The Obamas Read online

  With the president now secure in the most powerful office in the world, the Kendu Bay Obamas went wild, chanting, “Obama! Obama! Obama!” in an echo of the exuberant crowd in front of the White House. It was a night that united Kenya. At no other time since Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa has the continent been filled with such hope for the future, and, not surprisingly, it took several minutes before everybody in K’obama settled down to listen to Obama’s inauguration speech.

  Rarely has an American president taken office with so many profound challenges facing him, both at home and abroad. He began, “My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.”

  In Washington, as in Kendu Bay, the crowds were transfixed by both the mesmerizing rhythm of his elegant delivery and the content. Obama continued: “Yet every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.… On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” He then laid out his priorities for the next four years: “We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together.” As I looked around at the people watching his speech, their faces beaming with pride, it struck me that Kendu Bay could do with a few roads, bridges, and electric grids.

  Obama continued with his manifesto for the world: “And so, to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born …”

  This was too much for the Obamas in Kendu Bay, who were sitting less than a couple of hundred yards from that very spot. The party dissolved into a riotous cheer, which surely must have been heard 7,500 miles away in Washington, D.C.

  Three months earlier, Barack Obama walked out onto the stage in Grant Park, Chicago, on the evening of November 4, 2008, and made his acceptance speech to a devoted audience; many had been standing for over four hours in the chilly Illinois evening. “It’s been a long time coming,” announced the president-elect, “but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

  It had been a remarkable road for a nation to follow. When Barack Obama was born in August 1961, much of the American South remained segregated, and black and white American citizens were separated literally from cradle to grave. Black Americans were born in segregated hospitals, educated in segregated schools, and buried in segregated graveyards. In 1961, the year that Obama’s father married Ann Dunham in Honolulu, a racially mixed marriage was not even legal in seventeen states of the Union. Forty-seven years on, their son stood in front of an international television audience measured in billions, to accept the mantle of leader of the free world.

  As Barack Obama noted in his acceptance speech that evening: “The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America—I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you—we, as a people, will get there.”

  The president’s rousing speech alluded to what is arguably the United States’ greatest strength as a society—the ability over a period of three centuries to absorb many disparate groups of immigrants into a single nation, a people with a common purpose and a strong sense of national identity. As Obama himself said at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston: “There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”

  The ability of the United States to integrate diverse peoples into a single nation is in marked contrast to the homeland of the president’s father. Kenya has been an independent nation for nearly half a century, but if you stop people at random—even in Nairobi, where traditional customs are weakest—and ask them where their main allegiance lies, they will almost always reply that their tribe is much more important to them than their country. This is certainly the case with the Luo and many other ethnic groups in the country, whose tribal allegiances go back for centuries. These compelling loyalties have inevitably led to much conflict among Kenyans, both before British colonial rule and after independence.

  I first worked in Kenya in 1987, the same year the younger Barack Obama first visited his African relatives. Inevitably, Kenya was a very different country back then, but in some ways, very little has changed. Back in 1987, Daniel arap Moi had been president for nearly ten years, and he would remain so for another fifteen. He came to power promising an end to corruption, smuggling, tribalism, and the detention of political opponents, and he enjoyed popular support throughout the country. But his good intentions had not stood the test of time, and by 1987 his government increasingly relied on secret police, human rights abuses, and political assassination to stay in power.1 He changed the nation’s constitution to make Kenya a single-party state, suppressed political opponents, and cleverly manipulated Kenya’s ethnic and tribal tensions to weaken and divide the opposition.

  In 1999 Amnesty International and the United Nations issued reports accusing Moi of serious human rights abuses.2 Moi was constitutionally barred from running for another presidential term in 2002, and the following year news of even more human rights abuses began to surface, including the use of torture. In October 2006 Moi was found guilty of taking a $2 million bribe from a Pakistani businessman in return for a monopoly of duty-free shops in the country’s international airports.3 In 2009, people told me that in many ways life was better than it had been back in 1987, although I was soon to find out that political intimidation, corruption, and tribalism were still a routine part of political life in Kenya.

  As soon as I stepped off the aircraft at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in November 2008, it was obvious that other big changes had happened since my first visit. When I first came to Kenya in 1987, the population was 22.4 million; today, it is 39 million people (2009 estimate).4 Nairobi is no longer the genteel colonial city that it was in 1987; 60 percent of the population live in shantytowns. The city’s largest slum, Kibera, is said to be the biggest in Africa, with more than a million inhabitants. Traffic clogs the streets, and air pollution has become a serious problem. The number of vehicles on the road has doubled in ten years, and Kenya now has one of the worst road safety records in the world. Yet despite the large number of Mercedes cars and Land Cruisers on the streets, the majority of people still earn less than $2 a day.

  On the other hand, the strong tribal divisions have not diminished in the last twenty years. The country accommodates more than forty separate tribal groups, with the Kikuyu the biggest group, by far with 22 percent of the population, followed by the Luhya with 14 percent, the Luo with 13 percent, the Kalenjin with 12 percent, and the Kamba with 11 percent. Smaller tribes make up a further 27 percent of the population; Kenyans of European, Asian, and Arab descent account for just 1 percent. Religious beliefs are equally divided: 45 percent of Kenyans are Protestant, 33 percent are Roman Catholic, and Muslims and traditional religions make up about 10 percent each.

  As the most populous tribe, the Kikuyu have dominated Kenyan politics ever since the country gained its independence from Britain in 1963 and Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, became the country’s first president. (The similarity of his name to his country’s is coincidental.) The Kikuyu also have a reputation for being very successful in trade and commerce. The traditional Kikuyu lands are in central Kenya, in the fertile highlands to the south and west of Mount Kenya—this was the region that attracted the white colonists in the early years of the twentieth century. As a consequence, the Kikuyu (along with the Kalenjin and the Maasai) suffered extensive displacement as the whites took over their traditional lands and turned their farms into large plantations growing coffee, tea, and cotton.

  The Luhya are the second-largest tribe, with a population of over five million, but they are widely spread around the country and much more diverse than any other ethnic group in Kenya, with
around sixteen or eighteen subgroups. Many of these subgroups speak their own dialect of Luhya, some of which are so different from one another as to be considered separate languages altogether. Because of their diversification, the Luhya have a much smaller political voice in the country than might be expected from their numbers.

  Major towns, provinces, and main tribal areas in Kenya.

  The Luo, Kenya’s third-largest tribe, has a population of just under five million. This is the tribe of Barack Obama’s ancestors. They traditionally place much emphasis on education and have produced many scholars in Kenya, some of whom have graduated from prestigious colleges around the world (including Barack Obama senior, who graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1962, and later took a master’s degree in economics at Harvard). As a result, Luo professionals dominate almost every part of Kenyan society and frequently serve as university professors, doctors, engineers, and lawyers.

  One such Luo professional is Leo Odera Omolo, a respected journalist based in Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city and the center of the Luo homeland. Leo has spent all of his life reporting from around Africa and has been on first-name terms with practically every African president in the past fifty years. He once told me that Idi Amin of Uganda challenged him to a wrestling match—not once, but three times. He was very proud to have beaten him on each occasion.

  In explaining what made the Luo different from other Kenyans, Leo first pulled down his lower lip to reveal six missing front teeth. Most African tribes traditionally circumcise boys to mark the onset of manhood. But the Luo (and some other tribes whose ancestors migrated south from Sudan) mark the end of childhood of both sexes in a different but still painful way: by removing the six bottom front teeth. “I am a Luo,” he said with a cheeky grin and a twinkle in his eyes, which belied his seventy-three years:

  I have twenty-three children by five wives, and another three children by women who were not quite my wives. We are tall, very black, and very intelligent because we eat lots of protein, lots of fish.

  The Luo are fair and they are democratic people. They want to discuss issues. They don’t want secrecy. They don’t have “night meetings.” If they call a meeting, they will reveal it outside when they’ve done.

  They also squabble and fight, but the fight can be resolved very quickly. The next day, if nobody is killed, you are friends again. That is a trait of the Luo. Some of them are hot-tempered—they come up and down quickly—but they don’t hold a grudge after a disagreement.

  There are also so many parties with the Luo. At a funeral—a lot of it; marriage—a lot of it. [Luo] spend a lot of their energy and resources in parties. A funeral will deplete a family and leave them poor … they slaughter all the cows they have, goats, everything. They will even clear their grain store.

  When Kenya became independent in 1963, the Kikuyu and the Luo inherited most of the political power. Their mutual distrust, stemming from intertribal rivalry, continues to lie just below the surface of Kenyan politics. Immediately after the last presidential elections in late December 2007, this antagonism degenerated into riots against President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu. After Kibaki unilaterally declared that he had won the election, the Luo opposition leader, Raila Odinga, accused Kibaki of vote rigging.

  Although the worst atrocities during the postelection violence took place in the Rift Valley, protesters also took to the streets in Kisumu. Roy Samo, a local councilor in Kisumu, experienced the postelection carnage at close quarters:

  They were counting the figures and Raila Odinga was leading the president by more than a million votes. Then there was [an electrical] blackout, and the next minute [President] Kibaki was leading Raila by 1 million votes. Nobody could believe it! We have a town with an 80,000 maximum electorate, so how can the president get 150,000 out of a possible 80,000 votes?

  I remember when they announced [that Kibaki had won]—I was here in my house watching the result. People from all their houses and in the bars, they started screaming and shouting and a cloud of death could be seen hanging around Kisumu.… People were watching their TVs and they started seeing how people in Nairobi were reacting. Like in Kibera [Nairobi’s biggest slum], they started burning tires, uprooting the railway …

  Around 8 p.m., Kisumu also started going up in flames—it was about looting and the burning of property. So many people rushed into supermarkets to loot. Sixteen people were burned [to death] and fifteen people were shot dead. In my area, ten people were shot dead, because by now the police were shooting people. [The violence] started on the twenty-ninth of December, 2007, up to February 28, when Raila [Odinga] and Kibaki signed an agreement.

  The government figures say that 1,500 were killed, which we dispute. It’s ten times more than that, and 500,000 people were displaced. But now, as we are talking [in May 2009], 220,000 people are still living in tented camps.

  Tribalism remains strong in Kenya for several reasons. Primary schoolchildren usually learn their tribal language first, before moving on to Swahili and then English. Even today, young people usually marry within their own tribe, especially if they stay within their tribal area.

  Although tooth extraction is now mostly a thing of the past, other religious and traditional customs still strengthen the tribal bond of Kenyans. The ongoing controversy over circumcision demonstrates the continuing hold of tradition on Luo society. Because research has shown that circumcised men are 60 percent less likely to contract HIV, circumcision is now encouraged for all Kenyan males as a way of reducing the disease (which has reached epidemic proportions, afflicting one in five young Luo males).5

  Not surprisingly, many of the younger, sexually active men support the idea of circumcision, but it has caused a storm of protest from the more traditional Luo, who consider circumcision to be a tribal taboo. I went down to the beach at Dunga, a small fishing village on the shores of Lake Victoria near Kisumu, and talked to some of the fishermen there. Dunga is the only working fishing village left in the Kisumu area, and women walk up to ten miles every morning to buy fish to carry back and sell in their village. The women earn less than 100 Kenyan shillings ($1.25) a day, but the fishermen are traditionally some of the best paid workers in the region, often earning Ksh 500–1,000 ($6.25–12.50) a day or more. Charles Otieno, a local fisherman and a community leader in the Dunga cooperative, explained:

  HIV is a very big problem along the beaches.… Most of these women here [at the beach] are widows and most of their husbands have died of HIV. So they come and interact with the fishermen. The men have many girlfriends; they never have one girlfriend. For example, I’m a fisherman. I can fish at Dunga beach one week, another week I go to another beach and I fish there, and then I go to another beach and I have to obtain another girlfriend there. So every time I do that, most of the fishermen do that.

  I asked Charles if many of his friends had been circumcised to help prevent catching the HIV virus. He replied, “According to our customs and beliefs—it started from earliest times—our people were not being circumcised. Some of the people have gone for circumcision, but most of the people, they are not going.”

  About fifty miles west of the main city of Kisumu, almost as far west as you can go in Kenya without ending up in Uganda or getting your feet wet in Lake Victoria, is the tiny village of Nyang’oma K’ogelo. Here lie the graves of President Obama’s father, also named Barack Obama, and his grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama. Even during the Democratic primary, media attention on the Obama family in K’ogelo was intense, and it became positively frenzied once Obama won the election. Within a couple of weeks of the election, I was driving to K’ogelo, where President Obama’s stepgrandmother Sarah Obama lives. The red dirt road was in much better condition than I expected, and I mentioned this to Roy Samo, my researcher and translator. He chuckled as he cited a Luo proverb: “Ber telo en telo—the benefit of power is power.” The road had obviously been upgraded very recently, and workers were still putting in culverts to deal with flooding during the rainy sea
son. Alongside the dirt track, more workers were installing wooden electricity poles. For the first time in their history, the residents of K’ogelo who could afford it would have light after dark, at the flick of a switch. The first person to benefit from the electricity would of course be Mama Sarah.

  K’ogelo turned out to be a very ordinary, very sleepy Kenyan community, with no running water and a population of just 3,648.6 Most of the huts are spread across the rolling hillsides, separated by fields of maize. The village center has a handful of shops scattered around an area of hard-baked earth, which serves as the marketplace on Tuesdays and Fridays. In the local shops you can buy a leg of goat from the butcher, a bottle of local beer from the bar, or a simple meal in one of several small “hotels”—tiny drinking and eating establishments with not a bed in sight. Down a small side street are two barber shops—they are usually good places to hang out to get the latest gossip, although in all the time I spent in K’ogelo, I never actually saw anybody having his hair cut. Rather, the two barbers seemed to earn their living from renting out their battery-powered disco equipment for parties. The busiest workers in the village were the two old men who repair punctured tires; they both seemed to have a never-ending row of battered bicycles lined up against the trees. The real action in K’ogelo seems to take place under the shade of a large acacia tree, where the young men of the village spend most of the day sitting around, smoking, and idly chatting.