BIOGRAPHY: BILL McSWEENEYreviews The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's FatherBy Sally H Jacobs Public Affairs, 297pp, $27.99
IN 1961, a report on a black student from the University of Hawaii to the US immigration authorities stated that the “Subject has been running around with several girls since he arrived here and last summer [we] cautioned him about his playboy ways. Subject replied ‘that he would “try” to stay away from the girls’.”
Try as he might, Barack Obama snr, like a latter-day St Augustine, had still not controlled his urges three years later when he was pursuing a PhD programme in economics at Harvard. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service were after him again. Their memo from June 1964 records that Harvard officials were trying “to get rid of him” and “couldn’t seem to figure out how many wives he had”. But they were “going to try to cook something up to ease him out . . . ”.
This was the 1960s, an age when students were having sex for breakfast, but black-on-white sex was still distasteful to the official palate.
As Richard Adams wrote in the Guardianwhen the immigration documents were made available online in April this year, the 1960s was an era when racially-mixed marriage was still illegal in many parts of the US. State laws banning interracial marriage in the US were only overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1967 and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that miscegenation rather than prudery motivated the official concern with Obama's lifestyle.
Sally H Jacobs tells an intriguing story about the father of the American president. His own father, Onyango Obama, took the name Hussein on converting from Christianity to Islam after the first World War. This set him at odds with his tribal community of Luos, but such a break with family tradition never bothered this supremely confident and arrogant Kenyan. After discarding several women who failed to live up to his housekeeping demands, Hussein Onyango (President Obama’s grandfather) found one agreeable to him. Walking in the woods one day, “he spotted a beautiful young woman with broad cheeks and deep-set brown eyes, carrying a basket of fish”, as Jacobs tells it. He dragged her back to his hut, and the rest is presidential history.
In his mid-20s, in 1959, having demonstrated an extraordinary self-discipline in pursuit of his educational aspirations, Obama snr found the money to take up a place at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu: This would be a passport to his rightful position among the elite of the new Kenya, just now emerging from the humiliations of a despoiled colony.
Obama was already married to a 16-year-old Kenyan named Kezia, whom he left behind to pursue his studies and who was now expecting their second child. That was no barrier to his inclinations in his new life in Hawaii. In the university he met a beautiful young American girl of 17 who fell hopelessly in love with this whirlwind just blown in from his ancestral village in Africa. Within a few months Ann Dunham was pregnant and the first black president of the United States was on his way.
Obama snr wanted to be an economist in part because he was attracted to the intellectual rigour of the discipline; in equal part because he was certain that this was where he would find his niche. This was the guarantee that he would rise to his deserved station when he returned to his native land. As the author writes, becoming an economist would “cast him as a catalyst in the unfolding drama of Kenya’s independence, a Big Man in the tableau of movers and shakers just then coming to the fore”.
It was not from the academies of Honolulu – or even New York, which offered him a comprehensive package of inducements – that an economist commanding the highest rewards and status would emerge. For Obama, Harvard was the world’s greatest university and only Harvard would equip him for the elite role he would play in the new Kenya.
In the progressive social policies of Jomo Kenyatta and Obama snr’s closer friend and colleague, Tom Mboya, he watched the struggle for independence from afar. Like the Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah, Obama snr was convinced that capitalism could accommodate the communalist values of his African homeland, and he ached to join the political fray with the emerging leadership in Kenya.
But first he needed that PhD from Harvard. And Harvard was not ready to oblige their Kenyan playboy, however talented he was. When the letter came from the university’s International Office in May 1964, he was shocked. In his hubris he had never imagined that the world’s greatest university, from which he expected the highest honours, would kick him out. He had demonstrated mathematical and analytical skills of the highest order; he had achieved all that had been asked of him, as he saw it, and now he was being ordered to leave the country.
But hope resurfaced from the usual quarters. This time it was a 27-year-old named Ruth Baker, with wavy blond hair and a major in business. She was looking for change in her life when she met it on the dance floor. Obama snr, “wearing his crisp white shirt and pressed gabardine pants . . . was bumping out a rhumba at a festive summer party of Nigerians”. That was yet another of his talents. In his youth he had honed a natural gift for rhythm and movement into a class act. He was the John Travolta of wherever he could find other dancers to stand back and applaud, and he played the part for all he was worth. So what if he didn’t get the PhD – he just called himself Dr Obama.
Back in Kenya, his arrogance and a rapidly-developing dependence on alcohol combined to crush his spirit and destroy his career. Seldom sober, sacked from three jobs, he suffered multiple injuries from driving while drunk, and eventually killed himself behind the wheel in a stupor of alcohol in 1982.
Among the grainy photographs which the author includes in her book there is one of particular interest. Taken in Honolulu airport in 1971, it depicts a young boy and his father in playful mode, an image of affectionate bonding. But the image deceives. The future president of the United States was 10 years old at the time and he had not seen his father since he was a baby. By now the father's health and fortunes were in decline and there was little left of the natty, energetic Kenyan who had fathered him – and seven others besides – for a young boy to relate to. "I often felt mute before him," the future president recalled in his memoir Dreams from My Father. As the Christmas visit dragged on the young boy "began to count the days until my father would leave and things would return to normal".
A man more unlike his son in the White House is hard to imagine. Jacobs tells a fascinating story of a likeable, reckless, talented fool whose dreams of himself far exceeded his ability to realise them.
Bill McSweeney is Research Fellow in International Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin
