Obama Sr lived before his time

By Franklin Awori

BARACK Hussein Obama is a man who apparently lived before his time. He was highly educated and brilliant, but his unconventional life ended tragically after a series of misfortunes. Yet in his bestseller Dreams from My Father, Obama praises the man who inspired him to pursue politics.

In a classic rags-to-riches tale, Obama Sr, the son of a Kenyan peasant, emerged from the impoverished Kogelo village in Alego and became a Harvard-educated economist. Throughout his life, he battled issues of racial prejudice, interracial relationships and corruption in his homeland, but despite these, some argue, he led the struggle to decolonise Africa.

Back home, however, many people say Obama Sr was far from being an iconic figure. Veteran journalist Philip Ochieng’, who writes for The East African portrays him as an egomaniac who only had himself to blame for his downfall.

Ochieng’ writes that although Obama Sr was charming, generous and extra-ordinarily clever, he was also imperious, cruel and given to boasting about his brain and wealth.

In 1959, at the age of 23, Obama Sr was among the few bright students, including Ochieng’, who had been selected to study in America through the famous student airlift organised by Thomas Joseph Mboya, one of Kenya’s Independence heroes and later minister for economic affairs. Obama had impressed leaders of the Kenyan Independence movement with his keen interest in economics and politics.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama Junior writes that his father was selected to attend university in order to “to master Western technology and bring it back to forge a new modern Africa”.

Obama Sr then headed for Hawaii, leaving behind his pregnant wife Keziah and a son. While studying in Hawaii, he married a young white woman from Kansas. America was still very segregated at the time. It took a lot of guts for a black man, whom Obama Junior describes as “pitch black”, to marry a white girl from Kansas.
Obama Junior was born in August 1961. At 26, after graduating top of his class in econometrics, he moved to Harvard in New York, one of the most prestigious universities in the world and a centre of intellectualism. Again, he left behind a wife and a child.

Obama’s admission to Harvard was in itself a great achievement, even more so in the 60s. “Kenyans at Harvard were countable at that time, probably two or three,” says Prof Frederick Okatcha, an Educational Psychology lecturer at Kenyatta University says. Okatcha was a student at Yale University at the time.

It was at Harvard that Obama Sr made a name for himself as an intellectual. He was studying econometrics, which Okatcha describes as “pure economics”, because it involved mathematics and required a bright mind. His friends and documented works reveal that he was a brilliant economist, although there is little evidence that he used this knowledge and brilliance much after leaving the US.
Obama Junior wrote in his memoirs about his parents’ meeting and wedding: “In a Russian language course, he met an awkward, shy American girl, only 18, and they fell in love. The girl’s parent, wary at first, was won over by his charm and intellect.”

“In many parts of the South, my father could have been strung up a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way,” says Obama Junior. “Even in the more sophisticated northern cities, the hostile stares and whispers might have driven a woman in my mother’s predicament into a back alley abortion.”

“All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader – my father had been all of those things,” Obama Junior says of his father who deserted him as a two-year-old.

As Obama Junior grew older, his interest in his biological father increased and he sought to understand the man he called “father” but one who was a complete foreigner to him.
One of the things he sought to know was why his father had abandoned them in Hawaii. “It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know,” his mother, Ann, told him. “I divorced him.”

But doing the ‘right thing’ did not automatically gain the couple their parents’ acceptance. Obama Junior explains in the book how his grandfather in Kenya wrote a long nasty letter saying he did not approve of the marriage nor did he want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman.

During his stay in New York, Obama Sr acquired a taste for the finer things in life. “His social life revolved around a popular student hangout called the West End bar on Broadway Avenue”, says Okatcha. Just like other Kenyan students, he became a regular there. But unlike the others, who would order regular beer and American bourbon, Obama Sr drank the more expensive Budweiser beer and Scotch whisky, which was a symbol of status.

He would walk in, hoist himself up onto a high seat and order his favourite drink. He would then sip this quietly, adjusting his blackrimmed spectacles, which gave him the look of a serious and thoughtful academic. At intervals, he would light up a cigarette and take long drags, blowing rings up towards the ceiling.

Okatcha also remembers that offering Obama Sr a drink came at a cost. If asked, “What will you have?” Obama would reply in his booming voice, “A double Scotch whisky.” “If you asked him, ‘With what’?” says Okatcha laughing, “He would reply, ‘With another double Scotch whisky.’”
Apart from his booming voice, today echoed in Obama junior, he was noticeable for his sharp sense of dress and style. “He was always in a suit and a tie, even at the bar,” says Okatcha. “He had personality and self-confidence. The fact that he was brilliant and well-educated meant he had everything (with which) to impress the girls despite a different cultural background.”

At his home in Kogelo, villagers also remember a sharply-dressed man who was rumoured to have lived and worked in America. “He was a city man and most of us just saw him a few times,” says a villager, Francis Otieno, 69. “He would have been long forgotten were it not for the son.”

On his return to Kenya in the mid 60s, Obama Sr was employed by an oil company. He later served as an economist in the newly independent government. But unable to find an avenue for his intellectual energy, frustration soon became evident when he increasingly turned to whisky for consolation.

Senator Obama writes in his book that his father lost his civil service job after campaigning against corrupt African politicians. It is possible that the key to Obama Sr’s fall from grace lies in an essay he wrote in 1965. The essay takes a critical look at the Kenyatta government’s economic policy. A move, analysts say, that placed him in direct conflict with President Kenyatta.

Okatcha believes that Obama Sr was too open-minded and liberal to fit into the rigid and bureaucratic government system.
Others, however, like Ochieng’, say boasting proved to be Obama Sr’s undoing.

“He (Obama Sr) said there was tribalism in it and that left him without a job, plunged him into prolonged poverty and dangerously wounded his ego.”
Okatcha would occasionally bump into him at the United Kenya Club, near the University of Nairobi.

“He sat at the bar counter with a Scotch, just like he did in the US,” says Okatcha. His third wife, Ruth, was an American and teacher whom he had met at Harvard. By then he was still legally married to both Keziah and Ann.

According to friends, drinking blighted Obama Sr’s life: he lost both his legs while driving under the influence. Obama was often accused of arrogance, but Okatcha disagrees. “He would listen carefully to your arguments and then tear into you with facts and figures. He could be very forthright and that could be annoying to some people.”

Other acquaintances, however, say Obama Sr had no time for people without ideas and that may be where the issue of his arrogance and boisterousness arose.
He was a typical technocrat who believed in providing brains for a system. “The determination and hard work is certainly a feature (the) Senator has inherited from his father,” Obama’s grandmother, Sarah Obama, observes.

Obama Sr’s social adventures saw him end up with three wives — two Americans and one Kenyan – and at 46, he had eight children. But after a road accident in Nairobi in 1982, he died a desolate man. And it is only the reflected glory of his son, Barack Obama, that has brought glory to a man whose intellect got muddled in Kenya’s post independence politics and his own human flaws.

Adam magazine