And Then Life Happens: A Memoir

by Auma Obama

  The next morning we made a small fire, as we had the evening before, warmed up a few cans of baked beans, and consumed the contents with some bread. Shortly thereafter, we set off again toward Nairobi. We had covered the long distance to see the lake, had drunk a Coke and two Sprites, slept miserably in a wind-lashed tent, and felt as if we had been on a great adventure. That’s how we were in those days: For a small pleasure, we didn’t shy away from even the greatest effort.

  On the way back, the mostly straight road was as empty as it had been on the way there. To the right and left stretched a dry landscape with low bushes. They would have looked dead but for their small, bright-red flowers, which blurred on the horizon and resembled a blazing fire—an eerily beautiful sight.

  But our adventure was not yet over. After a few hours’ drive, the Beetle began to sputter and finally stopped completely. We got out. Karl and Patrick looked for the cause of the breakdown, and I sat down on a rock and stared into space. We weren’t in a hurry.

  It wasn’t long before the two men had discovered the reason for the problem. Sand had jammed the engine. But no settlement or village, let alone a repair shop, could be seen far and wide. Nor had we encountered another car. We were completely on our own.

  To this day, I am amazed that I wasn’t worried at the time. I was certain that we would somehow overcome this difficulty. And Patrick actually did find the solution. He had once helped out at a car repair shop and knew that in order to continue driving, we only had to find a way to clear the carburetor of sand.

  The two men stuck their heads under the hood and dealt with the innards of the Beetle.

  “We have no choice. We have to clean everything with gasoline,” Patrick asserted.

  “How do you intend to do that?” I asked. “We don’t have any real tools with us, let alone a siphon.”

  “With our mouths,” Patrick answered resolutely.

  “What? Is that even possible?” Karl asked.

  “It’s possible. We have to suck the gasoline out of the tank with our mouths and then clean the individual parts with it.”

  Karl did not look all too thrilled. Nor was I.

  “Are you sure?” I looked first at Patrick and then at my boyfriend.

  “We have no choice,” the two men said, almost simultaneously.

  “Otherwise we’ll have to stay here until someone finds us,” Karl added.

  “But that could take days!” A tiny sense of panic flared up in me. In the past two days, we had seen at most one or two cars.

  “Exactly,” Karl said soberly.

  I didn’t say anything else.

  “So let’s get to it!” Patrick said with gusto.

  “Can I do something?” I didn’t want to just sit there and watch my companions swallow gasoline.

  “No. Just keep an eye out for a car.”

  A big job indeed! So I watched helplessly as Patrick and Karl removed the carburetor and began to clean it with the sucked-out gasoline.

  The whole thing took over an hour. Finally, the men raised their heads and looked at each other.

  “I think that’s it,” Patrick said. Everything stank of gasoline, and I was glad that none of us smoked—who knew what danger we would have exposed ourselves to.

  At that moment, the roar of the engine sounded to my ears like the most beautiful melody. We sighed with relief. As we drove on, I could not rid myself of the thought that we had been damn lucky.

  20.

  SINCE MY TRIP TO CHICAGO, the exchange with my brother had remained lively, as I had suspected—no, had known it would. And when he learned that I would be spending a year working in Kenya, he wanted to visit me there and take the opportunity to see his father’s country for the first time. But Barack did not intend to stay for only a few days; rather, he wanted to devote a whole month to discovering his roots. His desire was to meet as many relatives as possible and to continue with me the conversation we had begun.

  After a painful good-bye, Karl had returned to Germany, and it had gotten very lonely in my small apartment in the beautiful neighborhood of Keleleshwa. So I was all the more excited to have Barack as a guest. The apartment was not very big, but it would suffice for my brother and me. I borrowed a cot from a friend and stowed it in the living room behind the large couch. It would serve my brother as a guest bed during his visit.

  When I expressed my reservations regarding the comfort of the apartment to Barack, he said he was “very low-maintenance.” He explained to me that as long as he had a place to sleep, could jog, and got something to eat, he was happy. But the last of the items he mentioned meant a slight challenge for me. I had never been very domestic, and I knew it would be hard for me to guarantee Barack a warm meal each day. Usually, I ate in the university cafeteria, rarely at home. When Barack came, I tried to shift gears and made an effort to put food on the table every day. But often I forgot to cook or buy groceries, and then my brother had to make do with peanut butter sandwiches and salad.

  * * *

  Aunt Zeituni and I picked up Barack at the airport in my blue Beetle. I was excited; after all, it was only our second meeting.

  He himself had arrived smoothly, but apparently not his suitcase. The next day, we had to drive to the airport again to inquire where his luggage was. I can still see us standing at the Kenya Airways counter, where Barack spoke with one of the members of the ground personnel, a young woman, tall, with a pretty, well-proportioned face and wonderfully smooth, brown skin. Her good looks had definitely not escaped my brother’s attention, for when we finally got his suitcase and had stowed it and sat in the car, he made a remark about her attractive appearance.

  I still remember that we then got into a conversation about relationships in general. He told me that he had just broken up with his girlfriend. They had studied together, but had drifted apart and finally separated—among other reasons, because Barack was planning to leave Chicago to continue his education at Harvard University. He would no longer be returning to America’s West Coast, preferring to stay in the east.

  Of course, Barack asked me how things were going with my German boyfriend. Since Karl had only recently returned to Germany and I really missed him, I wore my heart on my sleeve.

  “You’ve really got it bad,” Barack said, after I had raved to him about Karl.

  “That’s how it should be when you’re in love,” I replied. “I’m definitely happy, apart from the fact that I miss him.”

  Barack laughed. “It’s true, you’re really beaming!”

  * * *

  Again we spoke almost without cease. My brother was preoccupied with many questions, and as the days went by, there were more and more.

  During one of our conversations, he explained to me why he was planning to go to Harvard. He had already studied political science at Occidental College and at Columbia University in New York. Now he wanted to earn a law degree, though he was still working in the projects in Chicago.

  “What I’m doing now is far from enough,” he said resolutely. “There’s only so much I can achieve through my current work. I accompany the people I advocate for to plead their cases to the city authorities. I comfort them when they lose a child to violence or complain about the state of their schools, poor health care, or lack of a pension. But in the position I am in, I cannot ultimately bring about significant change in their lives.”

  I didn’t fully understand. “But you are changing something. You give the people hope for a better future.”

  Barack looked at me seriously. “But that’s not enough. I don’t want to just give them hope. I want to make a better future possible for them or at least for their children.”

  “And how do you plan to do that?”

  “By working within the system to influence legislation and the policies that govern these people’s lives.”

  “But is studying law enough to be able to do that?”

  “No. But I don’t want to study law in order to work solely as a lawyer afterward. I want to
become more politically active. I hope that with a background in law I will be able to have an impact on policy makers.”

  I looked at my brother. He spoke so earnestly, his voice firm and committed. I didn’t doubt for a moment that he meant every word he said.

  Our conversation led us to the subject of world politics. We discussed Africa and the continent’s relationships to the rest of the world, and talked late into the night. Barack listened with interest when I told him about my “development work” in Germany and about how I had ultimately stopped doing it out of frustration.

  “You shouldn’t have quit, Auma,” he said. “I’m sure you were doing good work.”

  I smiled sadly.

  “I was probably in over my head. I always got too worked up.”

  “You can’t do that. You always have to keep your eye on your vision. Sometimes people take longer to understand, but eventually they get it. I believe firmly in that.”

  “Maybe you’re so optimistic because you come from a country where it’s possible to dream. Here you can dream as much as you want, but in most cases it doesn’t go beyond hope. Just think of our old man,” I said.

  “He just didn’t try to become a decision maker, someone who determines what really happens.”

  “Oh yes, he did,” I protested. “Only no one wanted to listen to him. He was the leading economist in the Ministry of Finance and advised the government in all economic matters. Wasn’t that enough?”

  “No, because his proposals were not backed by legislation.”

  “Does that mean that only legal experts can change the world?”

  “Of course not.” Barack laughed out loud. “It takes much more than legal skills to do that. But laws have a significant impact on people’s lives. If you want to make a difference, you have to put yourself in a position from which you can influence events. Our father apparently didn’t know how to do that.”

  My brother’s argument did not entirely persuade me. My view was more that the possibility of bringing about serious and meaningful social change very much depended on what type of person one was. There were people who could carry others along with them. They could convince others with their visions—my father was not one of those people. He was too much a loner, too much a man of ideas. Though he was forward thinking, he was not necessarily the best person to realize his visions.

  To Barack I said, “What you are trying in the United States would be much more difficult in Kenya. But knowing you, you’ll definitely accomplish it.”

  * * *

  Shortly after his arrival, we decided to visit our grandmother Sarah. We chose to take the train, because in those days it was still reliable, and comfortable, too. In the early evening, the train slowly rolled out of the station and departed Nairobi’s center with increasing speed. It headed toward the Great Rift Valley, which became world-famous through the film Out of Africa. Unfortunately, we saw nothing of the East African Rift, because by the time we passed through the valley, it was already dark. While the train crew made our beds, we went to eat dinner in the dining car. The old car with its colonial flair seemed like a museum piece. The waiter proudly showed us the royal coat of arms of the British Empire on the knives and forks and huge soup spoons that lay on the small dining tables.

  “We still praise the British here and are proud of our colonial heritage. People don’t think about how much was destroyed back then in this country.” I had to get this comment off my chest.

  Barack shrugged and said with a smile, “Ignorance is bliss.”

  The next morning at sunrise we approached Kisumu, our first stop. There were green fields everywhere, in which various types of grain were growing. The sight conveyed an impression of wealth and abundance.

  It was as if Barack had read my mind, for he said with astonishment, “The landscape is completely at odds with the image of starving Africans that we have in the West.”

  “Our reality is at odds with Western preconceptions in many ways,” I replied. “But we’re not the only ones who see this; others do, too, though they don’t register it. I’m talking about fellow Africans. It’s as if we are blocked. Many of us flee the rural life, only to end up in slums in the city. And we ourselves reinforce the image of poor, starving Africans. It reminds me of my experiences in Germany. The people there often didn’t perceive me as I really was, but rather according to their own preconceptions. Even when I had discussions with them for hours and explained to them that I was different from the preconceived image in their head, most of the time they refused to believe it. Even the fact that I spoke German almost fluently usually didn’t change anything. Some went on speaking to me in that strange Tarzan German. And if I wore traditional West African clothing—in Kenya, we don’t have a traditional national dress—they would comment that I now looked like a ‘real African.’”

  Leaving the Kisumu train station, we took a taxi to the central bus depot. There we boarded a minibus that would stop in Alego Nyangoma. Finally, around noon, we got off the bus and stood, exhausted from the bumpy ride over bad roads, in front of the “shopping center” of Nyangoma, which was actually nothing of the sort. It consisted of only a few tiny shops, a small marketplace, and an outdoor bicycle repair shop, where a man fixed punctured tires under a huge tree.

  My grandmother was already approaching when we reached the top of the hill that formed the edge of the upper part of our land. I ran toward her. Barack followed somewhat more slowly.

  “Nyar Baba!” said Granny Sarah, laughing out loud. In Luo those words mean “Daddy’s little girl.” My grandmother always called me Nyar Baba when she was especially happy about my coming. She lavished other pet names on me, too, but with “Daddy’s little girl” she expressed all her love.

  I hugged her and greeted her warmly. “Nadi, Mama?” I asked. (“How are you, Mama?”) From an early age, I had called my grandmother “Mama.”

  “Very well. And whom have you brought with you there?”

  I had intentionally not “warned” her. The visit was supposed to be a surprise.

  Barack, who had stood patiently behind me, now held out his hand to our grandmother.

  “Nadi?” he said with an American accent.

  Our Granny burst out laughing.

  “And he even speaks Luo!”

  In the meantime, other family members from the compound, attracted by our voices, had joined us, too.

  “I’m Barack,” my brother introduced himself. “Barack Obama.”

  My grandmother threw her hands in the air and let out a cry that cut me to the quick. It sounded as if she had hurt herself terribly. I looked at her worriedly, and from her facial expression I could tell that she didn’t know whether to weep or laugh. The surprise had been a success.

  “Barry? Is it really you? How lucky I am to have lived long enough to meet you! Auma, have you really brought Barry home?” She was beside herself with joy. “If only your father were still alive!” With the edge of her leso, a wraparound garment that Kenyan women wear around their hips, she wiped the tears from her eyes. Then she pressed Barack tightly to her ample bosom and pulled him by the arm to the main building on the homestead, my grandfather’s house. The relatives who had come over had in the meantime taken our luggage from us and walked ahead toward the house.

  “We have to slaughter a rooster immediately,” my grandmother exclaimed excitedly as we walked. “The occasion must be celebrated. My grandson has come from America. Osumba, Guala! Bi uru, come here!” Osumba and Guala were my grandmother’s younger children, who still lived with her.

  She spoke quickly and loudly, literally breathless with happiness about Barack’s appearance. I followed the two of them, smiling, for I had expected this reaction to Barack’s “homecoming.”

  Most of the time we spent telling stories. Barack thereby learned some more about our father—for example, how he had refused as a small boy to go to the local primary school, because a woman and not a man taught there. In those days, the teachers were per
mitted to cane children, and our father vehemently resisted being beaten by a woman. He even managed to persuade his parents to send him to school in N’giya, a small village two and a half miles away.

  Barack also met new relatives and participated enthusiastically in the rural family life. My brother observed everything closely; despite the fact that on our grandmother’s homestead he got only a glimpse of traditional Luo life, he wanted to experience it as fully as possible. He went into the fields with our grandmother and watched how they were tilled. Together we accompanied her to the market. There she brought the cabbage and other vegetables grown in the garden, and Barack helped her carry the large sack. All the people eyed him with curiosity, and Granny Sarah told them excitedly about her grandson who had come all the way from America to Kenya to visit her. Unfortunately, Barack spoke no Luo, and my grandmother could barely converse in English. Nonetheless, they managed to communicate wonderfully with gestures.

  * * *

  After several days, we left my grandmother to travel on to Karachuonyo. In this village on the shores of Lake Victoria lived additional members of the Obama family. It was also where my father and my mother had fallen in love at a dance. Though the Obamas originally came from Alego, our great-grandfather, Obama Opiyo, left Alego to take up residence in Karachuonyo, where land was allotted to him. There his sons and daughters were born. One of these children was my grandfather, Onyango Hussein. Grandfather Onyango was a very community-oriented young man, who liked to participate in political events in Kendu Bay. But it was made clear to him that he was an outsider and thus had no say in decisions. Because he was a proud man, he didn’t want to feel slighted anymore, and so he set off with his family to return to his father’s home. His siblings remained behind and settled in Karachuonyo, where they established their families.

  Grandfather Onyango was accompanied on his return by my biological grandmother, Akumu, his second wife and my father’s mother, as well as Sarah, his third wife, at that time his young bride. His first wife, Halima, refused to come with him. She had heard that Alego was very primitive and backward, and she did not want to live there. Ultimately, Akumu didn’t last long in Alego either. After only a brief stay she departed the compound and left her three children behind, my father and his sisters, Nyaoke and Auma. Nyaoke, the oldest, was twelve at the time, my father nine. Auma was still a baby. They all grew up with Granny Sarah. Although she was not their biological mother, Granny Sarah was nonetheless considered their mother by tradition and years later became the only grandmother I really knew. When I introduced her to Barack, he, too, embraced her as our Granny.