The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  Unlike the ritual re-enactments of the Battle of Selma, the re-enactment of the crossing of the Pettus Bridge involved no mock violence. The skirmishes were limited to the jostling of photographers trying to get a picture of the Clintons and Obama. Would they stand together and link arms? They would not. But they did share the front row with Lewis and Lowery and younger politicians, like Artur Davis. Along the way, Obama encountered the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a civil-rights icon in his mid-eighties, who had battled Bull Connor in Birmingham and survived beatings, bombings, and years of slanderous attack. Shuttlesworth had recently had a brain tumor removed, but he refused to miss the commemoration. On the bridge, he chatted awhile with Obama. And then Obama, who had read so much about the movement, who had dreamed about it, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, popped a piece of Nicorette gum in his mouth, and helped push the wheelchair of Fred Shuttlesworth, a leader of the Moses generation, across the bridge and over to the other side.

  Part One

  You have to leave home to find home

  --Ralph Ellison, marginal note in an unfinished manuscript

  Chapter One

  A Complex Fate

  It is an ordinary day, 1951, downtown Nairobi. A city sanitary inspector sits alone in his office. He is moon-faced, with wide-set features, an intelligent young African of twenty-one, stifled in his ambitions at a time of political turmoil. He is testing milk samples for the local health department. The colonial government has initiated a crackdown on the Kenyan independence movement that began to flourish after the end of the Second World War. By 1952, the British will institute a state of emergency and carry out a systematic campaign of arrests, detentions, torture, and killing to quell the Kikuyu nationalist movement they've come to call "the Mau Mau rebellion."

  The door opens: a white woman steps through carrying a bottle of milk. Farming families, Europeans and Africans, come to the office all the time to have food products examined and to make sure they are free of disease before taking them to market.

  The young man offers to help. Being a trained functionary in the sanitation bureaucracy is considered a decent job. He grew up in eastern Kenya, on Kilimambogo, a vast sisal farm owned by Sir William Northrup McMillan, a Great White Hunter sort. The farm was in the "white highlands," near Thika, where Europeans owned all the land. His farm manager carried a kiboko, a whip made of the hide of a hippopotamus, and was not reluctant to use it. The health inspector's father was illiterate, but he held a relatively privileged job as a kind of foreman on the estate. The family lived in a mud-and-wattle hut with no plumbing or electricity, but he made seven dollars a month, enough to send his son to missionary schools. At Holy Ghost College, a secondary school in the town of Mangu, the young man studied English and learned about Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington. Soon, however, he was at a dead end. There was only so much he could learn in schools where there were no textbooks and students sometimes wrote their lessons in the sand. There were no universities in Kenya. The children of Europeans went "home" to study and the few blacks who could afford college went elsewhere in East Africa. He thought about studying for the priesthood, but, as he said later, the white missionaries in Kenya were "among those who constantly told the African he was not ready for various advances, that he must be patient and believe in God and wait for the day when he might advance sufficiently." And so the young man studied instead on scholarship at the Royal Sanitary Institute's training school for sanitary inspectors.

  The European woman regards the young man coolly. His name is Thomas Joseph Mboya, though the woman seems to have no desire to learn that.

  "Is nobody here?" she says, looking straight at Tom Mboya.

  When Tom was still living on Sir William's farm, his father used to tell him, "Do not set yourself against the white man." But Tom couldn't bear the manager of the estate, with his whip, his entitled swagger; he couldn't bear the fact that his white colleagues in the inspection bureaucracy made five times as much as he; and now, on this ordinary day, he cannot bear this impertinent white woman making so determined an effort to stare right through him, to will him into invisibility.

  "Madam," he says, "something is wrong with your eyes."

  The woman stalks out of the inspection lab.

  "I must have my work done by Europeans," she says. "This boy is very rude."

  Like thousands of other Kenyans at the time, Tom Mboya was listening to the speeches of Jomo Kenyatta, known as the Burning Spear, the elder statesman and leading voice of the Kenyan independence movement. Anti-colonialist movements were gaining strength throughout Africa: in Nigeria, Congo, Cameroon, the Gold Coast, Togo, the Mali Federation of Senegal and French Sudan, Somalia, Madagascar.

  In 1955, when he was twenty-five, Mboya won a rare scholarship to study for a year at Ruskin College, in Oxford, where he read widely in politics and economics, joined the Labour Club and the Socialist Club, and discovered a circle of liberal, anti-colonial professors. For Mboya, who had no prior university experience, the year at Ruskin prodded him to think of what other Kenyans could gain from a higher education abroad.

  When Mboya returned to Nairobi, the next year, he began to make a name for himself as an activist and labor organizer. With Jomo Kenyatta in jail for nearly all of the last decade of colonial rule, people began to speak of charismatic young Tom Mboya, a member of the minority Luo tribe, as a future leader of post-colonial Kenya and a politician of a new kind. Kenyatta was the singular Kenyan hero, but he was a traditional anti-colonial fighter surrounded mainly by loyal Kikuyu. Mboya hoped that Kenya would look beyond tribal divisions and toward an integrationist conception of democratic self-rule and liberal economic development.

  In 1957, after the British made concessions concerning the number of Africans permitted to sit on Kenya's Legislative Council, Mboya, at twenty-six, won a seat representing Nairobi, a predominantly Kikuyu-speaking constituency. Mboya's Luo tribe came mainly from the areas near Lake Victoria, in the western part of Kenya. Soon he became the secretary-general of both the Kenya African National Union, the leading independence party, and the Kenya Federation of Labor. He was an electrifying speaker and an effective diplomat. Well before he turned thirty, Mboya was an international symbol of anti-colonialism and civil rights. In the U.S., he met with Eleanor Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins and even shared a stage with Martin Luther King, Jr., at a civil-rights rally. In Kenyatta's absence, he led delegations to Lancaster House, in London, to negotiate the final arrangements for Kenyan independence. In March, 1960, the editors of Time put Mboya on their cover as an exemplar of independence movements across the continent.

  One of the movement's frustrations was that there was no easy way to develop the intellectual potential of young Kenyans. Kenyatta and Mboya could more easily envisage the end of colonialism than they could a sufficiently educated cadre of Africans to run the country. "Too often during the nationalist struggle," Mboya wrote, "our critics informed us the African people were not ready for independence because they would not have enough doctors and engineers and administrators to take over the machinery of government when the colonial power was gone. This criticism has never been justified. At no time has a colonial power deliberately educated the mass of the people for the day of independence." The Kenyans would have to do it themselves.

  Mboya tried to persuade the British to provide some of the most promising young Kenyans with scholarship money to study abroad. He came up with the notion of an "airlift" to foreign universities. He worked closely with a number of wealthy liberal Americans on the idea, particularly the industrialist William X. Scheinman. For the Americans, the airlift had a Cold War motivation: as African countries became independent, they might tie themselves more closely to the West, rather than to the Soviet Union, if their young elites went to universities in the United States and Western Europe. In 1958, as Mboya was developing the idea, the total number of black Kenyans in college amounted to a few hundred in African schools, sevent
y-four in Great Britain, and seventy-five in India and Pakistan. Albert Sims, a former State Department and Peace Corps educational expert, estimated that, in sub-Saharan Africa, only one child in three thousand attended secondary school and one in eighty-four thousand went to college "of any sort." That was certainly part of the reason that a colony of sixty-five thousand Europeans had been able to retain power for so long over more than six million Africans.

  The colonial administration rejected Mboya's airlift proposal, telling him that his "crash" educational program was more political than educational and that most of the students were under-prepared, ill-financed, and bound to fail out of American colleges.

  The U.S. State Department was not eager to defy the British by sending Mboya money. Instead, Mboya came to the United States to raise money privately. For six weeks, he gave as many as six speeches a day on college campuses in the hope of arousing interest in the program and in collecting promises for scholarships. He obtained promises of cooperation from a range of schools, especially historically black colleges like Tuskegee, Philander Smith, and Howard and religious-based colleges like Moravian College, in Pennsylvania, and St. Francis Xavier University, in Nova Scotia.

  Along with his new American friends, Mboya helped found the African-American Students Foundation to increase fund-raising. And, in the fall of 1959, with the support of the A.A.S.F. and dozens of American universities, the airlift began. Among the eight thousand donors were black celebrities such as Jackie Robinson, Sidney Poitier, Mrs. Ralph Bunche, and Harry Belafonte and white liberals like Cora Weiss and William X. Scheinman.

  Back in Nairobi, Mboya didn't have much time to review applications. Hundreds of people lined up outside his door every day, petitioning him about health care, divorce decrees, dowries, land disputes. Mboya studied the stacks of files of young Kenyan men and women who had worked hard in secondary school and were now in dull or menial jobs far below their potential. The students' applications were sincere and patriotic. Their ambitions were not of emigration and escape but of education and return, of service to an independent Kenya.

  The airlifts, which continued until 1963, had a profound effect, and the program soon expanded to other African countries. "My father was one of the few Kenyan politicians who was equally at home in a village and Buckingham Palace," Mboya's daughter Susan said. "Africa is a very complex society, and you need people who are educated and worldly enough to translate those worlds to each other. Without it, you are lost. The airlift provided a pool of people like that for Kenya's future."

  The airlift was a signal event in the history of Kenya as it approached independence. According to a report conducted by the University of Nairobi, seventy per cent of the upper-echelon posts in the post-colonial government were staffed by graduates of the airlift. Among them was the environmentalist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Another was a Luo from a village near Lake Victoria, an aspiring economist with a rich, musical voice and a confident manner. His name was Barack Hussein Obama.

  In Selma, Barack Obama, Jr., had said that he could trace his "very existence" to the Kennedy family because the Kennedys had donated money to Tom Mboya's educational program for young Kenyans. Factually and poetically, Obama had overreached. The Kennedys did not contribute to the first airlift that, in September, 1959, brought Obama's father and eighty others from Nairobi to the United States. As the Washington Post reported a year after the Selma speech, Mboya approached Kennedy at the family compound in Hyannisport in July, 1960, after the first airlift and in the hope of funding the second. At the time, Kennedy was chairman of a Senate subcommittee on Africa and was running for President. He listened to Mboya's proposal and then gave him a hundred thousand dollars from a family foundation named for his brother Joseph, who was killed in the Second World War. Vice-President Richard Nixon, who was running against Kennedy that year and was also eager to win black votes, had earlier tried to get support for the plan from the Eisenhower Administration but failed. This, and the prospect of Kennedy's getting to advertise his largesse, deeply frustrated him. A Nixon ally, Senator Hugh Scott, accused Kennedy of making the donation from a tax-exempt foundation for political purposes--a charge that Kennedy called "the most unfair, distorted, and malignant attack I have heard in fourteen years in politics."

  One of Obama's campaign spokesmen, Bill Burton, belatedly apologized for the error in the Joshua generation speech, yet the thrust of Obama's narrative in Selma was hardly a hoax. The Kenyan side of his family had not escaped history. His father was a member of a transitional generation, making the leap from colonialism to independence, from enforced isolation to the beginnings of worldly opportunity. And Obama himself was proposing not only to be the first African-American elected to the White House but to do it as a man whose family was one generation removed from a rural life, an oppressed life, under colonial rule.

  When Obama was running for senator in 2003 and 2004, he said that his father had "leapfrogged from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century in just a few years. He went from being a goat herder in a small village in Africa to getting a scholarship to the University of Hawaii to going to Harvard." The notion that Obama's father or grandfather was a mere "goat herder" is also a form of romantic overreach. Manual work was never their destiny or occupation; goat herding was something that all villagers did, even distinguished elders, like the Obama men. "All of us who grew up in the countryside were part-time herdsmen," Olara Otunnu, a Luo and a former foreign minister of Uganda, who was a close friend of Obama's father, said. "It was absolutely of no consequence. It's just something you did while you were in school. Obama's grandfather was, by African standards, middle or upper middle class. He brought china and glassware to the home! The earnings he made as a cook for the British were a pittance by Western standards, but it was cash in hand. He was exalted in his village. And Obama's father grew up with all of that and, of course, surpassed it. Look at the cover of Dreams from My Father. Look at the photograph on the left of Obama's father in his mother's lap. He is wearing Western clothes. A true 'goat herder' would be in a loincloth. Clearly, the grandfather was far more Westernized than most and it went on from there."

  Barack Obama, Sr.,'s father, Onyango Obama, was born in 1895 in western Kenya. He was impatient with village life. "It is said of him that he had ants up his anus," his third wife, Sarah Ogwel, once said. He learned to read and write English, then made the two-week trek to Nairobi, where he found work as a cook for white Britons. A "domestic servant's pocket register" that Obama saw when he visited Kogelo, shows that, in 1928, when Onyango was thirty-three, he worked as a "personal boy," and there are short remarks of evaluation in the register from a Mr. Dickson, a Captain C. Harford, a Dr. H. H. Sherry, and a Mr. Arthur W. H. Cole, of the East Africa Survey Group. Mr. Dickson praised Onyango's food ("His pastries are excellent"), but Mr. Cole declared him "unsuitable and certainly not worth 60 shillings per month."

  After Onyango's first wife, Helima, discovered that she could not conceive, he outbid another man for a young woman named Akumu Nyanjoga, paying a dowry of fifteen head of cattle. In 1936, Akumu bore a son, Barack. Soon afterward, Onyango Obama met and married Sarah Ogwel. Akumu found her husband to be imperious and demanding. She left him with two children. Barack considered both Akumu and Sarah to be his mother. (And, today, Barack, Jr., calls Ogwel, who is in her late eighties and still lives in the village of Kogelo, "Granny" or "Mama Sarah.") Sarah recounted to her grandson tales of her husband's mythological adventures--how Onyango, on his trek to Nairobi, fought off leopards with his panga, climbed a tree, and stayed in the branches for two days to avoid a rampaging water buffalo, and how he found a snake inside a drum.

  Onyango was an herbalist, a healer, a well-respected farmer, and a prominent man in his village. He was also, like most Luo men, a stern father, demanding that his children behave like the obedient little boys and girls he had seen when working for the British colonials. "Wow, that guy was mean!" Obama quo
tes his half brother Abongo as saying. "He would make you sit at the table for dinner, and served the food on china, like an Englishman. If you said one wrong thing, or used the wrong fork--pow! He would hit you with his stick. Sometimes when he hit you, you wouldn't even know why until the next day." Before Barack, Sr., was born, Onyango lived for a while in Zanzibar and converted to Islam. Well over ninety per cent of the Luo were Christians; the decision to convert was highly unusual and the reasons were vague. Onyango added "Hussein" to his name and gave it to Barack when he was born.

  During the Second World War, Onyango served as a cook in the British Army in Burma. He was likely attached to the King's African Rifles, a colonial regiment that drew on British-controlled lands on the African continent. He was called "boy" by the British officers and soldiers and suffered all the other indignities of a black African in such a situation. The work itself was an indignity: in Luo society, men do not cook. "So here is a grand village elder, the head of an important clan, doing women's work for the white man: he has to psychologically adapt," Olara Otunnu, Obama's Ugandan friend, said. "The colonials treated their servants very badly. They were rude and disrespectful. It would hurt anyone to be a 'coolie,' to use the old colonial term, but especially a village leader like Onyango."

  Onyango had also come to sympathize with the independence movement. Working for the British, he had earned cash in the new money economy, but he had also accumulated a well of resentment. "He did not like the way the British soldiers and colonialists were treating Africans, especially members of the Kikuyu Central Association, who at the time were believed to be secretly taking oaths which included promises to kill the white settlers and colonialists," Sarah Ogwel said.