth began quite quickly to notice changes in Obama. Some nights he drank so much he could barely make it to the car and Ruth was afraid to let him drive them home. As he worked increasingly long hours, he often did not come home from work until well after midnight, stumbling to the door reeking of whiskey and perfume. At times he shouted at her with rage, calling her slow and stupid. And one night
he astonished her with the news that he not only had been married a second time, but had a young son in Hawaii. “He just said he had a little son there and he was very proud of him,” said Ruth. “He had a little picture of him on his tricycle with a hat on his head. And he kept that picture in every house that we lived in. He loved his son. He never mentioned the wife, though. I knew nothing about her. But none of that bothered me. As I said, I was in love with a capital ‘L' and that was that. I didn't know anything about anything.”

Despite Ruth's growing misgivings and Obama's own ambivalence, which he shared only with a handful of friends, the couple decided to get married by the end of the year. Propelled by the turbulent currents of their love affair, for either one of them to turn back would have been difficult. Ruth could hardly face returning to America and the failure that would have signified. Nor could Obama easily surrender the wife who had given him such cachet. And, in at least some respects, they still shared the intense passion that had consumed them back in Cambridge. So on Christmas Eve of 1964 they stood before a justice of the peace in the city registrar's office as two of their friends looked on.
¹³
The service was strictly bare bones. There was no ring, no gifts. As she reached out to take Obama's hand before the ceremony began, Ruth hesitated for an instant. “I was thinking should I
really
marry this guy?” recalled Ruth. “I mean, how long was this going to last? I just had a feeling it was risky. But, you know, I went ahead with it.”

 

AS THE OBAMAS BEGAN THEIR NEW LIFE together in the opening days of 1965, so Kenya also entered a critical new phase of development. Obama rode roughshod into both experiences. Within months he had thrust himself into the turbulent political debate of the day and assumed a public position that would put him at odds with the prevailing political powers for the better part of his career.

During the first year of independence Jomo Kenyatta had devoted himself primarily to centralizing his powers and ensuring that any potential political challenge was neutralized. The first Cabinet, dominated by Kikuyus and several of Kenyatta's own family members, had been put into place, which would color Kenyan politics for generations.
¹⁴
Although the popular Luo leader Oginga Odinga had been appointed vice president of
the new republic, the post had been deliberately defined with severely limited powers that muted his ability to challenge the president or his policies. With the inauguration of the Republic on December 12, 1964, and the appointment of Kenyatta as president, Kenya's founding father had firmly asserted his personal authority by establishing a centralized executive authority, and this set the stage for his political dominance for years to come.

Almost as important as the political shape of the new nation was its economic mooring. In his conversations with the departing British administrators during the days leading up to the declaration of the republic, Kenyatta had already committed himself to a mixed economy that would leave many aspects of the European-established infrastructure largely unchanged. Growth rather than redistribution was his priority, as was the maintenance of ties with foreign investors and multinational corporations.
¹⁵
The African nationalists had also already endorsed the controversial notion of extending private land titles begun during the colonial era, continuing a shift from the African tradition of communal property holding.
¹⁶
The ongoing process of Africanization called for the installation of African employees throughout business and government and also the eventual shift in ownership of the nation's assets into the hands of Africans through a steady process of growth. But the question of exactly whose hands would control those assets was not settled. To resolve some of these issues and to implement the economic program he had in mind, Kenyatta turned to a core group of his highest-ranking deputies under the guidance of a lingering expatriate community.

The beating heart of the process was the new Ministry for Economic Planning and Development (MEPD) housed in the beige four-story Treasury Building on Harambee Avenue. Development planning—the notion that an infusion of resources paired with a workable program could provide self-sustaining growth—was all the rage in the underdeveloped world and in the West. Kenyatta had appointed Tom Mboya to be the office's new minister along with Mwai Kibaki as his deputy. Some speculated that Kenyatta, ever wary of Mboya's widespread political base, had given him the MEPD rather than a more prominent post such as the vice presidency or Ministry of Finance to undercut the power of his potential rival. But Mboya accepted the position with enthusiasm. As he saw it, the job presented
an opportunity to shape the country's economic structure and to deal head on with some of the thorny issues of land allocation and foreign investment that some left-leaning members of the KANU party were beginning to question.
¹⁷

In the opinion of many of the young economists fresh back from their overseas training, the MEPD was the place to be. Imbued with Mboya's intelligence and zeal, the Ministry operated far more efficiently than most other government agencies and attracted a cadre of highly trained economists and planners. Many of them were deeply passionate and committed to their homeland's potential for development, and they considered themselves a united force. Years later some of that close-knit club of junior economists, who have since gone gray, would fondly refer to the tired corridors of the MEPD as “home.” In the final weeks of 1964 that team was being carefully assembled.