KENYA, FAMILY, AND A FATHER’S LEGACY
KENYA, FAMILY, AND A FATHER’S LEGACY
Before going to Kenya, Barack planned a three-week trip to Europe, touring places he’d always heard about but had ever seen. However, instead of enjoying the trip, he felt edgy, nervous, and hesitant with strangers. By the end of the first week, he thought he’d made a mistake. Although
Europe was beautiful, it wasn’t a part of his own history, a part of who he was. He began to realize that the three-week trip was just delaying his journey to his father’s home, a postponement of coming to terms with his father and his own past. He felt emptiness within, but would going to Kenya fill that space? His friends in Chicago assured him it would, that the trip was necessary, perhaps a pilgrimage of sorts, to find out about his
A T R I P T O K E N YA A N D H A RVA R D L AW S C H O O L 43 father and his roots, a trip that might fill a gap that had always been there
between him and his father. Landing at Kenyatta International Airport, the homecoming he’d imag- ined quickly dissipated. No one was there to meet him. Abandonment and exhaustion quickly overwhelmed him. Searching for lost luggage, he was introduced to a young woman who recognized his family name, say- ing that Barack’s father had been a close friend of her family. Barack real- ized this had never happened before. Never had anyone recognized the name Obama, nor had anyone ever remembered his father as Dr. Obama. For the first time, he felt comfort, an identity that name recognition provides. Suddenly, he realized that, in Kenya, no one would ask him to spell his name, nor would anyone mispronounce it. His name made him belong.
Not long after speaking with the African woman, Auma arrived. Trail- ing behind her was Barack’s Auntie Zeituni, his father’s sister. Kissing him on both cheeks, Auntie welcomed him home. On that first morning, as Barack rode in the car with Auntie Zeituni and his half sister, what he saw, smelled, and felt was strange but vaguely familiar. Then he realized that it all reminded him of his days in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, Lolo. It was the same smell of burning wood and diesel fuel and the same expressions on people’s faces as they made their way through the crowds going to work or to shop. Dropping off his Auntie at her job at a local brew- ery, she told Auma to take good care of Barry and to not let him get lost again. Barack asked Auma what she meant, and she told him that it was a local expression—when someone who hadn’t been seen in a while returns, they are known as having been lost; she added that people who leave and never return, after promising to stay in touch, are thought to be “lost.”
Barack spent his first day resting at Auma’s apartment before absorbing Nairobi life by walking through the local marketplace. He saw Kenyans selling their wares, and he watched the tourists from Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States shopping, eating, and setting themselves apart from the Kenyans selling their wares and serving them food. He remembered being a boy in Hawaii, making fun of the tourists with their pale white skin and skinny legs. He realized that the tourists in Kenya didn’t seem funny; their self-confidence, their expression of freedom to roam with an obvious sense of superiority, felt somewhat insulting.
After spending the day walking through the Nairobi marketplace, Auma and Barack were invited to dinner at Aunt Jane’s apartment. When
he first met Jane, she reminded him that she was the one who had called him with the news that his father had died. At her home, a small crowd of family members had gathered to meet him. Besides his Aunt Jane, he
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met Auma’s mother, Kezia. When she took his hand, she said in her na- tive Swahili that her other son had finally come home. He shook hands with aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces that evening, each greeting him cheerfully, each smiling as if meeting him was nothing new at all. After describing his work in Chicago, he told them he was going to study at Harvard in the fall. His Aunt Jane responded by saying it was good he was studying at the same place his father had studied. On the way back to her apartment, Auma told Barack about his Aunt Sarah, his father’s older sister. She said he should visit with Aunt Sarah but that she wouldn’t join him. When he asked why, Auma said there was a dispute over their father’s estate, and Aunt Sarah was bitter over her brother’s opportunities compared to the hard life she had experienced by being denied those same opportunities. She didn’t believe the estate was worth much, but many, including Aunt Sarah, had expected much from Barack Sr. Auma said their father had made everyone believe he had so much when in reality he had little. And now that Barack had come to Kenya, he, too, was part of what- ever inheritance there was, and he was one of the many family members competing for a portion of an estate that remained in dispute.
After only a few days in Nairobi, Barack could feel his father’s presence in the streets where he walked, in the people passing by, in the laughter and the cigarette smoke. He thought the Old Man, as Auma called him, was there, asking his son Barack to see him and to understand. His fam- ily seemed to be everywhere, fussing over him as Barack Sr.’s lost son, wanting to provide for his needs, keeping him occupied, not wanting him to be alone. At first, he was grateful, noticing that this attention and closeness of family was different from the isolation found so often in the United States. But the closeness was tinged with tension, and it occurred to Barack that some of the tension came from the good fortune he had enjoyed in the United States, fortune that was in contrast with how his family and most Kenyans lived day by day. Conditions in Nairobi were difficult for everyone. From unemployment to few educational opportu- nities and living without a government safety net, there was truly only family to help in difficult circumstances. Now that Barack had an ex- tended family, and with his good fortune, he had responsibilities. What they were, he did not yet know, because they were so different from the responsibilities he had back home.
As Barack struggled with his seemingly good life compared to a Ken- yan’s life and the resulting responsibilities to his Kenyan family, he was also learning more about his father and his father’s role as head of the family. Zeituni told him that his father suffered because his heart was too big; he gave to anyone who asked him for something, and they all asked.
A T R I P T O K E N YA A N D H A RVA R D L AW S C H O O L 45 She told Barack that his father was under enormous pressure and that he
shouldn’t judge him too harshly; she cautioned Barack to learn from his father’s life, saying that if he has something, everyone will want a portion of it. She said he must learn to draw a line somewhere and that if everyone is family, then no one is family. She said his father never understood this, and she cautioned Barack that he must. 2
While in Kenya, Barack visited Ruth, one of his father’s wives, and Mark, another half brother who was a student at Stanford University. While at Ruth’s home, Barack looked at an album of photos of his fa- ther and Ruth and of Auma and her brother Roy. He saw pictures of his father and this part of his family on a beach vacation. They were seem- ingly happy scenes—scenes he had always dreamed about—of what his life would have been like had his father taken him and his mother back to Kenya. The photos were reflections of his own long-held fantasies that he had kept secret, of living under one roof with his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters. It was to him what might have been and how wrong it had turned out. The photos made him sad enough to look away. After leaving Ruth’s, he and Auma talked about Mark and how difficult life was for him as a mixed-race child in Kenya. Barack then thought about his mother and his grandparents, and he realized once again how grateful he was for them—who they were and for the stories they told him. It was Zeituni’s words—that if everyone is family, then no one is family—that kept him thinking. He had come to Kenya to make sense of many worlds that might be made into a harmonious whole. Instead, what was divided seemed to multiply. He was learning about his father, getting to know him long after he had died; he was meeting his extended family and learning what they meant to him and what he meant to them; he was learning about Kenya and about stereotypes; he was questioning his own spirit, ideas, courage, and ambitions. The longer he stayed, the more
he knew; he also knew there were many more questions than there were answers. As part of his Kenyan pilgrimage, Barack, Auma, Kezia, Auntie Zeituni, and his half brothers Roy and Bernard left Nairobi by train for the town of Kisumu and then on to the village of Alego, which, for Barack and his family, was “Home Squared,” the ancestral home. In Alego was Granny, his grandfather’s wife, who welcomed Barack with open arms, saying she had dreamed about the day she would meet him, the son of her son. She told Barack, in her native Luo language, that his arrival and his finally com- ing home had brought great happiness. Home Squared was a compound comprising a house with an iron roof and concrete walls, flowers, a large water tank, a few chickens, and a tall mango tree. Inside the small house
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was his father’s Harvard diploma, photographs of Barack Sr. and an uncle who had moved to the United States and had never returned to Kenya, and photos of a young woman and two children standing behind an older man sitting in a high-backed chair. The picture was of Barack’s grandfa- ther, and the infant in the young woman’s arms was Barack’s father. After tea, Roy took Barack to two graves at the edge of the compound, near a cornfield. One was his grandfather’s, whose headstone read Hussein On- yango Obama, B. 1895, D. 1979; the other grave was covered with tiles, with a bare space where a plaque should have been. After six years, Roy told Barack, there still was no plaque to say who was buried there. 3
For Barack, the simple joy of being with Granny at the ancestral home was enhanced by everything he was doing and touching, the full weight of a circle that was beginning to close and that he might finally recognize himself as he was in that one place. When he found he couldn’t com- municate with Granny in the Luo language as he wanted to, and as she expected him to, he asked that Auma tell Granny that he wanted to learn Luo, but that it was hard to find time in the States, because he was very busy there. Granny said she understood but added that a man “can never
be too busy to know his own people.” At this point, he knew that this, too, was part of the circle, the fact that his life was not tidy or static, that after this important trip to Nairobi and to Home Squared there would always be hard choices to make. 4
It was in the compound of his ancestral home in Alego, under a mango tree, that Barack asked Granny to tell him about his father’s family. He asked her to start at the beginning. As Granny began to speak in Luo and Auma translated, Barack felt the wind lift and then settle, and he heard voices run together—three generations of voices running like a “current of a slow-moving stream . . . questions like rocks roiling with the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices re- turning to that single course . . . a single story.” 5
Before leaving Granny and Alego, Barack returned to the two graves at the edge of the compound. As he stood beside the grave without the plaque, Granny’s stories came to life and he wept. When his tears were spent, calmness came over him and he felt the circle close. He realized who he was, what he cared about. He knew his life in the United States, the black life and the white life, the sense of abandonment he felt as a boy, and the frustrations and hopes he witnessed in Chicago were all con- nected to this place that was far away; it was a connection that was more than a name or the color of his skin. The pain he felt was the same pain his father felt, the questions were the same as his brothers’ questions, and the struggle was his birthright. 6
A T R I P T O K E N YA A N D H A RVA R D L AW S C H O O L 47 Barack returned to Nairobi with Auma. There were more family din-
ners, a few more arguments, and many more stories. He knew he would soon be returning to the United States and to another life altogether, and the trip became a true pilgrimage, a quest to find answers. And while some questions went answered, he knew that what he was looking for by going to Kenya he found in the stories he heard, the people he met, and what
he saw and touched. The trip was like the baobab tree, he writes in his book Dreams from My Father, the tree that can go for years without flower- ing and can survive on practically no rainfall, the tree that some believe possesses a special power and that houses spirits and demons. It is because of their odd shape, he writes, their outline against the sky, that each can tell a story, having a character that is neither benevolent nor cruel, but enduring, and that the tree might walk away, except for its knowledge that “on this earth one place is not so different from another—the knowledge
that one moment carries within it all that’s gone on before.” 7 Leaving his half sister Auma, and his father’s family that was now his own family, in Nairobi, Barack returned to the States, ready to study law at Harvard.