Barack Obama Dreams from My Father

buy her a soda, you can have two carvings and the necklace she’s making for five hundred shillings.”

The young man went to buy sodas for all of us, and we sat on wooden stools that the old woman pulled

out from behind a large chest. She told us about her business, the rent she had to pay the government for

the use of her stall, how her other son joined the army because there was no land left to work in their

village. Across from us, another woman wove colored straw into baskets; beside her, a man cut a hide into

long strips to be used for some purse straps.

I watched these nimble hands stitch and cut and weave, and listened to the old woman’s voice roll over

the sounds of work and barter, and for a moment the world seemed entirely transparent. I began to imagine

an unchanging rhythm of days, lived on firm soil where you could wake up each morning and know that all

was how it had been yesterday, where you saw how the things that you used had been made and could

recite the lives of those who had made them and could believe that it would all hang together without

computer terminals or fax machines. And all of this while a steady procession of black faces passed before

your eyes, the round faces of babies and the chipped, worn faces of the old; beautiful faces that made me

understand the transformation that Asante and other black Americans claimed to have undergone after their

first visit to Africa. For a span of weeks or months, you could experience the freedom that comes from not

feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump

sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or

read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart,

without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the

world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life

without living a lie or committing betrayal.

How tempting, I thought, to fly away with this moment intact. To have this feeling of ease wrapped up

as neatly as the young man was now wrapping Auma’s necklace, and take it back with me to America to

slip on whenever my spirits flagged.

But of course that wasn’t possible. We finished our sodas. Money changed hands. We left the

marketplace. The moment slipped away.

We turned onto Kimathi Street, named after one of the leaders of the Mau-Mau rebellion. I had read a

book about Kimathi before leaving Chicago and remembered a photograph of him: one in a group of

dreadlocked men who lived in the forest and spread secret oaths among the native population-the prototype

guerrilla fighter. It was a clever costume he had chosen for himself (Kimathi and the other Mau-Mau leaders

had served in British regiments in their previous lives), an image that played on all the fears of the colonial

West, the same sort of fear that Nat Turner had once evoked in the antebellum South and coke-crazed

muggers now evoked in the minds of whites in Chicago.

Of course, the Mau-Mau lay in Kenya’s past. Kimathi had been captured and executed. Kenyatta had

been released from prison and inaugurated Kenya’s first president. He had immediately assured whites who

were busy packing their bags that businesses would not be nationalized, that landholdings would be kept

intact, so long as the black man controlled the apparatus of government. Kenya became the West’s most

stalwart pupil in Africa, a model of stability, a useful contrast to the chaos of Uganda, the failed socialism of

Tanzania. Former freedom fighters returned to their villages or joined the civil service or ran for a seat in

Parliament. Kimathi became a name on a street sign, thoroughly tamed for the tourists.

I took the opportunity to study these tourists as Auma and I sat down for lunch in the outdoor

café of the New Stanley Hotel. They were everywhere-Germans, Japanese, British, Americans-taking

pictures, hailing taxis, fending off street peddlers, many of them dressed in safari suits like extras on a

movie set. In Hawaii, when we were still kids, my friends and I had laughed at tourists like these, with their

sunburns and their pale, skinny legs, basking in the glow of our obvious superiority. Here in Africa, though,

the tourists didn’t seem so funny. I felt them as an encroachment, somehow; I found their innocence

vaguely insulting. It occurred to me that in their utter lack of self-consciousness, they were expressing a

freedom that neither Auma nor I could ever experience, a bedrock confidence in their own parochialism, a

confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures.

Just then I noticed an American family sit down a few tables away from us. Two of the African waiters

immediately sprang into action, both of them smiling from one ear to the other. Since Auma and I hadn’t yet

been served, I began to wave at the two waiters who remained standing by the kitchen, thinking they must

have somehow failed to see us. For some time they managed to avoid my glance, but eventually an older

man with sleepy eyes relented and brought us over two menus. His manner was resentful, though, and after

several more minutes he showed no signs of ever coming back. Auma’s face began to pinch with anger,

and again I waved to our waiter, who continued in his silence as he wrote down our orders. At this point, the

Americans had already received their food and we still had no place settings. I overheard a young girl with a

blond ponytail complain that there wasn’t any ketchup. Auma stood up.

“Let’s go.”

She started heading for the exit, then suddenly turned and walked back to the waiter, who was

watching us with an impassive stare.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Auma said to him, her voice shaking. “You should be ashamed.”

The waiter replied brusquely in Swahili.

“I don’t care how many mouths you have to feed, you cannot treat your own people like dogs. Here…”

Auma snapped open her purse and took out a crumpled hundred-shilling note. “You see!” she shouted. “I

can pay for my own damn food.”

She threw the note to the ground, then marched out onto the street. For several minutes we wandered

without apparent direction, until I finally suggested we sit down on a bench beside the central post office.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She nodded. “That was stupid, throwing away money like that.” She set down her purse beside her and

we watched the traffic pass. “You know, I can’t go to a club in any of these hotels if I’m with another African

woman,” she said eventually. “The askaris will turn us away, thinking we are prostitutes. The same in any of

these big office buildings. If you don’t work there, and you are African, they will stop you until you tell them

your business. But if you’re with a German friend, then they’re all smiles. ‘Good evening, miss,’ they’ll say.

‘How are you tonight?’” Auma shook her head. “That’s why Kenya, no matter what its GNP, no matter how

many things you can buy here, the rest of Africa laughs. It’s the whore of Africa, Barack. It opens its legs to

anyone who can pay.”

I told Auma she was being too hard on the Kenyan, that the same sort of thing happened in Djakarta or

Mexico City-just an unfortunate matter of economics. But as we started back toward the apartment, I knew

my words had done nothing to soothe her bitterness. I suspected that she was right: not all the tourists in

Nairobi had come for the wildlife. Some came because Kenya, without shame, offered to re-create an age

when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested comfortably on the backs of the darker races; an age of

innocence before Kimathi and other angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta started to

lash out in street crime and revolution. In Kenya, a white man could still walk through Isak Dinesen’s home

and imagine romance with a mysterious young baroness, or sip gin under the ceiling fans of the Lord

Delamare Hotel and admire portraits of Hemingway smiling after a successful hunt, surrounded by grim-

faced coolies. He could be served by a black man without fear or guilt, marvel at the exchange rate, and

leave a generous tip; and if he felt a touch of indigestion at the sight of leprous beggars outside the hotel, he

could always administer a ready tonic. Black rule has come, after all. This is their country. We’re only

visitors.

Did our waiter know that black rule had come? Did it mean anything to him? Maybe once, I thought to

myself. He would be old enough to remember independence, the shouts of “Uhuru!” and the raising of new

flags. But such memories may seem almost fantastic to him now, distant and naive. He’s learned that the

same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot

eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels that the white man has built. He sees the money of the city

swirling above his head, and the technology that spits out goods from its robot mouth. If he’s ambitious he

will do his best to learn the white man’s language and use the white man’s machines, trying to make ends

meet the same way the computer repairman in Newark or the bus driver back in Chicago does, with

alternating spurts of enthusiasm or frustration but mostly with resignation. And if you say to him that he’s

serving the interests of neocolonialism or some other such thing, he will reply that yes, he will serve if that is

what’s required. It is the lucky ones who serve; the unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd

jobs; many will drown.

Then again, maybe that’s not all that the waiter is feeling. Maybe a part of him still clings to the stories

of Mau-Mau, the same part of him that remembers the hush of a village night or the sound of his mother

grinding corn under a stone pallet. Something in him still says that the white man’s ways are not his ways,

that the objects he may use every day are not of his making. He remembers a time, a way of imagining

himself, that he leaves only at his peril. He can’t escape the grip of his memories. And so he straddles two

worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty,

careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition.

A voice says to him yes, changes have come, the old ways lie broken, and you must find a way as fast

as you can to feed your belly and stop the white man from laughing at you.

A voice says no, you will sooner burn the earth to the ground.
That evening, we drove east to Kariako, a sprawling apartment complex surrounded by dirt lots. The

moon had dropped behind thick clouds, and light drizzle had begun to fall. As we climbed the dark stairwell,

a young man bounded past us onto the broken pavement and into the night. At the top of three flights,

Auma pushed against a door that was slightly ajar.

“Barry! You’ve finally come!”

A short, stocky woman with a cheerful brown face gave me a tight squeeze around the waist. Behind

her were fifteen or so people, all of them smiling and waving like a crowd at a parade. The short woman

looked up at me and frowned.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“I…”

hand. “Come. You must meet everybody here. Zeituni you have already met. This…” she said, leading me

to a handsome older woman in a green patterned dress, “this is my sister, Kezia. She is mother to Auma

and to Roy Obama.”

Kezia took my hand and said my name together with a few words of Swahili.

“She says her other son has finally come home,” Jane said.

“My son,” Kezia repeated in English, nodding and pulling me into a hug. “My son has come home.”

We continued around the room, shaking hands with aunts, cousins, nephews, and nieces. Everyone

greeted me with cheerful curiosity but very little awkwardness, as if meeting a relative for the first time was

an everyday occurrence. I had brought a bag of chocolates for the children, and they gathered around me

with polite stares as the adults tried to explain who I was. I noticed a young man, sixteen or seventeen,

standing against the wall with a watchful expression.

“That’s one of your brothers,” Auma said to me. “Bernard.”

I went over to the young man and we shook hands, studying each other’s faces. I found myself at a

loss for words but managed to ask him how he had been.

“Fine, I guess,” he answered softly, which brought a round of laughter from everyone.

After the introductions were over, Jane pushed me toward a small table set with bowls of goat curry,

fried fish, collards, and rice. As we ate, people asked me about everyone back in Hawaii, and I tried to

describe my life in Chicago and my work as an organizer. They nodded politely but seemed a bit puzzled,

so I mentioned that I’d be studying law at Harvard in the fall.

“Ah, this is good, Barry,” Jane said as she sucked on a bone from the curry. “Your father studied at this

school, Harvard. You will make us all proud, just like him. You see, Bernard, you must study hard like your

brother.”

“Bernard thinks he’s going to be a football star,” Zeituni said.

I turned to Bernard. “Is that right, Bernard?”

“No,” he said, uncomfortable that he’d attracted attention. “I used to play, that’s all.”

“Well…maybe we can play sometime.”

He shook his head. “I like to play basketball now,” he said earnestly. “Like Magic Johnson.”

The meal smothered some of the initial excitement, and the children turned to a large black-and-white

TV that was showing the munificence of the president: the president opens a school; the president

denounces foreign journalists and various Communist elements; the president encourages the nation to

follow the path of nyayo-“footsteps toward progress.” I went with Auma to see the rest of the apartment,

which consisted of two bedrooms, both jammed from one end to the other with old mattresses.

“How many people live here?” I asked.

“I’m not sure right now,” Auma said. “It always changes. Jane doesn’t know how to say no to anybody,

so any relative who moves to the city or loses a job ends up here. Sometimes they stay a long time. Or they

leave their children here. The Old Man and my mum left Bernard here a lot. Jane practically raised him.”

“Can she afford it?”

“Not really. She has a job as a telephone operator, which doesn’t pay so much. She doesn’t complain,

though. She can’t have her own children, so she looks after others’.”

We returned to the living room, and I sank down into an old sofa. In the kitchen, Zeituni directed the

younger women in cleaning the dishes; a few of the children were now arguing about the chocolate I’d

brought. I let my eyes wander over the scene-the well-worn furniture, the two-year-old calendar, the fading

photographs, the blue ceramic cherubs that sat on linen doilies. It was just like the apartments in Altgeld, I

realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. The same noise of gossip and TV. The

perpetual motion of cooking and cleaning and nursing hurts large and small. The same absence of men.

We said our good-byes around ten, promising to visit each and every relative in turn. As we walked to

the door, Jane pulled us aside and lowered her voice. “You need to take Barry to see your Aunt Sarah,” she

whispered to Auma. And then to me: “Sarah is your father’s older sister. The firstborn. She wants to see you

very badly.”

“Of course,” I said. “But why wasn’t she here tonight? Does she live far away?”

Jane looked at Auma, and some unspoken thought passed between them. “Come on, Barack,” Auma

said finally. “I’ll explain it to you in the car.”

The roads were empty and slick with rain. “Jane is right, Barack,” Auma told me as we passed the

university. “You should go see Sarah. But I won’t go with you.”

“Why not?”

“It’s this business with the Old Man’s estate. Sarah is one of the people who has disputed the will.

She’s been telling people that Roy, Bernard, myself-that none of us are the Old Man’s children.” Auma

sighed. “I don’t know. A part of me sympathizes with her. She’s had a hard life. She never had the chances

the Old Man had, you see, to study or go abroad. It made her very bitter. She thinks that somehow my

mum, myself, that we are to blame for her situation.”

“But how much could the Old Man’s estate be worth?”

“Not much. Maybe a small government pension. A piece of worthless land. I try to stay out of it.

Whatever is there has probably been spent on lawyers by now. But you see, everyone expected so much

from the Old Man. He made them think that he had everything, even when he had nothing. So now, instead

of getting on with their lives, they just wait and argue among themselves, thinking that the Old Man

somehow is going to rescue them from his grave. Bernard’s learned this same waiting attitude. You know,

he’s really smart, Barack, but he just sits around all day doing nothing. He dropped out of school and

doesn’t have much prospect for finding work. I’ve told him that I would help him get into some sort of trade

school, whatever he wants, just so he’s doing something, you know. He’ll say okay, but when I ask if he’s

gotten any applications or talked to the schoolmasters, nothing’s been done. Sometimes I feel like, unless I

take every step with him, nothing will happen.”

“Maybe I can help.”

“Yes. Maybe you can talk to him. But now that you’re here, coming from America, you’re part of the

inheritance, you see. That’s why Sarah wants to see you so much. She thinks I’m hiding you from her

because you’re the one with everything.”

The rain had started up again as we parked the car. A single light bulb jutting from the side of the

building sent webbed, liquid shadows across Auma’s face. “The whole thing gets me so tired, Barack,” she

said softly. “You wouldn’t believe how much I missed Kenya when I was in Germany. All I could do was

think about getting back home. I thought how I never feel lonely here, and family is everywhere, nobody

sends their parents to an old people’s home or leaves their children with strangers. Then I’m here and

everyone is asking me for help, and I feel like they are all just grabbing at me and that I’m going to sink. I

feel guilty because I was luckier than them. I went to a university. I can get a job. But what can I do,

Barack? I’m only one person.”

I took Auma’s hand and we remained in the car for several minutes, listening to the rain as it

slackened. “You asked me what my dream was,” she said finally. “Sometimes I have this dream that I will

build a beautiful house on our grandfather’s land. A big house where we can all stay and bring our families,

you see. We could plant fruit trees like our grandfather, and our children would really know the land and

speak Luo and learn our ways from the old people. It would belong to them.”

“We can do all that, Auma.”

She shook her head. “Let me tell you what I start thinking then. I think of who will take care of the

house if I’m not here? I think, who can I count on to make sure that a leak gets fixed or that the fence gets

mended? It’s terrible, selfish, I know. All I can do when I think this way is to get mad at the Old Man

because he didn’t build this house for us. We are the children, Barack. Why do we have to take care of

everyone? Everything is upside down, crazy. I had to take care of myself, just like Bernard. Now I’m used to

living my own life, just like a German. Everything is organized. If something is broken, I fix it. If something

goes wrong, it’s my own fault. If I have it, I send money to the family, and they can do with it what they want,

and I won’t depend on them, and they won’t depend on me.”

“It sounds lonely.”

“Oh, I know, Barack. That’s why I keep coming home. That’s why I’m still dreaming.”

but whenever we tried the lines were always busy. Auma finally suggested that we drive out there

ourselves. At the British Airways desk we found two young women discussing a nightclub that had just

opened. I interrupted their conversation to ask about my bag, and one of them thumbed listlessly through a

stack of papers.

“We have no record of you here,” she said.

“Please check again.”

The woman shrugged. “If you wish, you can come back tonight at midnight. A flight from Johannesburg

comes in at that time.”

“I was told my bag would be delivered to me.”

“I’m sorry, but I have no record of your bag here. If you like, you can fill out another form.”

“Is Miss Omoro here? She-”

“Omoro is on vacation.”

Auma bumped me aside. “Who else can we talk to here, since you don’t seem to know anything.”

“Go downtown if you want to talk to someone else,” the woman said curtly before returning to her

conversation.

Auma was still muttering under her breath when we stepped into the British Airways downtown office. It

was in a high-rise building whose elevators announced each floor electronically in crisp Victorian tones; a

receptionist sat beneath photographs of lion cubs and dancing children. She repeated that we should check

the airport.

“Let me talk to the manager,” I said, trying not to shout.

“I’m sorry, but Mr. Maduri is in a meeting.”

“Look, miss, we have just come from the airport. They told us to come here. Two days ago I was told

my bag would be delivered. Now I’m told that no one even knows it’s missing. I-” I stopped in midsentence.

The receptionist had withdrawn behind a stony mask, a place where neither pleading nor bluster could

reach. Auma apparently saw the same thing, for the air seemed to go out of her as well. Together we

slumped into a pair of lounge chairs, not knowing what to do next, when a hand suddenly appeared on

Auma’s shoulder. Auma turned to find the hand attached to a dark, wiry man dressed in a blue blazer.

“Eh, Uncle! What are you doing here?”

Auma introduced me to the man, who was related to us in a sequence that I couldn’t quite follow. He

asked us if we were planning a trip, and Auma told him what had happened.

“Listen, don’t worry,” our uncle said. “Maduri, he is a good friend of mine. In fact, just now I am about to

have lunch with him.” Our uncle turned crossly to the receptionist, who had been watching our conversation

with considerable interest.

“Mr. Maduri already knows you are here,” she said, smiling.

Mr. Maduri turned out to be a heavyset man with a bulbous nose and a raspy voice. After we had

repeated our story, he immediately picked up the phone. “Hello? Yes, this is Maduri. Who is this? Listen, I