"The Other Barack" reviewed

The race for the office of US president is now truly under way. It is of course a matter of universal concern, because of the global reach and impact of American power, even if the rest of the world has no say in who gets elected to that office because the democratic principle does not transcend national boundaries.

Even so, for Kenyans in particular (and others in the neighbouring countries) the forthcoming US election will resonate for the same reason that the last one in 2008 did. Then they were overjoyed with vicarious pride when Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. After all he bore, bears, the name of his Kenyan father; so Kenya will always be associated with American history right at the top. As if that wasn`t enough, he had even enshrined this connection in a best-selling autobiographical work with a catchy title that focused on his father`s legacy, while he was still on the make as a national figure, since transformed into an international statesman. But despite all expectations and exhortations, he has eluded making a return visit to Kenya in the years that he has been in office and now, as he embarks on a gruelling bid to be re-elected for a second term, it is most unlikely that he will do so any time soon.

And why? The answer may well lie in `The Other Barack`, a riveting and lucid biography of the older Obama by Sally H Jacobs, a veteran journalist on The Boston Globe, published in America last year, with the telling sub-title: “The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama`s Father”. That neatly sums up Obama Sr. Bold and reckless he certainly was but, more than that, he comes across as a deeply flawed character, in stark contrast to the idealism and romantic appeal of his son`s `Dreams From My Father`. Is it possible that President Obama wishes to put a distance between him and his late father, not necessarily to repudiate his ancestry but rather to give himself time to reappraise their relationship in the light of what he himself has gone through and may have learnt in the intervening years! Well, if so, this book will certainly give him, and the reader, much to ponder.

Obama Sr was an enigma even to his contemporaries. I knew him in the mid-1960s and wrote about it in `AwaaZ` (Issue 1, 2010; http://www.awaazmagazine.com/index.php/archives/item/136-barack-obama-an-accidental-mwananchi), a cultural magazine published in Nairobi. My acquaintance with him was as an occasional drinking companion. He was a very private person, who never let anyone get close to him. But even then it was clear that he was a larger than life figure. In retrospect, we can only judge him by his actions. These, alas, do not always reflect well on him.

In the very first chapter, Jacobs lays bare the character of `The Old Man` in unambiguous language, in terms of “the skein of lies and half-truths he had woven” about his “chaotic life”. What is revealed, as the book goes on, is not pleasant. As a foretaste of things to come, Jacobs points to the sombre realisation of his father`s shortcomings in President Obama`s `Dreams`: how “he had made the painful discovery that his father had not been the towering success that he had been led to believe as a child”. Was he already a fallen idol? Had he known his father as an adult might his `dreams` not have turned into a nightmare?

Jacobs has meticulously researched and documented Obama Sr`s complex antecdents, and relatively short but hugely chequered life. Above all, what comes across with vivid verisimilitude is the older Obama as a dandy and a bombast, who hid his fundamental frailties and failures behind a booming voice and an arrogant, intimidating posture.

His boasts of academic achievements were hollow. He never gained the much coveted PhD from Harvard, from where he was forced to leave and return to Kenya prematurely, despite which he styled himself as `Doctor` and claimed to be “one of the best economists in the country”!

His one memorable contribution to public discourse was in the form of an eight-page piece in the East African Journal in 1965 in which he critically challenged the conceptual framework of the government`s Sessional Paper No. 10 on `African Socialism and Its Application to Planning in Kenya`. This was the brainchild of Tom Mboya, who was already lining up to be a potential successor to Kenyatta, in opposition to the left-leaning Vice-President Oginga Odinga. Obama Sr derided the authors of the document for failing to define African socialism and seeking to perpetuate a neo-colonial agenda dependent on foreign capital and for not addressing the structural socio-economic disparities in the system. He was thus questioning the wisdom of state policy. It marked him out as a trouble-maker, and after Odinga`s break-up with Kenyatta and the formation of the Kenya People`s Union, he found himself largely hung out to dry as a disgruntled critic.

His pretensions of a brilliant professional career too were an exaggeration for, according to Jacobs, he never rose above the level of a middle-ranking bureaucrat. His employment history was littered with one episode after another of inappropriate behaviour, overbearing conduct, exceeding authority and even impersonating his own boss. Following a stint as a Shell executive, his first job after returning to Kenya, he joined the Central Bank of Kenya, only to last there for nine months. He was then appointed to the Kenya Tourist Development Corporation in a senior position but was fired from that, also on account of repeated acts of misfeasance. After a spell of unemployment that cost him both his dignity and purse, he persuaded Mwai Kibaki, then the Minister of Economic Planning, to give him a job at the Ministry. It was to be his longest and most productive, albeit marred by drink and quirkiness, and lasted from November 1975 to November 1982, when he died in a predictable car crash, aged 46.

His personal life was a catalogue of drunken excess and misadventures, sexual proclivities, financial crises, motor accidents involving death and injury, marital abuse and violence towards his (second) American wife Ruth, misanthropic tendencies and, above all, failure to connect with almost all his children, wives and mistresses on an emotional footing. If he did struggle with his inner demons, he never let it show. How was it that the promise and potential that he had projected or others had seen in him early on remained unfulfilled?

His background provides the clue. Jacobs has done a remarkable job of tracing the family history of the President`s father, stretching back to several generations, given the paucity of documented records and considering that she had never been to Africa before. We are treated to a colourful portrait of Obama Sr`s father, Hussein Onyango. His lowly status and incarceration under British colonial rule, and his Islamic cultural traditions, clearly shaped his stern character, which in turn was to influence Obama Sr.

We learn that at age eleven, the older Barack walked out of his primary school because “[h]e was a man, he declared, and he was not going to be taught by a mere woman who could not possibly have anything to teach him that he did not already know”! His father enrolled him in another primary school, where he did well, even though his inquisitive nature and resistance to discipline did get him into trouble. From here he was accepted into Maseno School near Kisumu. That put Obama Sr into the elite league, for it was of course one of Kenya`s oldest educational institutions, whose “roster of attendees … included some of the most sterling names in Kenyan history”, such as Oginga Odinga, Bethwell A Ogot, and Achieng Oneko.

As Jacobs tells us: “Into this highly regimented academic training ground came the teenage Obama. Muslim by birth, contrarian by nature, and survivor of a tumultuous youth, he was a problematic fit”. And so he proved to be: rebellious, disobedient, resentful of authority! Despite his fine intelligence and intellect, he did not endear himself to the principal, who did not take kindly to an unsigned letter of complaint about conditions at the school which seemed to bear all the signs of his authorship. The principal`s reaction was to bar from going on to the next stage of his schooling which would have enabled him “to obtain the Cambridge School Certificate … to apply for college” and beyond that to higher education abroad. His father was so enraged that he beat him hard with a stick and despatched him to Mombasa to earn a living and “learn the value of education now”.

In Mombasa he did not fare well as a junior typist and quarrelled with his Arab employer. He next tried his luck in Nairobi, where he had friends from his school days. Soon he again secured a clerical job, “this time with an Indian law firm”. This was in 1954, when Mau Mau was at its peak. It was during this crucial period that he met Tom Mboya, who was already rising to prominence. “The two men would develop a friendship, drawn to one another by their deep ethnic roots and rapidly developing political passions. They were both excellent dancers ... twirling across the dance floor to the guitar bands that were popular ... sport[ing] a highly polished Western appearance ... the tailored poise ... so artfully cultivated ... [sharing] a certain haughtiness, off-putting to others but a characteristic that apparently echoed positively between the two of them”.

Obama`s dancing prowess and socially domineering persona were to remain deeply embedded in his character. Jacobs gives a detailed and fascinating account of this phase of his life. He “somehow managed to get a Cambridge School Certificate”, albeit in the third division, and with the help of Elizabeth Mooney, an expatriate American Christian charity worker dedicated to improving the literacy standards of the colonial era African Kenyans, got admission to the University of Hawaii and secured funding to go there as part of the airlift of African students organised by Tom Mboya and Dr J Kiano in the fall of 1959. (He had by then been married under customary law to his first wife, Grace Kezia but, as Jacobs informs us, the question of when that marriage was dissolved was only finally resolved by the High Court in Nairobi in 1989, well after his death).

It was of course in Hawaii that he was to meet Ann Dunham and marry her while she was pregnant with their son who was to become the 44th President of the USA. But Obama Sr left them and moved to Harvard. Here too, his womanising got him into trouble and aroused the ire of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service who had long suspected his marriage to Ann to have been bigamous and told him to leave the country after Harvard University had withdrawn its financial support for him. And so he had to return to Kenya in July 1964, without completing his PhD.

This is a bare outline of Obama Sr`s extraordinary trajectory from humble beginnings to a failed intellectual, a rotten husband and an absent father. If in today`s parlance, he turned out to be a traditional African male chauvinist, then that surely was a trait inherited from his father! But did he not possess any redeeming qualities? Yes, he was generous when he had the money, and took his social obligations, especially towards his large extended family, seriously. His own brother Sayid had a more rounded view of him, as quoted by President Obama in Dreams :

“This is what made my brother such a good man, these things [referring to giving free rides to people waiting by the roadside for transport]. But I think also that once you are one thing, you cannot pretend that you are something else. How could he be a matatu driver, or stay out all night drinking, and also be writing Kenya`s economic plan? A man does service for his people by doing what is right for him, isn`t this so? Not by doing what others think he should do. But my brother, although he prided himself on his independence, I also think that he was afraid of some things. Afraid of what people would say about him if he left the bar too early. That perhaps he would no longer belong with those he`d grown up with”.

Further down the chain, how much of Obama Sr`s character and personality can be seen reflected in the President? Suffice it to say that, on a pragmatic assessment of what is in the public domain and of what we can surmise, the President is a solid, self-possessed, controlled individual who does not display any of the egregious, wanton, self-destructive qualities of his father and upon whom the cultural influences of his mother and US upbringing far outweigh his genetic inheritance. He is the opposite of his father, "The Other Barack"!

© Ramnik Shah 2012
Surrey, England

(Note: a shorter version of this review appears on the June 2012 edition of the Nile Journal at http://nilejournal.net/art/entertainment/The-Other-Obama
under the title London Notes: The Other Obama)