The Obamas Read online

  Copyright © 2010, 2011 by Peter Firstbrook

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in slightly different form in Great Britain by Preface Publishing, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, London, in 2010.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Firstbrook, P. L.

  The Obamas : the untold story of an African family / Peter Firstbrook.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Obama family. 2. Obama, Barack—Family. 3. Kenya—Biography. 4. Luo (Kenyan and Tanzanian people)—Biography. 5. Presidents—United States—Family—Case studies. I. Title.

  CT2227.5.O23F57 2011

  973.932092′2—dc22

  [B] 2010032403

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59142-5

  Book design by Barbara Sturman

  Jacket design by Jean Traina

  Jacket photography by Jo Harpley/Flickr/Getty Images

  v3.1

  FOR ROY SAMO

  May your dream of a better

  Kenya one day be realized

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  GENEALOGY CHART

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  1. TWO ELECTIONS, TWO PRESIDENTS MAP OF KENYA

  2. MEET THE ANCESTORS MAP OF MIGRATION ROUTES OF THE LUO ANCESTORS

  MAP OF NYANZA PROVINCE (LUOLAND)

  3. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF OPIYO OBAMA

  4. THE WAZUNGU ARRIVE

  5. THE NEW IMPERIALISM

  6. FIVE WIVES AND TWO WORLD WARS

  7. A STATE OF EMERGENCY

  PHOTO INSERT

  8. MR. “DOUBLE-DOUBLE”

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Methodology

  Timeline

  Notes

  Glossary of People

  Glossary of Terms and Place Names

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  WUOTHI EKA INE

  To travel is to see plenty

  PROLOGUE

  WAT EN WAT

  Kinship is kinship

  WHEN THE American people elect a president, they choose, de facto, a new leader of the free world. U.S. presidential elections are interesting to foreign observers if only because the winner becomes the single most powerful person in the world, practically overnight. Yet the election of a young senator from Illinois in November 2008 caused even more of a stir around the world than usual. The primary reason was not his lack of experience in executive decision making but the fact that he was black—or, to be strictly correct, half black. Although Barack Obama was brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia by a single mother for most of his early years, his absent father was African, from a tribe called the Luo, who live around the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya. When President Obama’s father came to Hawaii as a student in 1959, Kenya was still a British colony; after the country gained its independence in 1963, Obama senior—like many Kenyan students—returned home to find a job in the new government. President Obama recalls meeting him only once, during a brief visit that his father made to Hawaii just before Christmas 1971, when young Barack was just ten years old. The president never saw his father again, because Barack Obama senior died eleven years later, when he crashed his car into a tree one night in Nairobi.

  For anybody who has read his two books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, it is clear that President Obama is very conscious of his mixed heritage, and that as a young man he was unsure of his place in a multicultural world. In his self-deprecatory style, he referred to himself as a “mutt” in his first press conference after his election, when he spoke about getting a dog for his children: “Our preference is to get a shelter dog, but most shelter dogs are mutts like me.”

  In Dreams, he talks about his struggle as a young man to come to terms with his mixed racial heritage; later, he recalls his first visit to Kenya in 1987 to meet his father’s family and to learn more about his African birthright. He felt welcomed in Kenya, and he came to understand the importance that Africans place on family. Obama was taken to see his stepgrandmother, Sarah Obama, who still lives in her husband’s compound, which the family calls “Home Squared.” Both the president’s grandfather and father are buried adjacent to the house, and he wrote movingly about finding a connection with this little bit of Africa:

  I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried … When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words.1

  The title of this first book hints at his regret of never really knowing his father: “I had been forced to look inside myself,” he wrote in Dreams from My Father, “and had found only a great emptiness there.”2 When talking of his political beliefs in his second book, The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama acknowledges that he is a prisoner of his own biography: “I can’t help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives.”3

  In perhaps the most telling part of Obama’s prologue to Audacity, he makes a direct reference to his own father: “Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.”4

  Like many Americans, President Obama can trace the ancestral background on his mother’s side to a broad mix of European blood: he is, apparently, about 37 percent English, with additional contributions from German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Swiss forebears; many white Americans descended from European stock share a similarly rich mixture of Old World genes. On his father’s side, however, the genetic makeup is much simpler: he is 50 percent African, descended from a long line of Luo tribal warriors who originally lived in the Sudan and over the centuries migrated south and east across more than 600 miles of desert, swamp, and jungle before eventually settling around the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya.

  I am a documentary filmmaker with a long-standing interest in Africa. Over the years I have visited Africa dozens of times, but I had not worked in Kenya since 1987. Within just a couple of weeks of Obama’s election as the new president, I flew to Kenya with the intention of researching a film about the village where his family originated. I met many members of the Obama family; some had been in the media spotlight in the run-up to the election, but there were many more whose voices had never been heard. Even though I only scratched the surface of the history of the Obamas and the Luo people on this first visit, I realized that there was a fascinating story to be told. Putting the documentary on hold, I decided that the story of Obama’s family—and the extraordinary history of the Luo people—could best be told in a different way.

  This book, then, is the fruit of several more visits to the shores of Lake Victoria, to the part of western Kenya that is called Luoland. Barack Obama’s upbringing and education in America and Indonesia have been well covered elsewhere, both by the president himself and by other writers. I hope, therefore, that this book will offer some insight into the little-known half of President Barack Obama—the half of him that is Luo and that comes from a long line of formidable African warrior
s. Of this rich family lineage, the president himself is only vaguely aware.

  In 2006, President Obama made his third visit to Kenya, but this time it was in an official capacity, as a member of the U.S. Senate. He upset many senior Kenyan politicians on that trip because of his outspokenness against corruption, but the ordinary people loved him. His visit was brief and he had only a short time to visit the village where his father grew up. His relatives told me that he had less than forty-five minutes to meet his extended family, who lined up by the dozen in the hot equatorial sun outside Sarah Obama’s hut, waiting for their brief few seconds with their most favored son. Barack Obama’s aunt, his closest living Kenyan relative, showed me with obvious pride the set of drinking glasses she had been given on that visit; yet, sad to say, in the few seconds that she spent with her nephew, Hawa Auma did not have time to tell him about the extraordinary story of how his grandfather fell in love with his grandmother, nor the tragic circumstances of their separation; Charles Oluoch did not tell the senator his suspicions about how Barack Obama senior really died in 1982; nor have his father’s friends ever had the chance to tell Barack Obama about the parties they had together at Harvard as students in the mid-sixties.

  Despite his American upbringing, President Obama has attained the position of a near demigod in Kenya. Like all African tribes, the Luo have a rich anthology of proverbs and sayings, one of which strikes me as particularly poignant: wat en wat, “kinship is kinship,” which, loosely translated, means “blood is thicker than water.” The Luo will never consider Obama to be a white man. Regardless of where he was raised or what he might say or do, they will always see him as an African—a true Luo with an ancestry that can be traced back two dozen generations.

  Without the patient support, help, and generosity of dozens of local people—eminent historians, members of the Obama family, and Luo elders alike—this book would not have been possible. These people unstintingly supplied me with all the elements of the story; all I have tried to do is to arrange them into a coherent picture of the past.

  PETER FIRSTBROOK

  Kisumu, Kenya

  1

  TWO ELECTIONS,

  TWO PRESIDENTS

  BER TELO EN TELO

  The benefit of power is power

  THE EVENING was drawing in, dark clouds rolled overhead, and ominous specks of rain were making themselves felt in the hot, sticky, tropical twilight. It was not the ideal start to the evening; five hundred relatives and friends had gathered in the Obama ancestral home to watch the inauguration of their most famous son as president of the United States. We were all sitting in the courtyard of the family compound in K’obama, a remote village in western Kenya, and the heavens looked as if they were about to open. Some of the people had walked several miles to get here, and many of them were related to the president-elect either through birth or by marriage. We had less than two hours to go before Barack Obama took his historic oath of office, but the inclement weather and encroaching darkness were not the worst of our problems. We still had no television, the only generator to be found had no fuel or oil, and there was no aerial set up to receive the broadcast.

  Everything had seemed so simple and straightforward the previous day, when I sat down with the village committee—the Kenyans love their committees—to discuss their preparations for the celebrations. Yes, there would be three televisions for people to watch, and three generators to power them. The trees around the compound would be strung with 100-watt electric bulbs, so we would have plenty of light. They would slaughter a cow and several goats, and they welcomed my offer to bring a dozen crates of soft drinks, but definitely no beer, as they were all Seventh-Day Adventists.

  The small village of K’obama lies just outside of Kendu Bay, itself a small township on the shores of Lake Victoria in the western province of Nyanza. K’obama is home to dozens of families, all of them related in one way or another to the recently elected president. Like many small villages in this part of Kenya, the ancestral name takes the prefix K- to denote the family homestead. Despite this clear indicator of the family’s presence, K’obama had been largely ignored by the international press since the election of Barack Obama. Journalists and television crews had all headed to Nyang’oma K’ogelo (also called simply K’ogelo), a small village on the opposite side of Winam Gulf and home to Sarah Obama, known as Mama Sarah, stepgrandmother to the president-elect. And so here I was in K’obama on the eve of the presidential inauguration with not a journalist in sight, nor even another mzungu (“white man” in Swahili). I had my suspicions why K’ogelo had attracted all the attention of the world’s press, but I did not get confirmation of the real reason until sometime later.

  Meanwhile, although the party in K’obama was in full swing, there was still no sign of a television set. I had tracked down a couple of empty fuel cans and I sent our van off to buy some petrol for the generator, but that had not materialized either. Although Africa has always been one of my favorite places to visit, working here is not without its challenges. The Luo, Obama’s African tribe, are known for being easygoing and generous, and I had received nothing but help and support from them. But they also had a reputation for, among other things, talking big and doing very little.

  With little more than an hour to go before darkness fell over K’obama, my luck began to change: not one, but two televisions suddenly arrived. The first was one of the TVs promised by the organizers, and it made its entrance balanced precariously on a wheelbarrow. Then came the second television, which I had previously negotiated to hire for the evening from a neighbor. The van came back with fuel, and within minutes the little Honda generator spluttered into life and the televisions lit up into a grainy image. Perhaps we would be able to watch the historic inauguration after all.

  Meanwhile, the Obama family members began to drag their cheap plastic garden chairs in front of the two screens. Darkness falls quickly in the tropics, and soon everybody was settling down for the evening, apparently oblivious to the gathering storm clouds. It was a wonderfully diverse mix of people, from six-year-old schoolchildren to great-grandmothers in their eighties. Dozens of people came and thanked me for helping to get the TVs working, some of them smelling as if they had been drinking more than fizzy soda. I had not actually seen any beer around, but illicit alcohol is commonly available in Kenya, and I suspect that some of the revelers were not conforming to the strict lifestyle expected of Seventh-Day Adventists.

  Local brew has always been fermented in Kenya, but traditionally it was only as strong as beer. However, stronger and more potent brews have become more popular in recent years, encouraged no doubt by the high taxes imposed on alcohol by the government. The police often turn a blind eye to the brewing in return for a cut of the profits. Sometimes these drinks are “fortified” with methanol, a toxic wood alcohol, which can have disastrous consequences. Kenyans call the drink chang’aa, but it is also given other popular names such as “power drink” (which gives a hint to the strength of the industrial additive) and “kill-me-quick” (which, frankly, is a more honest description). People in illegal drinking dens have been known to complain that the lights had been switched off in the bar, when in practice the lethal concoction they were drinking had turned them blind in an instant. One of the most severe drinking accidents in Kenyan history happened in 2000, when an especially toxic batch of the brew resulted in the deaths of 130 people and the hospitalization of more than 400.

  We managed to tune the televisions to gain a reasonable reception on the same channel, and the audience became transfixed by the events unfolding 7,500 miles away in Washington, D.C. Unknown to us at the time, some of the Obamas who had traveled to the United States had arrived at the White House only to be turned away because they could not take their seats in time before the president-elect arrived on stage. Apparently there had been a mix-up with the arrangements and they were picked up late from their hotel; despite producing their Kenyan passports and their official invitations, which showed the
most famous surname in the world on that day, their pleas went unheeded, and they returned to their hotel where they watched the very same CNN coverage that we were watching in K’obama.

  There was little interest in much of the early proceedings of the inauguration ceremony. As the commentators described the finer details of the president’s new limousine, with its eight-inch armor plating and tear gas cannons, people chatted among themselves. After all, they lived in huts with corrugated iron roofs, with neither running water nor electricity; most of them did not even own a bicycle. They neither knew nor cared whether Obama’s new Cadillac, which gets eight miles to the gallon, was a good thing or not. The long list of guests arriving on the podium meant nothing to the five-hundred-strong Obama family, either. As the assembled dignitaries shivered in the bitter Washington winter, where the air temperature had fallen to several degrees below freezing, the Kenyans were glancing nervously upward and wondering if the rainstorm was going to stay away.

  One by one, past presidents assembled in front of the podium: Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and finally the outgoing president, George W. Bush. Then the president-elect appeared, and the imminent downpour over Kendu Bay was instantly forgotten as the crowd roared his name and stood up to applaud “their” man. As the proceedings moved at a glacial speed in Washington, the raindrops over Kendu Bay dried up in the tropical heat, only to be replaced by mosquitoes and flying ants.

  Finally the big moment arrived. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts moved to the podium, where he was joined by the president-elect. (Cue more exuberant cheering from the Kenyans.) Obama was about to make history by becoming the first African American U.S. president. Before him, more than a million people were gathered on the National Mall, with the vast crowd stretching as far back as the Washington Monument in the distance. Justice Roberts led with the oath: “I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear [pause] that I will execute the Office of the President faithfully.” Like the majority of television viewers around the world, nobody in Kendu Bay was aware at the time that Justice Roberts had made an error in the order of the words. No doubt the two men had practiced this moment several times, and a faint smile seemed to cross Obama’s face as he realized that Roberts, a fellow Harvard Law School graduate, had misplaced the word faithfully during the oath. Barack Obama continued, “And will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”