by Auma Obama
The working hours of the Kenya Airways employees indicated that the Nissan had passed the scene of the accident around eleven o’clock at night.
“I can show you the exact spot on Elgon Road, if you want. Besides a small tree, there is nothing there far and wide that could have caused an accident. We were told that your father drove into this small tree and the steering wheel crushed his chest with the impact.”
“But he didn’t have any injuries. I saw him at the funeral,” I said despondently.
“Exactly! We said the same thing to ourselves. Apart from a small scratch on his forehead, there was no visible sign. And even more interesting is the fact that the accident happened practically in front of the residence of a minister. The question is what the military guards were doing who normally stand there.”
The sarcasm in the voice of my usually so sweet-tempered aunt could not be missed.
“Something isn’t right there, Auma,” she concluded and left it to me to digest those weighty words.
“Why didn’t you do anything to find out the truth?” Again I asked this question, this time reproachfully.
“I told you that we all had the feeling that something was amiss. But what could we do? According to the autopsy report, your father died of internal injuries. The case was not investigated further, but was shelved.” In those days, it was difficult to pursue anything. Under Daniel arap Moi, corruption reigned everywhere. It would have been impossible to persuade potential witnesses to testify in court along the lines of our way of thinking. Everyone was too afraid.
Indeed, the political situation in Kenya in those days was anything but pleasant. Moi ruled with an iron fist. He stood at the head of a one-party system, and all important government posts were occupied by people who were loyally devoted to him. Oppositional figures disappeared. Many rumors of torture and even deaths were circulating. And the corruption had reached a scale that far surpassed all that had preceded it.
Shortly before my father’s death, Moi had dismissed the then-governor of the Central Bank of Kenya. My aunt now informed me that my father told her that he had been slated to be the successor, because he was the leading economist responsible for the national budget (he had specialized in econometrics, which not many people had mastered at that time). But he died before he could take up the post. Without being able to point a finger at anyone in particular, Aunt Marsat seemed convinced that his death had something to do with that.
“Your father was too well known to be brought silently from the street to the mortuary like an anonymous accident victim—especially since he had his papers on him!”
I was speechless. For a long time, we just sat there without saying a word, each of us preoccupied with her own thoughts.
* * *
“Do you know that you actually refused to accept your father’s death back then?” Aunt Marsat asked when we resumed the conversation a few days later.
“How so? I had no choice but to accept it. He was dead.”
“Of course, I know. But you withdrew into yourself and blocked out everything going on around you.”
“What do you mean?”
I had actually decided not to discuss my father’s death anymore. Our last conversation about him had been very painful, and I didn’t want to suffer even more than I was suffering already. But I had opened Pandora’s box, and now there was no going back. I could also sense clearly that my aunt wanted to talk about my father. And so she just started speaking.
“The mourning went on for four days in Nairobi. Many, many people came to pay their last respects to him. Even Mwai Kibaki, the former Minister of Finance and current President, was among them. He had been his boss in the Ministry of Finance. On the fifth day, we went home with the body to Alego, in a long convoy of cars, buses, and minibuses.”
“And me? Where was I?” I asked, gradually becoming curious. She was right. I absolutely could not remember what had happened in the time up to shortly before the funeral.
“You were completely devastated. We rode together in one of the cars in the procession. When we arrived in Alego at the homestead and you started to get out of the car, you passed out.”
At first I didn’t want to believe her, but I could tell from her facial expression that she wasn’t lying.
“You were carried into the small room in the main house.” The room was known as “Bobby’s room” at the time (Bobby had been Abongo’s nickname); today it is called “Barack Jr.’s room,” because he slept there on his last visit to Alego before he became famous.
“You came to. But in the days leading up to your father’s funeral, you stayed in the room.”
I tried to remember, but everything remained a blank.
“The place was teeming with people who had come to mourn,” my aunt went on. “Day and night, people arrived. Your mother was there, too.”
But I couldn’t even remember her being there.
“Like many other relatives, she had been holding a vigil in Nairobi in your father’s house in Upper Hill since she had found out about his death. Then she accompanied the body to Alego.”
That made sense to me, because as my father’s first wife, she was required by Luo custom to be present at the funeral.
“Many important figures came, colleagues of your father’s, ministers like Robert Ouko, Peter Oloo Aringo, and Olum Gondi. All people who had influenced his career.”
Of all the individuals she listed, I saw none in my mind’s eye.
“I can’t remember any of them,” I noted in frustration.
“The few times you tried to leave the room, you were overwhelmed by such intense grief that you couldn’t breathe and passed out again.”
* * *
My younger brother Opiyo had participated in the funeral, too. Barely two years before the death of his father, Opiyo had returned to the Obama family at the age of fourteen, after he had been separated as a three-year-old from his biological father when Ruth and my father got divorced.
Opiyo’s mother, who after the divorce wanted to separate from everything that reminded her of my father, had even changed her sons’ names. She called them only by their Jewish first names, and she had their last names changed to that of her second husband. Thus Opiyo David Obama and Okoth Mark Obama became David Ndesandjo and Mark Ndesandjo. That was intended to achieve a final severing between the children and their father and prevent any association with the name Obama.
As a fourteen-year-old, Opiyo was no longer willing to accept that. He sought out his father and was lucky to still be able to spend a little time with him as an adolescent.
The thought that he reestablished a connection with my father of his own accord is a great comfort to me. Despite everything he had heard about him, he wanted to get to know his father and give him and himself a chance. Thus my younger brother, too, got a sense of the love that my father, despite the mistakes he made, felt for his children. Opiyo’s participation in his funeral is for me a clear sign of the affection of a returned son, who had the opportunity literally at the last minute to be embraced by his father before his sudden death abruptly tore them apart.
What I most regret to this day about my memory loss at that time is that it also almost totally effaced my recollection of Opiyo. For my brother himself suffered a fatal traffic accident only a short time after our father’s death. Once again, I found out about this through a phone call from Aunty Jane. As I hung up the phone, I knew that I would miss him just as intensely as I had when he was taken from me as a three-year-old. And that I loved him just as much as I had back then, even though I had barely gotten to know him.
* * *
My father was gone, and the Obama family had to recover and look to its future. That was easier said than done—for immediately after my father’s death, a gulf opened up.
Jael had not been married to my father. But because she had a child from him and had lived with him at the time of his death, the Obama family did not want to cast her out. As a mere girlfriend,
however, Jael would not have been permitted to participate in the funeral rites, because she would not have been recognized as part of the Obama family. So the suggestion was made to marry my father and Jael retroactively in accordance with a Luo custom.
Not all family members agreed with the posthumous marriage. Supported by Muslim relatives, who were against this custom for religious reasons, they rejected it. They wanted to prevent an imposition of a wife on my father after his death. After long debates, the Luo tradition, which Odima had represented with strong arguments, prevailed, and the opposition was outvoted. Money was raised for the bride price, and my father’s younger brother Uncle Yusuf and a few other male relatives rushed off to Jael’s family to ask for her hand on behalf of my father. Now Jael could participate in the funeral, and her son, George, was recognized as a member of the Obama family.
* * *
Jael, who after my father’s death got a job in the Ministry of Finance, was allowed to live for a few more months in the government-provided house in Upper Hill, until she could stand on her own two feet with the help of the new job.
Aunt Marsat stayed in Alego and helped receive the many guests who kept coming long after my father’s death to pay their last respects to him. Afterward, she moved in with her sister Zeituni.
As time went on, Jael distanced herself more and more from the Obama family; except through her son, George, there was no real connection to us anymore. Then one day she went away completely, taking her son with her.
16.
IN 1984, MY MOTHER VISITED me for the first time in Heidelberg. I had invited her to spend part of the summer with me. Since I had never really lived with her, except in the first years of my life, of which I had no memory, her visit seemed to me a good opportunity to make up for this.
What connected us was no classical mother-daughter relationship. Though we had seen each other often since I had “reunited” with her at the age of thirteen, it had always been with other people, with my Aunty Jane, her own mother, or other relatives. The two of us had never been alone together.
Now, in Heidelberg, I had the chance to get to know her without constraints and expectations. After my father’s death, she had taken up her place as his first wife and was again living with my grandmother on the compound in Alego.
Her visit was planned for a month. I was really looking forward to this time and imagined everything we would do together, all the usual mother-daughter things. If her past attempt—when I was fifteen—to catch up on a “real” family life had failed, she could now at least participate in my life.
We had a wonderful time together. My friends couldn’t believe that she was my mother; most of them thought she was an older sister. Because she had had me at the age of seventeen, the age difference between us was not that large—she was only forty-one on her visit.
We often sat in my room and talked. I was no longer living in a residence hall; for some time, I had been sharing an apartment with other students in the Heidelberg old town. There, one of my closest friends, Maria, was a frequent guest. We cooked, danced, or went on walks together.
Maria was thin, had short brown hair, studied Romance languages and literature, and was a dance enthusiast like me. I first met her at a job I got through the employment agency of student services. We were both working on the cleaning and kitchen staff at the university’s ear, nose, and throat clinic. For me, the work was new and difficult. Polishing the linoleum floor with a heavyweight buffing machine was a particular challenge. You had to have the heavy apparatus well under control, or else it would zoom all over the floor, crash into the bedposts, and scare the patients.
On breaks, Maria and I groaned about the monster and laughed at near-catastrophes. The hospital experiences bound us together and were the beginning of a friendship that lasts to this day.
* * *
I did not give my mother much time to get settled into the apartment before I started asking her questions. I wanted to know more about my parents’ relationship and was curious about the details of what happened in those days. And above all, I wanted to know why my mother had left us with my father when we were still so young.
“I had no choice,” was her answer, when we were sitting alone in the kitchen at one point. “When he didn’t want to have me as his wife anymore, I didn’t know what to do. How was I supposed to take care of two small children without a livelihood?”
I refused to believe that that was the only reason she had given us up. The stories a former schoolmate had told me crossed my mind. She had been raised by her single mother, who had sold vegetables at the market to scrape together money for the school fees.
“So was it painful for you to give us up?”
“Those were hard times.” She continued to defend herself. “I was so young and completely distraught. I never would have expected that I wouldn’t live with your father anymore.”
I simply did not understand. Nor did I really want to understand. For at that moment I felt that it was also because of her that I had no “real” family. That it had not only been my father’s fault. She, too, could have acted differently, made other decisions back then. I felt an old resentment welling up in me, and sensed myself hardening inside, just as I had with my father in Rotterdam.
“Many things didn’t go the way I would have wished, Auma,” my mother went on. “There’s nothing I can do to change that now. You should only know that I almost went mad when I relinquished you and your brother to your father. Something cracked in me at that time, and after that my life completely changed.”
I stared at my mother and tried to comprehend, as hard as it was for me. She stared back at me, her eyes pleading for understanding.
“Your father and I were really in love before he went to the United States.”
No tears glimmered in her eyes, but her voice revealed pain and disappointment.
“We were together constantly back then,” she went on. “He taught me everything. Even the clothing I wore he had picked out for me. When your older brother was born, your father was so proud of his little family. You weren’t there yet.” She smiled lovingly at me.
“I was never there in that situation,” I replied bitterly. I simply could not fight my emotions. After a while, I asked, “Do you sometimes think about how it might have been if he hadn’t left?”
“Not for a long time. What happened, happened. There’s no sense in endlessly speculating.”
Little by little, I was accepting the idea that it always takes two to make a failed relationship. I probably had to face the fact that only my father and my mother really knew what had happened back then. Everyone else, the victims of their past decisions, had to live with it.
Determined to keep our difficult past from catching up with us and ruining the lovely time we were having in Heidelberg, my mother and I made a silent pact neither to occupy ourselves exclusively with it, nor to take personally everything that came up in our discussions.
* * *
One thing was bothering my mother in Heidelberg: the fact that at my age I didn’t have a boyfriend. I explained to her that I was still in love with a man who had left me two years earlier.
She couldn’t believe that after such a long period of separation I was still in love with a man who didn’t love me. “That’s not normal,” she said with concern, and advised me to forget Dieter immediately and look for a new boyfriend.
It was September, the time of new wine and onion pie. In the old town, people celebrated the Heidelberg autumn. At every corner, music groups played deep into the night. The whole city was astir. My mother and I walked along the main street and stopped here and there to listen to a band. Suddenly I felt queasy: On the stage, a rock band was playing, and at the bass stood … Dieter.
When I pointed him out to my mother, she was not particularly impressed.
“That’s who is keeping you up at night?” she said somewhat disparagingly. “He’s not worth it. And he isn’t even particularly good-looking.”
At first, I was shocked by her judgment, but then I tried to see Dieter through my mother’s eyes. For the first time, I asked myself what it was about him that had such a hold on me. I didn’t find an answer.
* * *
After that chance encounter, I developed the healthy desire to finally put an end to the Dieter obsession. I had been agonizing over him much too long already. So I decided one day to meet with my ex. My mother was right. I had to find out whether I was really still in love with him or only wanted to cling to something I had once felt for him. I called him and arranged to meet him the next afternoon in his room in the residence hall, where he still lived.
The hours before our meeting were probably among the hardest I had experienced in Heidelberg up to that point. I told my mother nothing about the plan. I wanted to get through the whole thing on my own and tell her about it only afterward.
It was a strange feeling to go back to Comeniushaus, the place where I had fallen so deeply in love. I still had his room number memorized.
Dieter greeted me coolly. I sat down and told him outright that I still had feelings for him. He didn’t seem particularly surprised about that, but only answered, “I know.” He smiled as he spoke. Oh, that smile! I still remembered it so well. With that smile he had always looked a little shy and embarrassed and at the same time irresistible. But that afternoon I detected in his eyes neither shyness nor embarrassment. He seemed self-confident and superior. And I sensed myself moving away from him inwardly.
Suddenly, I no longer recognized the man sitting in front of me. Had I really pined for him for two years? He showed no sympathy at all for my lovesickness. On the contrary, he seemed to enjoy the fact that I was still in love with him.
When we parted, I knew that I could banish him from my mind. I had done the right thing with my visit. Finally, I could heave a sigh of relief and face forward again.
And when I told my mother about it, she only smiled at me meaningfully. The rest of the time we spent completely lightheartedly. We were enjoying being together and the good mood between us much too much to let sad stories ruin it for us. We spent a lot of time with my friends. I wanted my mother to get to know all of them before she had to fly back to Kenya.
