The Other Barack (36 page)

By the time he got there Obama was often stumbling and barely coherent. If Ruth or one of the children made the mistake of locking up before they went to bed, Obama would hammer loudly on the door and angrily demand that someone let him in. Gladys Ogolah, the next-door neighbor who knew Obama from their days at Central Bank together, heard every word of it. “He would shout at Ruth, ‘Open the door, woman. Open the door,'” Ogolah recalled. “He would say, ‘Why are you sleeping when I am not back at home. Open the door
now
.' And then he would beat on the door,
boom, boom, boom
.”

Ogolah was hardly the only Woodley resident keenly aware of their baritone-voiced neighbor. Even when Obama was sober, his thundering voice wafted over the hedges and shattered the neighborhood calm. Sometimes, he was just calling to his children without making any effort to keep his voice down. But on the nights when he and Ruth got into an argument, his domineering voice could be heard the length of the Loddon Grove road and sometimes beyond. Not long after they moved into the house, the Obamas had become a regular topic of neighborhood talk, little of it good. “Barack would come back from work or wherever he was in the middle of the night and they would fight very loudly,” recalled Ndolo Ayah, who lived nearby. “Everybody knew about it. I think we all worried a bit about Ruth's safety. Barack was not a violent person, but he could be very violent in his language.”

Gladys Ogolah and her husband, Boaz, got to know the Obamas well and not just because of the couple's ongoing fighting. Boaz Ogolah was also an economist who worked in the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, and Obama respected his breadth of knowledge and experience. Sometimes Obama would drop in for a drink, and the two men would critique the other economists in government service whose academic credentials they considered inferior to their own. Obama would also talk openly of some of the beautiful women to whom he was attracted. “Barack was a Luo and a polygamist, and so this was no big deal to him,” said Ogolah. “He was very open about it.”

Just a few years younger than her neighbor, Gladys Ogolah grew to like her new American friend. Ruth clearly enjoyed Kenya and appreciated many of its customs. Unlike some
mzungu
who tended to stick with their own
,
Ruth counted African women among her closest friends. She was also devoted to all of Obama's children and even some of his closer cousins. She was the one who arranged their weekend outings swimming at the Panafric and Safari Park hotels or picnics in the countryside. And she was the one who drove them to their schools and doctors' appointments and, at times, shielded them from their father. “Ruth was a very great woman,” said Ezra Obama, sixty-one and a retired manager of market development for Coca-Cola living outside Nairobi. “She treated all of us children the same and I respected her very much.”

But no matter how much Ruth tried to make things run smoothly, Obama seemed always to have a complaint. And when his shouting developed into more aggressive behavior in the passing months, it was to Ogolah that Ruth often turned, running through the darkness to the safe haven of her neighbor's kitchen. “Sometimes, when he came home late he would order her to cook for him in the middle of the night and if she would not he would hit her about the shoulders and neck,” recalled Gladys Ogolah. “Ruth would run screaming down the road to our house crying. She was tired of being hit and tired of being called names. She had a very, very rough time and I was always worried about her.”

As a boy, Mark Ndesandjo was fearful of his towering father and tried hard to stay out of his way so he would not inadvertently trigger his rage. “What I felt from him was coldness. There was fear. That is what I recall,” Ndesandjo said in an interview. “I was physically afraid of him. He was a large looming man and you did not know what to expect. Is he going to hit you or your mother or other people in your family? He did not smile except when he was drinking or when he was with friends.”

Anxious as to what their father's condition would be on his return home each night, the children passed the afternoon following school with mounting apprehension. “Everyone in the house was totally on edge because you never knew when my father would be back,” Ndesandjo said in an interview. “When he got there he would probably be drunk. And then the light would go on and you would hear thuds and shouts and my mother's voice rising and crying and screaming. You would hear sounds
like falling objects and it would go on and on and on and on. I instinctively bonded with my mother because she was afraid and she was also very protective of me. And that made my father even angrier. He resented me because we were both now competing for my mother's attention. I was my mother's firstborn and she had shifted some of her attention away from him to me. Sometimes when she was holding me, he would shout at her, ‘Stop tending to that brat.'”

Nor was Obama's abuse of Ruth confined to their home. As he became increasingly careless about shielding his attraction to other women, Obama repeatedly humiliated his wife in public. “He would criticize me and flirt with other women right in front of me. Always, there were other women,” Ruth sighed. “He took great pleasure in demeaning me because it made him feel better.”

Ruth endured for two reasons. The first was Mark Okoth, and the second would be named David Opiyo. Within a few months of their return to Nairobi, Ruth learned that she was pregnant again and thus linked ever more inextricably to her husband. Obama had made it clear to her that if she ever left him, he would prohibit her from seeing their children, and in Kenya's patriarchal culture she had little doubt that he could do so easily. Determined to raise her children as best she could while struggling to preserve the marriage that had produced them, Ruth took stock of her situation. Her job at Nestlé continued to provide both a professional outlet and much-needed emotional support. Best of all, it gave her a source of self-esteem that she was not finding at home. She also had an extensive network of friends, some of whom strongly urged her to take the children and flee under cover of night. But Obama had never struck any of the children. As long as it was only she upon whom he inflicted his rage, she felt she could manage.

But it wasn't easy. One night Obama came home drunk as usual, but this time he had a pretty young woman clinging to his arm. It was not the first time he had done so. In the past Ruth had simply turned tearfully away as Obama and his woman friend slipped into one of the bedrooms together. But on this particular night Obama insisted that Ruth leave their house so that he could use their marriage bed without her interfering. He was, after all, a Luo and had a right to any woman he might desire, he declared, his voice growing steadily louder. But this time Ruth put her foot
down. She refused to move anywhere, and as she screamed out her hurt, the neighbors, as ever, got an earful.
⁸

One of those neighbors was Achieng Oneko, one of the Kapenguria Six who were convicted in 1952 of supporting the Mau Mau rebels along with Kenyatta and sentenced to seven years in prison. Oneko, who had abandoned his old cellmate to join Odinga and the Kenya People's Union, was a legendary freedom fighter and a pioneering newspaper editor. He was also a former Maseno student, although he attended many years before Obama. Upset by the Obamas' domestic furor, Oneko picked up the telephone and called his friend Ndolo Ayah. “He said, ‘You young people, you better talk to that friend of yours, Barack. He's making a mess of himself,'” Ayah recounted. “So I got another friend of mine and we headed on over to Obama's place to see what we could do.”

The situation was chaotic. Ruth was screaming so forcefully that it took her awhile to realize that there were visitors in the house. Obama was drunkenly explaining to her that, according to Luo tradition, “he could bring any woman into the house at any time.” said Ayah. “I said, well, he comes from a different Luo group than ourselves because we are Luo and you don't do this kind of thing. We tried to get Barack to come to Oneko's place so we could talk it out but he just told us to go to hell, you know. And so we left. I suppose at some level we felt it was none of our business.”

As his marriage with Ruth grew increasingly strained, Obama turned to his first wife, Kezia, for solace—at least that is what she maintains. While working as a waitress in a Mombasa restaurant in the late 1960s, Kezia says that Obama occasionally visited her when he passed through town on business. On one of those trips Kezia became pregnant with a son she claims Obama fathered. In 1968 Sampson Nyandega, called Abo, was born. Two years later Bernard Otieno, whom she says is also Obama's son, was born.
⁹

Many family members, however, do not believe that the boys are Obama's. They point out that he did not take them into his home, as he did with his other children, nor did he talk much about them. More compelling, the Nairobi High Court Judge who ruled on Obama's disputed estate in 1989 did not believe the evidence of Obama's paternity that Kezia presented and concluded that the boys were not his children. Judge J. F. Shields noted in a ruling that Kezia did not obtain the boys' birth
certificates until after Obama died and did so then only in an effort to have them named as beneficiaries to his estate. Shields also wrote that Kezia had presented evidence of having access to Obama only during time periods after Bernard and Abo were born.
¹⁰
Whether or not Obama fathered the boys, Kezia is adamant that Obama remained her lover throughout his entire life regardless of whom he was married to or when. “Ruth, these other women, even Anna, I just said I do not care,” Kezia shrugged, speaking in an interview. “Marry any of them. I am the first wife. Whoever wants to marry you, marry them. I do not care. He always came back to me.”

 

AS RUTH UNDERSTOOD HIM, Obama's reckless behaviors stemmed from a couple of sources. The first were the rich and varied temptations of Nairobi life in the years after independence. Although Obama had managed to curb his more extreme inclinations while under scrutiny in the United States, once he returned to Kenya in the heady days of the mid-1960s, it was another story. On a scholarship in America, she noted, “he was being judged on a daily basis. He had to behave properly. There were parameters. But once he was back in Kenya and all his friends are saying, ‘Let's go for the drink, let's go dancing, let's go find some women, let's do this and that,' he couldn't hold back. All those pressures were too much for him. He just didn't have the strength of character to resist. And the more he succumbed, the more he succumbed.”

But Ruth believes the greater source of Obama's undoing lay deeply embedded in his gnawing lack of faith in himself, exacerbated by the perils of Kenyan politics. Kenyatta's chokehold on matters of state meant that little could happen without his sanction or that of members of his inner circle. Obama had already been blackballed for his aggressive critique of Sessional Paper No. 10, and his critical commentary at Central Bank hadn't helped matters. Much as he yearned to be a Big Man, Obama was far from it. That his fortunes were dependent on favors from others and the shifting sands of Kenya's powerful elites made matters only worse. Indeed, since his collision with Harvard administrators, he had found the doors to power closed to him at almost every turn. Uncertainty, coupled with the Luo habit of self-inflation, drove him to chronic exaggeration intended to compensate for his perceived shortcomings.

“One day he was charming, charming and loving and wonderful. He was just the way a woman wants a man to be. And then the next day he's beating you and abusing you,” Ruth said. “You see, he was confused, very confused about himself. He had a great, enormous insecurity. He pretended to be this great fellow, but we all know that confident people do not have to blow their own horn like that. Nor do they have to drink all the time to give themselves false confidence.”

Gladys Ogolah tried reasoning with him when he was sober. Why, she asked, do you beat on Ruth? “He'd say, ‘Naaaaaah, I don't beat her. She just likes making noise.' I said that is not right. When my husband talked to him, he said he is just drinking too much and that is why he is loud.”

Although Obama had abundant company in his heavy drinking, he was driven by more than the cultural excesses of the moment. Also contributing to his dark mood was the evolving cast of Kenyatta's inner circle, ever more authoritarian and intolerant of challenge. By the end of 1967 the mushrooming political schism between Kenyatta and the radicals led by Oginga Odinga had distinctly worsened. Kenyatta had tolerated the formation of the socialist Kenya People's Union, but far from yielding on his positions, he became increasingly trenchant as the months passed. He reviled the opposition's leftist platform, and at a public rally in Nairobi on Kenyatta Day he denounced KPU members, declaring that from then on they would be regarded as “snakes in the grass.... Let them try and reexamine their minds and return to KANU. If they do not do so, KPU should beware! The fighting for our Uhuru is on. Whoever has ears to hear, let him heed this. We say we are ready to fight for our Uhuru.”
¹¹

Between 1966 and 1969 Kenyatta moved to stymie the opposition and isolate his Luo challengers. One means of effectively limiting the KPU's ability to expand was by refusing to authorize the registration of new party branches.
¹²
Those who attempted to organize opposition on a local level were overtly intimidated by KANU officials or else were likely to find the government withholding a sorely needed business permit or school document as a form of payback. As the government issued a series of laws and amendments that made it increasingly difficult for the KPU to compete with the dominant KANU party, it seemed likely that Kenyatta would soon crush the opposition altogether.
¹³