The Obamas Page 18

  At the time there were also lots of leopards. Baba also had a lot of poultry—he had all the chickens and all the turkeys and other small animals in our home. But then the leopards would come and eat them. One day I was sitting next to our cat—a big fat cat, our family pet. A leopard came and took the cat. I cried so much. I was very little.

  Soon after moving to their new home in K’ogelo, Sarah Obama gave birth to her first child, Omar, in June 1944. Hussein Onyango went on to father three more children with Sarah: Zeituni Onyango Obama in 1952, and two more sons, Yusuf and Sayid. For much of the time, Onyango was still working as a cook in Nairobi, but when he came back to K’ogelo he worked hard on his smallholding. The land had been left derelict since his brother Ndalo died in the early 1920s and bush had taken over. Yet within a year Onyango had cleared the undergrowth and started to apply modern farming ideas, which he had learned from people in Nairobi. Soon he had enough of a surplus to sell at the local market.

  Today his wife Sarah holds court in K’ogelo, sitting under one of the mango trees that Onyango planted soon after he moved to the village. On one of my visits there, Sarah waved her arm across the compound: “Look at all these fruit trees that he left here—he planted these. He wanted all this to be beautiful. He had lots of paw-paw plants, and oranges, all these mangoes, everything here.”

  Life in K’ogelo, however, was not a bed of roses. Onyango’s fourth wife, Habiba Akumu, had never wanted to leave Kendu Bay, doing so only because her parents pressured her into going with her children. Now life was as she had feared: she was lonely, she was away from her family, and she had been displaced by Sarah as her husband’s favorite wife. According to Hawa Auma, Akumu and Sarah did not get along well, and this only exacerbated Akumu’s loneliness. But Akumu was proud and stubborn, and she continued to stand up to Onyango’s excessive demands for cleanliness and obedience. Their arguments became more frequent and more violent.

  Auma told me that one day Onyango had a furious row with Akumu, and things came to a head: “My father then went out to dig a very big grave, to go and kill my mother.” After Auma’s unexpected revelation, she told me that she did not want to talk anymore; she was tired from sitting in the hot sun selling charcoal all day, and thinking of her mother upset her too much.

  As a farmer, Onyango must have spent a lot of time in those early days in K’ogelo turning over the soil; Auma could only have been a very young girl at the time, so perhaps she had misunderstood the situation. Still, the story was too intriguing to pass up. Knowing that Akumu came from a village close to Kendu Bay, I decided to try my luck at tracing her family. Like many of the small villages in the area, Simbi Kolonde lies some distance off the main thoroughfare along a bone-rattling dirt road. The track runs around the edge of Simbi Lake—a deep volcanic lake that is steeped in myth. One story claims that when an old woman visited the village many years previously, no one had offered the hospitality that was expected under the circumstances. In a fit of anger, the old woman created a massive flood that swamped the village and drowned all the people, leaving the magnificent lake. Fortunately, my own experience was the exact opposite, and not for the first time during my research I arrived unannounced at a home, only to be welcomed with warmth and kindness. Here I found Charles Odonei Ojuka and Joseph Nyabondo, both brothers of Akumu. We spent a couple of hours or so chatting about life in the past, then I casually asked Charles if he knew why Akumu left Onyango:

  Onyango used to love cleanliness, and he being a clean man, he never wanted his face to be touched by dirt. He didn’t like anything that is called dirt to be around him. So that is the number one cause which brought the disagreement with Akumu. There was a fight between Akumu and Onyango in K’ogelo—a quarrel. He dug a grave and he was going to cut her up and bury her there. An old man [a neighbor] came and helped Akumu, otherwise she would have been killed.

  The old man came and wrestled with Onyango, then Akumu escaped and walked all the way to Kisumu by foot [forty miles]. I think there was some problem because having married the other wife Sarah, it might have put a lot of pressure on Akumu. When Akumu came back [to Kendu Bay], Onyango never followed her, to look for her or to be reconciled with her. He just left her.

  When Akumu came over to this side [of the gulf ], the man who came to marry Akumu was called Salmon Orinda, and she gave birth to another five children. She was buried here when she died in 2006.

  In her desperation to get away from Onyango, Akumu had abandoned her children, leaving Sarah Obama to raise President Obama’s father. Sarah said that Barack senior was nine years old when Akumu left, so this must have happened in late 1944 or early 1945, shortly after the family moved to K’ogelo.

  Akumu’s three children—Sarah Nyaoke, Barack, and young Auma—were not happy in K’ogelo either. Auma claims they were not looked after, and often went hungry:

  Sarah was very bad to us and she really inflicted a lot of pain on us. She never wanted us in any way when we were young children … she mistreated us because she didn’t want us to have food. Then every time and again she kept on beating us. She forced Sarah Nyaoke and Barack to work on the farm. If they could not work when they were very young, then nobody would eat, so [sometimes] we did not eat for many days.

  Akumu’s three young children decided to run away. Sarah Nyaoke was only eleven at the time, Barack senior was nine, and Auma was still a toddler. Together, they set out on the seventy-five-mile trek back to their mother in Kendu Bay. Little Auma was too young to walk far, and her brother and sister tried to carry her, but she became too much of a burden:

  They were walking all the way to Lake Victoria, and this was very difficult for them. They left me behind. You need to know this, that Barack and Sarah left me because I was heavy, and they could not carry me. I was left alone, crying by the sisal plantation.

  Now, there were leopards near me, looking at me. I think they were sympathetic toward me. They never wanted to interfere with me. Then women from the community came and picked me up and took me home. I was still very young, but I can’t remember how old. I was still a toddler.

  In fact, Auma must have been three years old at the time. Sarah Nyaoke and Barack wandered for several days before a local chief found them walking near the lake at a village called Nyakach—seventy miles from K’ogelo. The two children had managed to walk almost all the way back to Kendu Bay before being returned to Onyango and Sarah in K’ogelo.

  Not surprisingly, Sarah Obama has a very different recollection of these dramatic events back in 1945. When first asked about Akumu, Sarah replied dismissively, “Who is Akumu?” But her memory soon returned: “She left when the father of the president was nine years old. And by that time, he had never started schooling [in K’ogelo]. So it was me—Mama Sarah—who protected and took care of them!”

  I asked Sarah why she thought Akumu left K’ogelo. “She never liked this place, saying that people would kill her here,” she told me. “So she went, and left me to take care of Barack senior.”

  Once Akumu’s three children had been returned to K’ogelo, life for everybody began to get back to normal. Hussein Onyango had always made education a high priority; he had enrolled Peter Oluoch in the Kisii high school in the 1930s, and now it was time for his own son to go to school. Barack senior started at the Gendia SDA primary school near Kendu Bay, but Sarah recalls that he found the schooling to be too easy: “He came back after the first day and told his father that he could not study there because his class was taught by a woman and he knew everything she had to teach him. This attitude he had learned from his father, so Onyango could say nothing.”1

  Once they were settled into their new homestead in K’ogelo, Barack went to another school in the nearby village of Ng’iya, a five-mile walk from his new home.

  Barack’s primary school teacher from Ng’iya, Samson Chilo Were, lives in retirement in a small settlement called Malumboa. The village is in a very remote part of western Kenya, close to Got Ramogi, where the first Luo set
tled in Kenya five hundred years ago. I visited him during the rainy season, and even a four-wheel-drive vehicle could not make it all the way to Samson’s house, so we went the last half mile on foot, wading ankle deep in mud and water. Samson was delighted to have unexpected visitors. He said he was born in April 1922, which made him eighty-seven years old, and apart from a slight deafness he showed little evidence of his advanced years—certainly his memory seemed as good as ever:

  I taught [Barack] Obama in standard five when I was teaching in Ng’iya primary school for boys. He was a smart boy, very clever in class. Very keen at hearing what we were telling him. Every time he learned well—English, Swahili—he did it properly. He liked sports and he liked singing as well. He was a very good singer and a very good dancer.

  We started before eight in the morning and school finished after games around 5 p.m. There were only six classrooms, just mud huts—there were no permanent huts then. We used to make iron sheets out of old oil drums for the roof.

  At that time, the whole school was about two hundred [students], because many parents didn’t like school. They thought it was a waste of time. The parents liked their children to look after their cows. School was a white man’s thing. The school fees were three [Kenyan] shillings [a few dollars at today’s prices] a year, at most. His father used to pay for his uniform—it was a white shirt and brown shorts. Even at secondary school there were no long trousers at that time. They were all walking barefoot.

  Samson also knew Hussein Onyango, who often invited the schoolteacher to his compound for a meal. Like everybody else I had met, Samson stressed Onyango’s priority on education and obedience:

  Onyango used to prepare a meal for me at [his] home. He was very keen on education, on [Barack] Obama getting an education. Onyango was keen like a white man; he knew how to be organized like a white man.

  He was a very harsh man as well. He would not allow Obama to joke with school. He wanted Obama to study and become a good man in the future. Sometimes Obama would hang around because he didn’t want to go to school, so Onyango would bang everything! “You’ve not gone to school yet and you are still here! Wake up and go to school.” And he would chase him to school.

  In 1948 Onyango donated land adjacent to his compound to build the first primary school in K’ogelo, and twenty years later a secondary school was constructed with money partly donated by Barack senior. But even though Hussein Onyango stressed the importance of education for his sons, he was a traditional African at heart and he put less emphasis on the education of girls. After all, the reasoning went, why spend good money to educate your daughters if they were only going to leave home and become part of another family? So neither Sarah Nyaoke nor Hawa Auma went to school, and to this day Auma cannot read or write.

  Some African families were more progressive about schooling girls, giving their daughters the benefit of at least a primary education. One such local girl was Magdalene Otin, who went to school with Barack Obama. Magdalene still lives in a traditional Luo roundhouse, which is something of a rarity in Kenya today: their fragile construction means that they seldom last more than thirty years, and most “modern” huts are now built square with a roof of corrugated iron. After many inquiries in and around K’ogelo, I was eventually directed to Magdalene’s hut, which was a short walk from the dirt road that led into the village. After some searching, I found her house hidden among trees and fields of tall maize.

  Magdalene couldn’t remember how long she had lived there, but she told me it was “a very long time”; her hut must have been at least fifty years old. A thick mud wall ran around the inside like a doughnut, and she entertained her guests in the center of the hut—the “hole” in the doughnut—where there was a small table and several chairs. Between the inner and outer walls was a small, private space that provided a tiny sleeping area, plus dry storage for grain and a place for her chickens. The birds obviously felt at home, wandering in and out all the time in search of something to peck. Even with the birds, Magdalene’s home was spotless. She had few other personal possessions, except for a dozen framed family portraits—her husband was long dead, as were seven of her eight children.

  Magdalene was tiny, frail, and shy. She didn’t know how old she was, but she did remember when Barack Obama senior went to school in Ng’iya, so she was probably in her mid-seventies, although a lifetime in the fields had made her look much older. The first three times I visited Magdalene she seemed overwhelmed by the attention of a mzungu and unsure of herself, not wanting to speak out of turn or inappropriately. On my second visit she insisted on preparing a meal of boiled chicken and ugali, the traditional dish of maize flour cooked to a thick dough. In the traditional way of Luo women, Magdalene served her guests (all of them men), but she did not eat. Instead she gently berated us for not eating enough, and kept piling more food on our plates; she then sat opposite with the other womenfolk from the compound, and watched us eat.

  On my fourth visit to see Magdalene, she finally opened up and started to talk about her past:

  I grew up with Obama. Barack loved school—he attended school regularly, and this was because his father was very strict and would not allow him to stay at home. Obama liked football—most African children like football. But he would come home early, not like the other children. He had to put the cows back in the pen—they couldn’t be left out late. If they are rained on badly they get sick, and we didn’t have the drugs for them that we have today.

  I asked her what life was like in K’ogelo back in the late 1940s:

  In those days the population was very small, and the trees were very tall and bushy. We had to meander through the trees to go anywhere. There were leopards and hyenas and all the other animals you talk about. And many snakes. I was very much afraid of the hyenas in those days. They are gluttons—I think they’re worse than leopards. We could only fetch water in the mornings because they chased us later in the day. They go for the buttocks of humans, as this is the bit that’s fat and soft.

  I asked her if the animals were still dangerous today:

  It’s the leopards which have killed most of our children. They took two children here just a couple of years ago. They go up in trees, and jump on them when they’re going to school. They twist your neck and you’re dead. If the hyenas kill you, they will eat you right there, but the leopards will always drag you away to a safe distance.

  After his primary schooling in Ng’iya, in 1950 Barack senior sat for what was then called the Kenya African Preliminary Examination. This selection exam, based on the British education system, was designed to identify the brightest African students for admission to secondary school. Barack senior easily exceeded the standard required to gain admission to the prestigious Maseno high school, which was, and still is, one of the top boarding schools in Kenya. The Maseno school lies almost equidistant between K’ogelo and the main town, Kisumu; established in 1906 by the Church Mission Society (CMS), it is the second oldest secondary school in Kenya. Presumably Onyango had no religious objection to sending Barack to a Christian school, even though he was raising his son as a Muslim. Maseno was founded as part of the British initiative to tutor the sons of local chiefs, thereby creating an educated elite to work for the colonial administration. Today, the school looks much like any provincial English boarding school from the 1930s, except for the tumbili (vervet monkeys) playing around the roofs of the classrooms, and the simple black-and-white painted sign on the main driveway telling visitors that they are about to cross the equator from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern.

  Maseno was substantially more expensive than Ng’iya primary school, and like parents the world over, Onyango and Sarah struggled to find the money for their son’s school fees. Despite being a practicing Muslim, Sarah decided the best way to earn some much-needed extra cash was to brew chang’aa to sell to the neighbors. Sarah earned a useful income from her brewing until Onyango came home one afternoon and discovered her fermentation vats. He was furious, tipping
them over and refusing to allow Sarah to continue her home brewing. Instead, she resorted to a less profitable trade in homemade chapatis.

  In 1951, Barack’s second year at Maseno, a new headmaster arrived. B. L. Bowers, who stayed at the school until 1969, was the longest-serving principal in the history of Maseno. Even by the standards of the early 1950s, Bowers—a white Anglican missionary from the United Kingdom—had a reputation for strictness, and he would ultimately prove to be the young Barack’s nemesis. But for the first couple of years at least, Barack excelled. One of his old friends and drinking companions, the journalist Leo Odera, recalled the elder Barack’s achievements at school:

  Barack had a very excellent record in form one, form two, and form three. He was top in mathematics, English, and almost every subject. But his personal conduct from the end of form three was not so excellent; academically he was okay, but became difficult.

  The student records at Maseno go back to 1906, and the administrators retain the reports of every boy who has passed through the school since it opened. Barack Obama senior’s records are kept securely in a safe in the principal’s office, rather than in the school archives. The documents are concise to the point of pithiness. Obama senior’s fading brown card, index number 3422, explains that Barack was a bright boy and had been promoted from Class B to A. In graceful handwriting, Bowers notes that the young Obama was “very keen, steady, trustworthy and friendly. Concentrates, reliable and out-going.” It was a good report, but things started to go downhill soon after that.

  By the time Obama reached form three at Maseno, he was seventeen years old and his attitude toward the staff and discipline at the school began to change. Sarah Obama recalls that he was rebellious—he would sneak girls into the dormitories or raid the nearby farms with his friends, stealing chickens and yams because the school food was not very appetizing. However, Leo Odera tells a much more complicated story about what happened in Barack senior’s final year at the school, which ultimately led to his downfall: