And Then Life Happens: A Memoir

by Auma Obama

  * * *

  In Kendu Bay, we were welcomed as warmly as in Alego. The family was happy to meet Barack. They asked almost as many questions as he did. For me, it was not always simple to introduce Barack to his relatives without getting lost in the confusion of the familial relationships.

  Back in Nairobi, we were invited to dinner by more family members. In some cases, I would have preferred it if Barack had gone alone, but my brother insisted that I accompany him. Uncle Odima was among those I didn’t necessarily want to see. I had mostly unpleasant memories of him and his family and had not been in contact with him for many years. But now I had made Barack curious about this uncle with all my stories.

  “Odima lived with you, with our father. I have to meet him and his family.” My brother looked at me imploringly.

  “You should do that. I just don’t want to be there.”

  “That would be impolite. They must know that I’m staying with you.”

  I didn’t want to tell Barack that I didn’t care about that and that I didn’t owe that family anything. Only because I saw his disappointed expression, I gave in.

  * * *

  The visit with Ruth was also difficult. I had run into her in the city and told her that Barack was with me. She invited us to lunch and mentioned that Mark (Okoth) was also staying in Nairobi at that time. I accepted the invitation, for I thought that Barack should meet this younger brother, too.

  We arrived on time at the home of our father’s third wife. Her house was not hard to find. She lived on the large street that leads from Spring Valley to Gigiri, a beautiful area of the capital. She had sold the house in Lavington a long time ago. With the proceeds, I had been told, she had opened a preschool.

  After we had turned onto her property, I parked my old Beetle in the gravel driveway. Even before we had climbed out of the car, Ruth was already standing at the front door, a broad smile on her face.

  “Welcome!” she said heartily as we got out. She was looking warmly at Barack. “And you must be Barry.”

  “Barack,” he corrected her. I knew that my brother didn’t like being called Barry; only with our grandmother had he taken no exception to it.

  “Come in, Rita,” she said, turning to me. Although I had told her several times that I wanted to be called Auma, she stuck with Rita. To avoid any friction, I resigned myself to it.

  Another person was standing at the door, too. It was not Mark, whom I had not seen since he was nine years old, but Juliana, the domestic help my stepmother had taken with her when she left us. I greeted Juliana with a somewhat reserved smile—too many years had passed, too much was unresolved, and too much still hurt.

  Shortly thereafter, we stood in a living room with a dining table that was already set. The middle of the room was dominated by a seating area, and next to glass doors that led onto a terrace and into a large garden, there was a piano. I looked out the window and thought of my only previous visit to this house. That time I had come to stand at Opiyo’s graveside. Family members had told me that only Ruth knew where he was buried. After his death, they had tried to bury him in Alego in accordance with Luo tradition. But Ruth had resisted that vehemently, even though according to the old customs she had no authority to decide about Opiyo. Nonetheless, she had managed to retain control over the son she had only called David. She had his body cremated—the Luo are unacquainted with such a funeral rite—and his urn buried in her garden.

  I looked at that part of the garden where I had said farewell to my brother almost six years earlier. Too bad that Opiyo is not with us, I thought. He would have been so happy about Barack’s visit.

  “I’ll get Mark,” Ruth said, and left the room. My brother and I looked at each other, but said nothing. My look must have revealed that I found the situation extremely uncomfortable. Patience, patience, Barack’s eyes seemed to reply. I smiled faintly and was about to make a sardonic remark when Ruth entered the room again, followed by a young man with an Afro and a defiant face.

  “This is Mark,” she announced proudly. The sentence was directed at Barack, who had taken a seat on the sofa. He stood up and said formally, “Hi, Mark. How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you.” Mark’s answer was no less formal. It was clear that he wasn’t particularly interested in the brother who had suddenly turned up. He probably remained in the room only because his mother had told him to.

  “Mark is a great pianist,” said Ruth, when we had all sat down and there was a lapse in the small talk. “He should play something for you.

  “Come on, Mark, play something,” she implored him. “The two of them would definitely enjoy it.”

  Mark did not look thrilled. But when he replied that we probably didn’t feel like listening to him play anything, we protested politely, of course. I wondered whether his mother’s demand might have embarrassed him a little. But during the brief, stiff exchange with Barack, he had not struck me as shy. He had seemed confident, almost arrogant. Mark wasn’t shy. He just didn’t want to be shown off.

  I have to admit that he elicited beautiful sounds from the piano. He played outstandingly. When the piece was over, I applauded not only to be polite, but also because I was truly impressed.

  Mark stood up from the piano stool and accepted our compliments as if they were the most obvious thing in the world. But without music we again had to cultivate the conversation ourselves. We were at the mercy of the melodrama that I had in the meantime silently dubbed The Reluctant Meeting of Two Brothers.

  At that moment, Juliana appeared and asked whether she should serve the food. Ruth stood up and followed her into the kitchen. She looked satisfied—no wonder, with her son’s musical abilities.

  Whether Ruth’s two sons from her second marriage—she had gotten married again, to a man from Tanzania—ate lunch with us, I no longer recall. I can see only Barack and Mark in my mind’s eye, trying out of respect for Ruth to show a certain interest in each other. Before we said good-bye shortly after eating, my stepmother urged the two of them to exchange addresses. That way they could stay in contact in America. They did as she said, probably in the certain knowledge that neither would continue the brotherly contact.

  * * *

  “The things I do for you!” I groaned, when we were back in the car.

  “It went well, don’t you think?” Barack grinned mischievously.

  “But of course. Mark this, Mark that. Did you hear the way they talked about our father? It was as if he never meant anything to them. Ruth I can understand—that is, I can’t really understand her attitude, only accept it. But Mark? What reason does he have? And he’s so full of himself!”

  “Maybe he’s a bit insecure. And our father didn’t exactly leave them with the best impression.”

  “Always the diplomat. Typical, that you interpret Mark’s snootiness as insecurity. For me, he was just plain arrogant.” I knew that I was perhaps being unfair to Mark, but I couldn’t help myself. I was simply angry that he had received us without any sense of joy or warmth. And after I had heard nothing but disparaging remarks about my father during lunch, I was not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Today I think that Mark’s standoffish facade concealed much that remained unresolved from his childhood. After all, the memories were still vivid for me, too.

  * * *

  Before Barack and I left Ruth, we had visited Opiyo’s grave in the garden. Neither of us had spoken a word. And inwardly, I had again regretted that Opiyo was not with us. Perhaps he would have managed to bring us all together again.

  * * *

  Our complicated family situation fueled another desire in Barack: He asked me to introduce him to George, our father’s youngest son.

  Because I was no longer in contact with George and his mother, Jael, I did not know their new place of residence. But eventually I found out where our youngest brother went to school. So Barack and I decided to go there and greet him briefly during a break between classes.

  At first, everything went accor
ding to plan. We visited the school principal and told her our request. She asked us to wait a few minutes, for soon the bell would ring. She showed us the door to George’s classroom; we could wait for him outside in the hall. But on her way back to her office, the principal must have thought twice about our plan and called Jael to tell her about us. For when the bell rang, and the doors of all the classrooms flew open, filling the school with loud children’s voices, she rushed toward us from the end of the hall. We had just begun to ask a few boys and girls about George. They pointed him out to us, and we approached a lively eight-year-old.

  “Hi George,” said Barack. The boy looked up at him with curiosity, and then glanced at me.

  “I’m Auma, your sister, and this is Barack, your brother,” I explained, but by then the principal was standing next to us.

  “I’m sorry,” she broke in. “But you can’t talk to George.”

  “Why not?”

  “I spoke to his mother on the telephone, and she did not allow it.”

  “My brother came all the way from the United States and would like to meet his family, and George is part of it, too.” I tried to soften up the principal, but she remained firm.

  “Nonetheless, that’s not possible. You really have to leave the school now.”

  George stood there uncomprehendingly and looked from one of us to the other. He didn’t know us, and so he didn’t grasp the meaning of all this.

  “Okay, let’s go,” said Barack. He sensed the combativeness awakening in me, but he didn’t want to make a scene. “We’ve seen George, after all.”

  Then he turned to the boy. “It was really nice to see you, little brother. I would have liked to exchange a few more words with you, but that’s not possible right now.”

  “See you soon, George,” I said, giving him my hand.

  “Bye,” the little one replied politely. His facial expression revealed nothing.

  What might have been going through his young head at that moment? Suddenly two strangers appeared claiming to be his brother and his sister. That must have been confusing!

  “Does Jael have reasons to behave like that?” Barack asked, scarcely able to conceal his disappointment.

  “She had a quarrel with my mother. It was about our father’s inheritance. Since then, she doesn’t talk to us anymore. I’m really sorry for you.”

  A bit later Barack and I sat silently side by side in the car. Our father had not made it easy for us.

  * * *

  When no family visit was on the agenda, we took excursions, once to the coast, another time to the Maasai Mara game reserve. I wanted Barack to see how beautiful his father’s country was.

  To visit the national park, we joined a three-day safari tour. The driver chose the route along the ridge that led down into the Rift Valley escarpment. I knew this stretch well and told Barack every few minutes about the spectacular view that had eluded us on our train journey to Kisumu.

  When I was a child, my father had often chosen this route when we visited our grandparents in the country. It had once been the main connection between Mombasa and Kisumu. Usually, we stopped along the way at a tiny church, which had been built by Italian POWs during the Second World War.

  The journey went steeply uphill, and I remembered that I got dizzy when I looked through the car window into the depths. Now, this winding street was riddled with potholes, but then we finally came around the last curve—and before us lay a breathtaking panoramic landscape. Awestruck, I stood next to my brother and viewed the land of our ancestors.

  After that, it took another five hours before we reached the national park. Our group consisted of Europeans and Americans. I explained to Barack that we Kenyans usually couldn’t afford the expensive safaris.

  “Look, a Thomson’s gazelle,” the Italian sitting next to me suddenly exclaimed.

  “What does Thomson have to do with it?” I objected didactically. “We’ve always had these animals here. Just because this Scottish explorer, Joseph Thomson, discovered with astonishment an animal that did not exist where he was from, now it’s named after him? The Kenyans call it swara.”

  The Italian looked at me with surprise. Barack had already gotten used to me and my Kenyan pride and just smiled. He probably also suspected that I was not yet done with my comments.

  “Don’t you think that’s offensive?” I asked seriously.

  The man didn’t know how to answer my question. He looked around in confusion.

  “I don’t want to be impolite, but many other things here were renamed by Europeans, as if they were the first human beings to discover them. I just wonder what the Africans were for them, then. Apparently not human beings.”

  Over the next two days, we saw many more animals, and what had initially been a very serious discussion turned into a game, in which we debated which name fit best, the official one or the traditional one.

  * * *

  Mombasa, the city on the coast, was an entirely different experience from Maasai Mara. Once again we took the train to reach our destination. We headed eastward. Early in the morning we arrived in the lively port city, then we took the ferry and finally a matatu, a local minibus. Barack, curious about the countrymen of his Kenyan family, tried to have a conversation with the driver in English. But the man answered him in Kiswahili, the customary language on the Kenyan coast. He refused to believe that Barack, who looked like many of the coastal dwellers with his light brown skin, spoke no Kiswahili.

  “I’m an American,” Barack tried to explain, when he saw the man’s puzzled look. I nodded affirmatively.

  “If he’s an American, then why is he taking a matatu?” the minibus driver asked me in Kiswahili.

  “Because he’s a poor American. He’s a student,” I answered. I immediately translated the conversation into English, so that Barack knew what it was about, too.

  “There’s no such thing as poor Americans,” a fellow passenger from the back of the bus interjected in English.

  “Yes, there is!” Barack replied. “You’re looking at one right now.”

  “But he’s also Luo,” I added proudly.

  “Well, that explains a lot,” said the driver, and laughed out loud. I wasn’t sure whether the remark alluded to his inability to speak Kiswahili or his poverty.

  The other passengers now wanted to know more about the strange American and asked him many questions. When we got off the matatu, we felt as if we were saying good-bye to good friends, even though passengers had been getting on and off along the whole way.

  * * *

  At the entrance to our hotel, we were greeted by a surly guard. But we didn’t let that spoil our good mood. The weather was magnificent and the sea was invitingly blue. We swam and lazed about. I showed my brother the Mombasa old town and Fort Jesus, which had a checkered history. During their colonial period, the British had used the fortress as a prison, among other things.

  “Not many Kenyans vacation here,” I explained to my brother, when he called my attention to the fact that there seemed to be scarcely any black tourists.

  “That’s a shame. It’s really beautiful, and for the history alone more Kenyans should come here,” Barack replied.

  “Unfortunately, it’s too expensive for most of them. And even if they have money, they are not always welcome,” I said.

  “Hopefully, that will change soon.” My brother looked at me thoughtfully.

  I had already warned him that Africans were not readily accepted as guests in most of the hotels frequented by foreign, predominantly white tourists. Black women in particular frequently encountered that reaction, for they were typically regarded as prostitutes.

  Years later, that changed, and I witnessed how the people who ran tourist establishments on the coast were forced by the political unrest to solicit native vacationers. Because foreign tourists stayed away, the hotels had to reorient themselves and seek to attract clientele in their own country.

  * * *

  When it was time to say go
od-bye, Barack had become for me a brother with shared experiences. For the two of us there was no question that we would remain in close contact.

  21.

  IT WAS LOVE that made me leave Kenya after a year and return to Germany. Certainly, I also wanted to pursue my doctorate—but if it hadn’t been for my longing for Karl, I might have remained in my native country. In the previous twelve months, I had felt really at home and achieved more professionally than I had initially expected.

  In any case, now I was back in Germany. I wanted to write my dissertation under Professor Alois Wierlacher, but because he had gone to Bayreuth during my “time-out,” I could no longer stay in Heidelberg—I, too, had to move to the Wagner city. Fortunately, Karl had been living in Nuremberg in the meantime to finish his law studies there, so that he was only an hour away from me by car or train. As often as possible, I visited him. But unfortunately, he visited me less frequently, which meant that I spent much more time in Nuremberg and as a result did not make many friends in Bayreuth. I often felt very lonely when I was there. Almost imperceptibly, this—among other things—led to my increasing dissatisfaction with our relationship. I felt as if I were pulling on a rope that would not give.

  To top it all off, not everything in my studies was going the way I had imagined, either. My dissertation topic, which dealt with the perception of work in German literature, was not among my professor’s major interests; at that point he was more interested in the subject of food in German literature. Therefore, I constantly had to vie for his attention. During that time of disillusionment, Barbara and Donald and their two daughters, Roma and Sandra, came into my life and saved the day. Donald was Kenyan. We unexpectedly became acquainted, and he invited me to his home. His Polish wife, Barbara, and I became close friends. Their family became my refuge whenever I sought a place of warmth and wanted to talk in depth about things.