The Other Barack (6 page)

Hawa Auma, the third child born to Onyango and Akumu and the only one still alive, lives in the village of Oyugis about an hour's rough drive from Kendu Bay. As she remembers it, Barack was treated like
dhahabu ya nyota
, or “the gold of the stars” in Swahili. But she, too, adored her older brother. A widow, she spends most of her days sitting at the edge of the dirt road next to a pile of charcoal stubs that she sells for about 30 Ksh for a tin of two kilograms, or about forty cents, if she's lucky. Flashing her broad toothless smile, she delights in showing a visitor the interior of her tiny dark house where a photograph of President Obama, her nephew, and his family hang next to a row of dirt-encrusted axes. One of her prized possessions is a set of six water glasses that bear the seal of the U.S. Senate, which she says then-senator Obama presented to her along with 10,000 Kenyan shillings, or about $140, when he visited Alego in 2006. She wonders aloud if he will pay to get her teeth fixed one of these days.

Like all of Onyango's children and many of his grandchildren, Hawa Auma was raised as a Muslim. The front of her small house bears the painted black crescent and star featured on many Islamic flags along with
the name of her dead husband. She speaks reverently of a recent trip she made to Mecca with several other family members, although she is more interested in discussing the airplane they took than the Holy City of Islam. “That plane was all white and so beautiful,” she declared. “There was a toilet, a bed, just like a hotel. And all the time, tea with milk.”

Her brother Baraka, as she recalls, converted to Christianity when he was about six years old and changed his name to the more Christiansounding Barack because the Christian missionaries at the early schools he attended insisted that he do so. They were not discriminating against his faith in particular; rather, the missionaries required all non-Christians to leave their rival faith at the door and embrace Christianity if they hoped to go to school. Many young Kenyans who were baptized during the early twentieth century were given both African and Christian names, and the latter were often heavily Biblical ones such as Obadiah or Ezra. Later in life many of them abandoned those Christian names, considering them relics of an oppressive past.

Furious at the church's requirement but determined that his son be educated, Onyango did not openly challenge the missionaries. For his daughters, the situation was much simpler. Because they, like many girls, did not attend school, they did not have to trouble themselves with changing their names or renouncing the family faith. Barack, as Hawa Auma tells it, did not particularly care what religion he was ascribed; instead, he cared about not being different from the other children, and he cared enough about that to stand up to their bullish father. “Our father would say, ‘You are a Muslim. Why do you say you are something else?'” says Hawa Auma. “But Barack was very bold and he stood up to him. He would say, ‘I do not see anyone like that in the school where I am learning. I see only Christians.'”

Excluding matters of faith, Barack and his two sisters were raised largely according to longstanding Luo custom and tradition much as their parents had been. Although Barack would live as an urban man of the twentieth century when he became an adult, the tribal habits that defined rural Africa of the century past shaped his earliest years.

The Obama family lived in a typical Luo homestead composed of a collection of round, thatched dwellings arranged in a circular formation. Each of the structures had a designated function. Onyango occupied the
central house, called a
duol
, although he was more often with one of his wives than in his own hut. Although second in number, Helima acted as a first wife, who is called a
mikayi
, and lived in a larger hut in the middle of the compound. It was she who oversaw the running of affairs, no matter how many other wives might be added to the family. The man of a family would routinely have two or more wives, and their huts were positioned in descending hierarchal order in front of the first wife's house, just as the sons' homes were laid out before the father's hut.
³¹
When Onyango married Habiba, she became his third wife, or
reru
, and lived in a separate hut of her own. She and Helima together cared for Sarah and Barack when they were born.

Girls generally slept in their own mother's homes until they reached puberty and then moved into a home with their grandmother called a
siwindhe
where they remained until they married. Boys moved into a bachelor house called a
samba
when they reached their teenage years. Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, boys would undergo the ritual removal of their six lower teeth, signifying their entry into adulthood. Although, fortunately for Barack, the practice began to die out around the time he was born, as did many customs of which the missionaries disapproved, many older men in Luoland still bear the telltale dental gap. Today, death remains one of the Luos' primary cultural expressions, marked by several days of elaborate ritual and the burial of the corpse. The body goes to the left of the door to the main dwelling in the case of a female and to the right in the case of the male. When a married man dies, the wooden pole extending from the roof of the main dwelling called an
osuri
is broken in a signal of his passing. One of his brothers will then “inherit” his widow, or if there are no brothers, another male in the family will do so.

Elaborate protocols continue to govern relations among Luo men and women, particularly those between a man and his mother-in-law. A wife's mother, for example, is to keep her distance from her daughter's spouse. She is not to hug him closely or even to cook food for him in her daughter's home. And she is never, ever to spend the night in her son-in-law's home. If she does, the young couple will be afflicted by a
chira
disease, an illness triggered by the breaking of cultural norms and marked by progressive wasting. When Michelle Obama's mother, Marian Robinson, moved
into the White House to help take care of her granddaughters not long after the 2009 inauguration, many Luos around Lake Victoria grumbled in disapproval and predicted that disaster would surely follow.

Barack was teethed on the varied musical forms that echo in Luoland at an early age. By the early 1940s Kendu Bay had become known as a musical center featuring the popular fast-paced
mach
melodies and percussionbased rhumbas. Despite Onyango's severe ways, most family events were accompanied by performances on a lyre-like instrument called the
nyatiti
, then common among Luo families. Often the music would evolve into a popular form of verbal entertainment involving “praise names,” a string of laudatory words a person uses to describe themselves or someone else. A
pakruok
is another form of self-glorification that employs metaphors or similes and often uses symbols from the environment, such as plants or animals. On overhearing a Luo enjoying his Tusker beer while uttering a string of complimentary adjectives describing himself, a non-Luo might concur with the Kenyan truism that Luos are as supremely arrogant as they are intellectual. But among Luos, such talk is more game than brag, although of course there might be the
slightest
bit of truth to those elaborate appraisals. Barack would often approach friends in later years declaring himself “
an wuod Akumu nya Njoga, wuod nyar ber
,” or “I am the son of Akumu, the daughter of Njoga, a beautiful woman.” Or he might say, “
an wuon nyithindo mabeyo
,” meaning “I am the father of beautiful children.” It was a childhood habit that entertained him, and like many other practices learned from his childhood—not all of them as benign—he never abandoned it.

The addition of some home brew invariably enlivened such addresses. Although the Muslim faith prohibits the drinking of alcohol, Onyango was nonetheless a large consumer of
chang'aa
, a traditional alcoholic drink distilled from grains such as maize or sorghum.
³²
Another popular drink made at the family compound was
busaa
, brewed from millet or sorghum.

But Hussein Onyango typically put strict limits on entertainment, for he was determined that his son get the kind of formal education that he himself had tasted in the earliest mission schools. By the time Barack came of school age in the 1940s, those mission schools dominated education in East Africa, where the agenda was predominantly focused on reading, writing, and teachings from the Bible. Barack attended the
Gendia Primary School, started by the Seventh Day Adventist church in 1906 and located about three miles from his home. Each morning, he would fall in with the straggling groups of children who strode the wide dirt paths to school. In the absence of motor vehicles, Kenyan schoolchildren routinely walked many miles to their school in small groups, often singing praise songs along the way. Sometimes, on their way home, Barack and other boys would play a popular form of hockey called
adhula
, in which sticks made from date trees were used to shoot a ball into a rival clan's territory.
³³

Barack was fortunate that, due to his father's job, he often had shoes to wear on those long walks to school, unlike many children whose families were unable to afford such a luxury. So precious were those shoes, however, that children often carried them to school rather than wear them out on the rock-strewn journey. But in most other respects Onyango was a difficult and exacting father who did not hesitate to cane his children if they disobeyed him or to intimidate them with the threat of his infamous whip. His greatest expectations were reserved for Barack. Because Onyango had achieved much for himself and was one of the most accomplished men in the village, he was determined that Barack surpass him. “Sometimes Onyango would pull him aside and say, ‘I want you to go beyond where I am,'” said Arthur Reuben Owino. “‘People have respected me, so you also will be respected much more than me. You must study hard and pay attention. And always take care of your appearance.'”

Onyango kept a watchful eye on Barack's studies, particularly in the subject of math, for he had learned from the
mzungu
the importance of calculations and record keeping. On Barack's return from school each day, his father required him to perform his math sums out loud while standing beside a table laden with dinner. If he was unable to complete his work perfectly, he was forbidden to sit down and eat. Or he was locked in his room for the night. “Even as a young boy, Barack was very smart and prone to mischief and sometimes he would skip class because he did not feel he needed to go,” explained Wilfred Obama Kobilo, a first cousin to Barack and a businessman now living in Nairobi. “But Barack always made sure that he knew his math homework before he went home because he knew his father was waiting for him there. He knew that his father had very high expectations of him.”

Regardless of whether there was homework to be done or not, other children were forbidden to visit the Obama compound. Onyango considered them unkempt and ill-mannered, and he could not endure the noise they made. Nor were his own children permitted to visit other households to play with their friends. Once, when Barack ignored the rule and stopped at a friend's house, Joseph Akello recalls that Onyango was furious and shouted at him when he got home, “Why would you go to someone else's home when you have all the mangos and guavas you need
here
?” he demanded. “We have everything you need right here and so you must stay here.”

But every rule has its exception, even Onyango's. When one of his employers was leaving town to head to another posting, he gave Onyango some photographs they no longer wanted. The photos, simple poses of white ladies sitting in a drawing room, were of immense curiosity back in Luoland, where many women and children had never seen a white person and cameras were the stuff of lore. A few dared to inch close to Onyango's compound in hopes of getting a glimpse of the pale-faced ladies hanging on the walls inside, only to have him shoo them away. These white women, posed for photographs, were among the first Barack had ever seen. He gazed upon them in his childhood home, mysterious and alluring creatures that belonged to a world about which he could only imagine.

Onyango had also been given an abandoned RCA gramophone, one of the earliest record players, which trumpeted sound through a conical metal horn. Crank the handle on the side and the horn suddenly emitted a thundering torrent of Zulu drumbeats or the cascading strains of a Beethoven sonata. Turn the dial on the side of the box and suddenly the music got louder. Villagers were rapt. Immensely proud of the machine, Onyango permitted a select group to come and listen, but they had to abide by his strict rules. The gramophone was set on a stool in the middle of the compound, and children were instructed to sit quietly in front of it. Adults could come as close as the compound gate to listen, but no closer. As the strains of music swelled over the dusty yard and the panicked chickens frantically ran from the noise, Barack often leapt impulsively to his feet and began to twirl to the rhythm, but Onyango swatted him back down to the ground. No dancing was allowed. No singing, either. And
after two or three songs, he abruptly shut off the machine and ordered everyone back to work.

“Barack always wanted to dance. He had the rhythm in him,” said Akello. “But Onyango only let him have so much. A couple of songs. One record. Then it was over.”

 

HABIBA AKUMU DREAMED of running away.

An independent spirit, she had never been happy with her domineering husband. She chafed at his incessant rules and deeply resented his tyrannical ways. Even in the highly chauvinist Luo culture of the time, in which wife beating was not uncommon, Onyango was severe. When he summoned Habiba, he insisted that she must come at his first call or face a harsh beating. He constantly complained that she did not keep their home sufficiently tidy. And when they began to have children, the tension between them grew worse.