by Barack Obama
When the sun became too strong, we walked to an ice-cream parlor a few blocks from the university. Bernard ordered a chocolate sundae and began eating methodically, measuring out the ice cream half a teaspoon at a time. I lit a cigarette and leaned back in my chair.
“Auma tells me that you’re thinking about trade school,” I said.
He nodded, his expression noncommittal.
“What kind of courses are you interested in?”
“I don’t know.” He dipped his spoon in his sundae and thought for a moment. “Maybe auto mechanics. Yes…I think auto mechanics is good.”
“Have you tried to get into some sort of program?”
“No. Not really.” He stopped to take another bite. “You must pay fees.”
“How old are you now, Bernard?”
“Seventeen,” he said cautiously.
“Seventeen.” I nodded, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “You know what that means, don’t you? It means you’re almost a man. Somebody with responsibilities. To your family. To yourself. What I’m trying to say is, it’s time you decided on something that interested you. Could be auto mechanics. Could be something else. But whatever it is, you’re gonna have to set some goals and follow through. Auma and I can help you with school fees, but we can’t live your life for you. You’ve got to put in some effort. You understand?”
Bernard nodded. “I understand.”
We both sat in silence for a while, watching Bernard’s spoon twirl through the now-liquid mess. I began to imagine how hollow my words must be sounding to this brother of mine, whose only fault was having been born on the wrong side of our father’s cloven world. He didn’t resent me for this, it seemed. Not yet. Only he must have been wondering why I was pretending that my rules somehow applied to him. All he wanted was a few tokens of our relationship—Bob Marley cassettes, maybe my basketball shoes once I was gone. So little to ask for, and yet anything else that I offered—advice, scoldings, my ambitions for him—would seem even less.
I stamped out my cigarette and suggested we get going. As we stepped into the street, Bernard draped his arm over my shoulder.
“It’s good to have a big brother around,” he said before waving good-bye and vanishing into the crowd.
What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?
I could list various possibilities. But I’d never arrived at a definite answer, aware early on that, given my circumstances, such an effort was bound to fail. Instead, I drew a series of circles around myself, with borders that shifted as time passed and faces changed but that nevertheless offered the illusion of control. An inner circle, where love was constant and claims unquestioned. Then a second circle, a realm of negotiated love, commitments freely chosen. And then a circle for colleagues, acquaintances; the cheerful gray-haired lady who rang up my groceries back in Chicago. Until the circle finally widened to embrace a nation or a race, or a particular moral course, and the commitments were no longer tied to a face or a name but were actually commitments I’d made to myself.
In Africa, this astronomy of mine almost immediately collapsed. For family seemed to be everywhere: in stores, at the post office, on streets and in the parks, all of them fussing and fretting over Obama’s long-lost son. If I mentioned in passing that I needed a notebook or shaving cream, I could count on one of my aunts to insist that she take me to some far-off corner of Nairobi to find the best bargains, no matter how long the trip took or how much it might inconvenience her.
“Ah, Barry…what is more important than helping my brother’s son?”
If a cousin discovered, much to his distress, that Auma had left me to fend for myself, he might walk the two miles to Auma’s apartment on the off chance that I was there and needed company.
“Ah, Barry, why didn’t you call on me? Come, I will take you to meet some of my friends.”
And in the evenings, well, Auma and I simply surrendered ourselves to the endless invitations that came our way from uncles, nephews, second cousins or cousins once removed, all of whom demanded, at the risk of insult, that we sit down for a meal, no matter what time it happened to be or how many meals we had already eaten.
“Ah, Barry…we may not have much in Kenya—but so long as you are here, you will always have something to eat!”
At first I reacted to all this attention like a child to its mother’s bosom, full of simple, unquestioning gratitude. It conformed to my idea of Africa and Africans, an obvious contrast to the growing isolation of American life, a contrast I understood, not in racial, but in cultural terms. A measure of what we sacrificed for technology and mobility, but that here—as in the kampongs outside Djakarta or in the country villages of Ireland or Greece—remained essentially intact: the insistent pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth.
As the days wore on, though, my joy became tempered with tension and doubt. Some of it had to do with what Auma had talked about that night in the car—an acute awareness of my relative good fortune, and the troublesome questions such good fortune implied. Not that our relatives were suffering, exactly. Both Jane and Zeituni had steady jobs; Kezia made do selling cloth in the markets. If cash got too short, the children could be sent upcountry for a time; that’s where another brother, Abo, was staying, I was told, with an uncle in Kendu Bay, where there were always chores to perform, food on the table and a roof over one’s head.
Still, the situation in Nairobi was tough and getting tougher. Clothes were mostly secondhand, a doctor’s visit reserved for the direst emergency. Almost all the family’s younger members were unemployed, including the two or three who had managed, against stiff competition, to graduate from one of Kenya’s universities. If Jane or Zeituni ever fell ill, if their companies ever closed or laid them off, there was no government safety net. There was only family, next of kin; people burdened by similar hardship.
Now I was family, I reminded myself; now I had responsibilities. But what did that mean exactly? Back in the States, I’d been able to translate such feelings into politics, organizing, a certain self-denial. In Kenya, these strategies seemed hopelessly abstract, even self-indulgent. A commitment to black empowerment couldn’t help find Bernard a job. A faith in participatory democracy couldn’t buy Jane a new set of sheets. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply about money: my own lack of it, the pursuit of it, the crude but undeniable peace it could buy. A part of me wished I could live up to the image that my new relatives imagined for me: a corporate lawyer, an American businessman, my hand poised on the spigot, ready to rain down like manna the largesse of the Western world.
But of course I wasn’t either of those things. Even in the States, wealth involved trade-offs for those who weren’t born to it, the same sorts of trade-offs that I could see Auma now making as she tried, in her own way, to fulfill the family’s expectations. She was working two jobs that summer, teaching German classes to Kenyan businessmen along with her job at the university. With the money she saved, she wanted not only to fix up Granny’s house in Alego but also to buy a bit of land around Nairobi, something that would appreciate in value, a base from which to build. She had plans, schedules, budgets, and deadlines—all the things she’d learned were required to negotiate a modern world. The problem was that her schedules also meant begging off from family affairs; her budgets meant saying no to the constant requests for money that came her way. And when this happened—when she insisted on going home before Jane served dinner because things had started two hours late, or when she refused to let eight people pile into her VW because it was designed for four and they would tear up the seats—the looks of unspoken hurt, barely distinguishable from resentment, would flash across the room. Her restlessness, her independence, her constant willingness to project into the future—al
l of this struck the family as unnatural somehow. Unnatural…and un-African.
It was the same dilemma that old Frank had posed to me the year I left Hawaii, the same tensions that certain children in Altgeld might suffer if they took too much pleasure in doing their schoolwork, the same perverse survivor’s guilt that I could expect to experience if I ever did try to make money and had to pass the throngs of young black men on the corner as I made my way to a downtown office. Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled—the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway; that no one here could tell me what my blood ties demanded or how those demands could be reconciled with some larger idea of human association. It was as if we—Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I—were all making it up as we went along. As if the map that might have once measured the direction and force of our love, the code that would unlock our blessings, had been lost long ago, buried with the ancestors beneath a silent earth.
Toward the end of my first week in Nairobi, Zeituni took me to visit our other aunt, Sarah. Auma had remained unwilling to go, but because it turned out that her mechanic lived near Sarah, she offered to give us a ride to her garage; from there, she said, we could travel by foot. On Saturday morning, Auma and I picked up Zeituni and headed east, past cinder-block apartments and dry, garbage-strewn lots, until we finally came to the rim of a wide valley known as Mathare. Auma pulled off to the shoulder and I looked out the window to see the shantytown below, miles and miles of corrugated rooftops shimmering under the sun like wet lily pads, buckling and dipping in an unbroken sequence across the valley floor.
“How many people live there?” I asked.
Auma shrugged and turned to our aunt. “What would you say, Auntie? Half a million, maybe?”
Zeituni shook her head. “That was last week. This week, it must be one million.”
Auma started the car back up. “Nobody knows for sure, Barack. The place is growing all the time. People come in from the countryside looking for work and end up staying permanently. For a while, the city council tried to tear the settlement down. They said it was a health hazard—an affront to Kenya’s image, you see. Bulldozers came, and people lost what little they had. But of course, they had nowhere else to go. As soon as the bulldozers left, people rebuilt just like before.”
We came to a stop in front of a slanting tin shed where a mechanic and several apprentices emerged to look Auma’s car over. Promising to be back in an hour, Zeituni and I left Auma at the garage and began our walk down a wide, unpaved road. It was already hot, the road bereft of shade; on either side were rows of small hovels, their walls a patchwork of wattle, mud, pieces of cardboard, and scavenged plywood. They were neat, though, the packed earth in front of each home cleanly swept, and everywhere we could see tailors and shoe repairers and furniture makers plying their trades out of roadside stalls, and women and children selling vegetables from wobbly wood tables.
Eventually we came to one edge of Mathare, where a series of concrete buildings stood along a paved road. The buildings were eight, maybe twelve stories tall, and yet curiously unfinished, the wood beams and rough cement exposed to the elements, like they’d suffered an aerial bombardment. We entered one of them, climbed a narrow flight of stairs, and emerged at the end of a long unlit hallway, at the other end of which we saw a teenage girl hanging out clothes to dry on a small cement patio. Zeituni went to talk to the girl, who led us wordlessly to a low, scuffed door. We knocked, and a dark, middle-aged woman appeared, short but sturdily built, with hard, glassy eyes set in a wide, rawboned face. She took my hand and said something in Luo.
“She says she is ashamed to have her brother’s son see her in such a miserable place,” Zeituni translated.
We were shown into a small room, ten feet by twelve, large enough to fit a bed, a dresser, two chairs, and a sewing machine. Zeituni and I each took one of the chairs, and the young woman who had shown us Sarah’s room returned with two warm sodas. Sarah sat on the bed and leaned forward to study my face. Auma had said that Sarah knew some English, but she spoke mostly in Luo now. Even without the benefit of Zeituni’s translation, I guessed that she wasn’t happy.
“She wants to know why you have taken so long to visit her,” Zeituni explained. “She says that she is the eldest child of your grandfather, Hussein Onyango, and that you should have come to see her first.”
“Tell her I meant no disrespect,” I said, looking at Sarah but not sure what she understood. “Everything’s been so busy since my arrival—it was hard to come sooner.”
Sarah’s tone became sharp. “She says that the people you stay with must be telling you lies.”
“Tell her that I’ve heard nothing said against her. Tell her that the dispute about the Old Man’s estate has just made Auma uncomfortable about coming here.”
Sarah snorted after the translation and started up again, her voice rumbling against the close walls. When she finally stopped, Zeituni remained quiet.
“What’d she say, Zeituni?”
Zeituni’s eyes stayed on Sarah as she answered my question. “She says the trial is not her fault. She says that it’s Kezia’s doing—Auma’s mum. She says that the children who claim to be Obama’s are not Obama’s. She says they have taken everything of his and left his true people living like beggars.”
Sarah nodded, and her eyes began to smolder. “Yes, Barry,” she said suddenly in English. “It is me who looks after your father when he is a small boy. My mother, Akumu, is also your father’s mother. Akumu is your true grandmother, not this one you call Granny. Akumu, the woman who gives your father life—you should be helping her. And me, your brother’s sister. Look how I live. Why don’t you help us, instead of these others?”
Before I could answer, Zeituni and Sarah began to argue with each other in Luo. Eventually, Zeituni stood up and straightened her skirt. “We should go now, Barry.”
I began to rise out of my chair, but Sarah took my hand in both of hers, her voice softening.
“Will you give me something? For your grandmother?”
I reached for my wallet and felt the eyes of both aunts as I counted out the money I had on me—perhaps thirty dollars’ worth of shillings. I pressed them into Sarah’s dry, chapped hands, and she quickly slipped the money down the front of her blouse before clutching my hand again.
“Stay here, Barry,” Sarah said. “You must meet—”
“You can come back later, Barry,” Zeituni said. “Let’s go.”
Outside, a hazy yellow light bathed the road; my clothes hung limp against my body in the windless heat. Zeituni was quiet now, visibly upset. She was a proud woman, this aunt; the scene with Sarah must have embarrassed her. And then, that thirty dollars—Lord knows, she could have used it herself….
We had walked for ten minutes before I asked Zeituni what she and Sarah had been arguing about.
“Ah, it’s nothing, Barry. This is what happens to old women who have no husbands.” Zeituni tried to smile, but the tension creased the corners of her mouth.
“Come on, Auntie. Tell me the truth.”
Zeituni shook her head. “I don’t know the truth. At least not all of it. I know that even growing up, Sarah was always closer to her real mum, Akumu. Barack, he cared only for my mum, Granny, the one who raised them after Akumu left.”
“Why did Akumu leave?”
“I’m not sure. You will have to ask Granny about that.”
Zeituni signaled for us to cross the street, then resumed talking. “You know, your father and Sarah were actually very similar, even though they did not always get along. She was smart like him. And independent. She used to tell me, when we were children, that she wanted to get an education so that she would not have to depend on any man. That’s why she ended up married to four different husbands. None of them lasted. The first one died, but the others she left, because they we
re lazy, or tried to abuse her. I admire her for this. Most women in Kenya put up with anything. I did, for a long time. But Sarah also paid a price for her independence.”
Zeituni wiped the sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand. “Anyway, after Sarah’s first husband died, she decided that your father should support her and her child, since he had received all the education. That’s why she disliked Kezia and her children. She thought Kezia was just a pretty girl who wanted to take everything. You must understand, Barry—in Luo custom, the male child inherits everything. Sarah feared that once your grandfather died, everything would belong to Barack and his wives, and she would be left with nothing.”
I shook my head. “That’s no excuse for lying about who the Old Man’s children are.”
“You’re right. But…”
“But what?”
Zeituni stopped walking and turned to me. She said, “After your father went off to live with his American wife, Ruth…well, he would go to Kezia sometimes. You must understand that traditionally she was still his wife. It was during such a visit that Kezia became pregnant with Abo, the brother you haven’t met. The thing was, Kezia also lived with another man briefly during this time. So when she became pregnant again, with Bernard, no one was sure who—” Zeituni stopped, letting the thought finish itself.
“Does Bernard know about this?”
“Yes, he knows by now. You understand, such things made no difference to your father. He would say that they were all his children. He drove this other man away, and would give Kezia money for the children whenever he could. But once he died, there was nothing to prove that he’d accepted them in this way.”
We turned a corner onto a busier road. In front of us, a pregnant goat bleated as it scuttered out of the path of an oncoming matatu. Across the way, two little girls in dusty red school uniforms, their round heads shaven almost clean, held hands and sang as they skipped across a gutter. An old woman with her head under a faded shawl motioned to us to look at her wares: two margarine tins of dried beans, a neat stack of tomatoes, dried fish hanging from a wire like a chain of silver coins. I looked into the old woman’s face, drawn beneath the shadows. Who was this woman? I wondered. My grandmother? A stranger? And what about Bernard—should my feelings for him somehow be different now? I looked over at a bus stop, where a crowd of young men were streaming out into the road, all of them tall and black and slender, their bones pressing against their shirts. I suddenly imagined Bernard’s face on all of them, multiplied across the landscape, across continents. Hungry, striving, desperate men, all of them my brothers….
