And Then Life Happens: A Memoir

by Auma Obama

  “You need something to calm you down,” Peggy Flint finally said, and asked the driver, who was still sitting patiently, though somewhat uncertainly, at the wheel, to drive us to the school sanatorium. The other girls reluctantly got off the bus, and I was brought to the sanatorium. There I was given a tranquilizer, and it was decided to keep me there overnight. Miss Flint stayed with me until I had fallen asleep.

  * * *

  I never found out what my favorite teacher told the school administration about my crying fit. In any case, I was kept in the sanatorium for five days. And I seemed to really need that time, for I still remember waking up completely exhausted that first morning and doing nothing but sleeping in the days that followed. I was told that my breakdown had been a delayed burnout reaction to the difficult situation at home. Miss Flint wanted to send for my father, but I was opposed to that because I shied away from speaking to him about my problems.

  Miss Flint visited me every day. I found out that Mrs. Wanjohi, our headmistress, had reacted to the incident with shock and astonishment. No wonder, for she knew me only as a cheerful, lively, extroverted student, who shrank from nothing and was always in the thick of things. When I finally returned to classes, everyone helped me find my feet again. Only Miss Doyle avoided me as much as she could. I actually felt sorry for her. How could I explain to her that I had not cried so hard because of her, but because of everything that had happened in my life over the past several years? Among those things were my experiences at the home of my Uncle Odima, where I had had to seek shelter during one school break.

  8.

  RENEWED ACUTE FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES had forced my father to give up our rented house in Woodley, where we had lived for almost eight years. Now we had nowhere to stay and were dependent on relatives and friends to put us up. There was no space anywhere for our things. Many things got lost at that time: the classical music records my father loved so much, as well as books, paintings, clothing, and kitchenware. We children watched our home disintegrate—and could do nothing to stop it.

  When the next break began, my father brought me directly from school to Ngara, the neighborhood where my Uncle Odima lived with his family. I was to spend the next several weeks with him.

  Uncle Odima, whom I later called “Soda Uncle,” because he worked at a beverage company for years, had come to Nairobi as a teenager. At that time, my father had found a school for him and taken on the payment of his school fees. My father let him live with us until he had graduated from high school. Years later, my father and I now stood at his door. No sooner had we entered the house than I sensed that something was wrong. There was tension in the air. The atmosphere in the small living room was oppressive. Uncle Odima’s wife, Catherine, whom I knew from previous years, did not smile when she—with obvious reluctance—gave me her hand. She was quite clearly not pleased about my presence. I felt like an intruder.

  My aunt’s behavior toward my father and me was unambiguous. Outwardly, my father didn’t let it bother him, instead behaving as if he were at home. In retrospect, I assumed that he did that for me. He knew quite well that Catherine did not want us in her home. But he needed a safe place for me to stay.

  Uncle Odima was not yet home when we arrived. As soon as he returned from work, all would be well, I thought. Surely he would set his wife straight and demand that she treat us, his closest relatives, with the necessary respect. After all, he had lived with us for years. He would remember that my father had paid all his expenses back then and gotten him his current job. Interestingly, my uncle had even adopted my father’s name, because he knew that it would open doors for him. As Bonifus Odima Obama, he enjoyed all the advantages that were initially associated with the name Obama.

  But when he returned home to Ngara that evening and stood in the doorway of his small living room, he seemed to have forgotten all that. At the sight of us, he acted just as irritated as his wife had. He didn’t smile, greeted us only tersely, and disappeared into one of the rooms, from which he did not emerge until dinner was served. I was completely confused. Was this man really my favorite uncle, who had taken me on his best friend’s motorcycle in Woodley and had so often brought us sweets? This man here was a stranger to me. I felt the sense of loneliness that had so often accompanied me since the breakup of our family well up in me again. Besides my father and my brother, this uncle was all that remained of our former family—indeed, of a whole era. He had lived with us; he had to understand what I was going through. But his behavior expressed in no uncertain terms that he wanted nothing to do with us, that we represented too heavy a financial burden for him.

  Uncle Odima’s apartment was very small; besides the living room, there were two small bedrooms and a tiny kitchen. One of the bedrooms was allotted to my father, while my uncle and his wife shared the other one with their two-year-old son, Daniel. And where was I supposed to sleep? I looked around in confusion. And where did the maid, who was rattling the dishes in the kitchen, spend the night?

  Shortly after dinner, everyone went to bed. My father had gone out, which I didn’t even hold against him. Because how was someone supposed to remain in an apartment with such an unwelcoming atmosphere? Our whole situation was probably even more oppressive for him than it was for me.

  Catherine turned out the light in the kitchen and told me as she walked by that I could sleep on the floor in the living room with the maid. She did not show me where the bed linens were, however. So I asked the maid. She pointed to a thin, rolled-up mattress in a corner and a brown blanket. “You can share my things,” she offered. I thanked her and helped her move the furniture against the wall and unroll the mattress in the middle of the room. It was not the first time that I slept on the floor. That often occurred at my grandmother’s in Alego. But there it was always an adventure to sleep with other children on a huge papyrus mat. Most of the time we were so tired from playing that we didn’t even feel the hard floor and fell asleep immediately. That evening, however, in my former favorite uncle’s apartment, I couldn’t sleep. The floor was made of cement; I felt its hardness through the thin mattress whenever I moved. On top of that, it was cold with two people sharing the thin blanket. For a long time I lay awake and wondered desperately how I would get through the next four weeks in this house.

  The next morning, I had to get up before sunrise with the maid. The living room had to be put back in order because my uncle and his wife ate breakfast there before work. My father, who had not come back until night, was still asleep. I was supposed to help prepare breakfast, which was completely fine with me, because I didn’t know what to do with myself. Plus, I already sensed that my aunt would not approve of my sitting around doing nothing in the living room. But at least little Daniel was there. I was looking forward to his company, for it promised distraction. So I would attend to him. Unfortunately, it did not work out the way I’d imagined. With each passing day, my aunt treated me a little bit more like a second maid, and soon Daniel, too, began acting recalcitrant and fresh. Because I did not have to look after him, I ignored him as much as possible from then on.

  * * *

  In Ngara, I didn’t know anyone, and the unfamiliar surroundings intimidated me. So I stayed in the house most of the time. Only now and then I was sent to the kiosk or a store. And when I simply couldn’t stand it anymore in the cramped apartment, I would visit Aunty Jane in the nearby Kariokor neighborhood. I would stay there until the approaching darkness forced me to return to Ngara. Jane, my mother’s younger sister, was always happy to see me and had a smile to spare for me. But apart from the few visits with my father—he had moved into a cheap hotel after he brought me to my uncle—or Aunty Jane, I stayed in the ground-floor apartment, which was dark and cold. It had a tiny balcony, which was in the back, for the building was on a hillside. For hours I would sit there and gaze at the Nairobi River, a brownish polluted sludge that flowed along sluggishly. On our side, the bank consisted mainly of rampant reeds and garbage. On the opposite bank grew corn and
sukuma wiki, a type of collard greens common in Kenya. But there was filth everywhere there, too. The collard greens were grown by people who resided on the bank in wretched huts made of corrugated cardboard and plastic.

  The bleak landscape before my eyes matched my inner landscape only too well. In both, things looked gray and hopeless. Nonetheless, I envied the poor people on the other side of the river their home. I imagined that, despite everything, in the midst of their poverty they had intact families. But at the same time I was aware of what misery that destitution must have involved. I thought of my father, who, although he didn’t live in one of those cardboard huts, was now poor. And I sensed that the despair that arose from poverty was not to be underestimated. For that reason, I was anxious, but also sad: Those people were much worse off than I was.

  One day, when I was again on the small balcony looking across the river, I was overcome by the horrible feeling that things would never look up again. I could not imagine how my father would ever manage to find a way out of our plight. However hard he tried, he simply could not get a job. (At the time, I had no idea how closely linked this struggle for survival was with political power struggles.) For me, the school exams were approaching, and here with my uncle, in this oppressive apartment, I was incapable of studying. I was constantly freezing—in August it was quite cold in Nairobi without heating, with temperatures around 50 degrees at times—was always hungry, and felt isolated and abandoned. I looked down at the river. The balcony hung over the ground due to the hillside. As I gazed into the depth, I was suddenly seized by the desire to jump, wondering what would happen. Perhaps I would meet my end, I thought naïvely, and then all the suffering would be over. The balcony was probably too close to the ground for the fall to be deadly. But at that moment, I only wanted all the pain to cease.

  Just as quickly as the desperate vision had appeared, I recoiled from it. I rushed back into the dark living room, fleeing my own thoughts, and set to work helping the maid prepare dinner.

  * * *

  Despite all my family problems, I passed the final exam and was accepted into Kenyatta University, where I studied fine art and education. (In those days, you could not study German at the university.) I actually didn’t want to study in Kenya at all, for I had begun in high school to apply for an international scholarship. And because only four students in our graduation year took German, I was confident about finding financial support. As high school students, we were often invited to German-Kenyan events and cocktail parties. There, I spoke to many people about my desire to study in a German-speaking country in order to improve my knowledge of the language.

  At one of these parties, we German students met Munyua Waiyaki, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. He was impressed that we had such concrete plans for the future and promised us to keep an eye out for funding opportunities.

  We visited him in his ministry several times. From there he sent us to various people with the request to help us. But even though we met with many influential figures—ambassadors, ministers, businesspeople—our efforts came to nothing.

  I had been enrolled at Kenyatta for a year when I finally got a scholarship on my own initiative from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the German Academic Exchange Service. My friend Trixi, one of the four girls with whom I had taken German at Kenya High, had left for Germany a year earlier on a Goethe-Institut scholarship to study the language.

  Trixi was from Tanzania and a few years older than I. She was pretty, worldly, and seemed very grown-up. While I lived at boarding school and had to go home to my father during break, she lived with her sister Ade and some others in the Westlands neighborhood of Nairobi. There they ran their own household and could do as they pleased. I was impressed by the fact that they did not have to obey anyone. But Trixi’s life was not simple. Besides Ade, she had eight other younger siblings and helped her mother raise them. I had never been saddled with such a responsibility.

  Trixi and her flat mates had their own rooms, while the kitchen and bathroom were shared. At the time, I didn’t know that I was getting a taste there of what I would later come to know in Germany as a Wohngemeinschaft, or WG, a communal living situation.

  The campus of Kenyatta University, on which I lived, extended over a huge area several miles outside the capital. Because there was nothing but the university buildings far and wide, the place was tailor-made for studying. You also made friends quickly. I enjoyed that time and forged some friendships. But during those days I never lost sight of the desire to go abroad.

  * * *

  More than a year and a half had passed when I received the acceptance letter for the DAAD scholarship. Finally, my dream would come true! I would have the chance to leave the narrow world of my childhood and spread my wings. And although I really enjoyed my art studies, particularly painting and drawing, I told myself that I could pursue that activity any time, even without higher education. The opportunity to study in Germany would definitely not come a second time.

  I shared my joy about the scholarship with only a few people—for I was afraid that my father would find out about it and prevent me from accepting it and going to Germany.

  Our relationship had remained difficult; the sad events of the past stood between us and prevented us from getting closer. In my eyes, our family situation had improved only minimally, and I still held it against him that he had not fulfilled his fatherly duties—to give us a sense of safety, stability, and financial security.

  I was convinced that he would forbid me to study abroad. The mere fact that I had not asked his permission before I applied would surely displease him, the strict father. Not least among the reasons I wanted to get away was the desire to escape the cultural constraints and his authority. But I would not have been able to make that clear to him—especially as I was the only girl in the family and, despite our tensions, he had a special love for me.

  The fact that I had the desire to study German, of all things, and not economics, mathematics, law, or medicine—as my father probably would have wished—made everything still more difficult. For my father, the learning of a language was only a means to an end. When he visited me several months after I moved to Germany, he asked me what I wanted to do with my German. The disappointment in his voice was unmistakable. Before I could even answer his question, he added: “Child, it’s not enough to be able to speak German. In Germany, every homeless person under the bridge speaks German. It has to lead to something more.”

  Years later, I had to admit that my father had been right. The German language alone was not enough to practice a “decent” profession in Germany (or elsewhere). The subjects that I chose in addition to my major—pedagogy, sociology, and media studies—formed the actual cornerstones of my later career. But back then, with my nineteen years, when I held the scholarship in my hands, I could think of only one thing, and that was that I would not only be able to “really” learn German, but would also expand my own horizons. That was enough for me.

  But there was still one more hurdle, which threatened to destroy all my plans. Because I was not of age, which in Kenya was twenty-one, I could not apply for a passport without my father’s signature. According to Kenyan law, my mother, who knew about my travel plans and supported me, could not sign the application on her own. I was beside myself when I found out about this. Why did I need my father’s permission, too? Because he was a man? Why didn’t my mother’s signature suffice? She was a grown woman, after all. My fear of asking my father was based on the fact that he had up to then made virtually all major decisions about what I could and could not do. For me, contradicting him was unheard-of and I did not know whether he would tolerate it. Now I imagined all sorts of scenarios, which all amounted to the same thing: being prohibited from going to Germany. And that must not happen.

  I was firmly resolved to accept the scholarship, and because I did not receive support from the Kenyan authorities, I turned to those who had granted it to me. I sought out the German cultural attac
hé and explained my situation to him, describing to him honestly how things stood between my father and me. Luckily, he had a sympathetic ear and decided to help me. He made some calls and hinted that certain exceptions could be made. He promised to plead with the proper agencies to treat me as a special case.

  And, as luck would have it, after some back and forth and a number of sleepless nights, my mother finally received permission to sign the all-important application. I got my passport and the path to Germany was clear. Only once I was there did my father find out that I had left Kenya.

  GERMANY

  9.

  AS THE PLANE DESCENDED and approached Frankfurt Airport, I looked with curiosity out the porthole at the neatly divided landscape below me. The borders between the individual parcels of land looked as if they had been clearly demarcated with a ruler. The city, with its mass of houses, seemed like a compact whole, systematically and precisely sectioned by means of streets, highways, and train tracks.

  It was early morning in Germany in October 1980. Was I afraid of what this first day in a foreign land would bring? I no longer recall. In any case, I had gotten through my first long-distance flight. Apart from a scenic flight in a small sport plane, which I had won in a Sunday school competition when I was about ten (I could name the separate books of the Bible by heart), I had never flown before in my life. Back then, I had gotten ill in the shaky plane, and I remember that I was given a pill to settle my nerves and my stomach. But now I was landing in a wide-body aircraft on an unknown continent. I was so curious and excited that there was probably no space left for the fear of being away from home for the first time.