Peter Firstbrook - The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family  

Copyright 2010, 2011 by Peter Firstbrook

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

C ROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in slightly different form in Great Britain by Preface Publishing, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, London, in 2010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Firstbrook, P. L.
The Obamas : the untold story of an African family / Peter Firstbrook.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Obama family. 2. Obama, BarackFamily. 3. KenyaBiography. 4. Luo (Kenyan and Tanzanian people)Biography. 5. PresidentsUnited StatesFamilyCase studies. I. Title.
CT2227.5.O23F57 2011
973.9320922dc22

[ B ] 2010032403

eISBN: 978-0-307-59142-5

Book design by Barbara Sturman

Jacket design by Jean Traina

Jacket photography by Jo Harpley/Flickr/Getty Images

v3.1

F OR R OY S AMO

May your dream of a better
Kenya one day be realized

WUOTHI EKA INE

To travel is to see plenty

WAT EN WAT

Kinship is kinship

W HEN THE American people elect a president, they choose, de facto, a new leader of the free world. U.S. presidential elections are interesting to foreign observers if only because the winner becomes the single most powerful person in the world, practically overnight. Yet the election of a young senator from Illinois in November 2008 caused even more of a stir around the world than usual. The primary reason was not his lack of experience in executive decision making but the fact that he was blackor, to be strictly correct, half black. Although Barack Obama was brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia by a single mother for most of his early years, his absent father was African, from a tribe called the Luo, who live around the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya. When President Obamas father came to Hawaii as a student in 1959, Kenya was still a British colony; after the country gained its independence in 1963, Obama seniorlike many Kenyan studentsreturned home to find a job in the new government. President Obama recalls meeting him only once, during a brief visit that his father made to Hawaii just before Christmas 1971, when young Barack was just ten years old. The president never saw his father again, because Barack Obama senior died eleven years later, when he crashed his car into a tree one night in Nairobi.

For anybody who has read his two books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, it is clear that President Obama is very conscious of his mixed heritage, and that as a young man he was unsure of his place in a multicultural world. In his self-deprecatory style, he referred to himself as a mutt in his first press conference after his election, when he spoke about getting a dog for his children: Our preference is to get a shelter dog, but most shelter dogs are mutts like me.

In Dreams, he talks about his struggle as a young man to come to terms with his mixed racial heritage; later, he recalls his first visit to Kenya in 1987 to meet his fathers family and to learn more about his African birthright. He felt welcomed in Kenya, and he came to understand the importance that Africans place on family. Obama was taken to see his stepgrandmother, Sarah Obama, who still lives in her husbands compound, which the family calls Home Squared. Both the presidents grandfather and father are buried adjacent to the house, and he wrote movingly about finding a connection with this little bit of Africa:

I dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile. Oh, Father, I cried When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words.

The title of this first book hints at his regret of never really knowing his father: I had been forced to look inside myself, he wrote in Dreams from My Father, and had found only a great emptiness there.

In perhaps the most telling part of Obamas prologue to Audacity, he makes a direct reference to his own father: Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his fathers expectations or make up for his fathers mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.

Like many Americans, President Obama can trace the ancestral background on his mothers side to a broad mix of European blood: he is, apparently, about 37 percent English, with additional contributions from German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Swiss forebears; many white Americans descended from European stock share a similarly rich mixture of Old World genes. On his fathers side, however, the genetic makeup is much simpler: he is 50 percent African, descended from a long line of Luo tribal warriors who originally lived in the Sudan and over the centuries migrated south and east across more than 600 miles of desert, swamp, and jungle before eventually settling around the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya.

I am a documentary filmmaker with a long-standing interest in Africa. Over the years I have visited Africa dozens of times, but I had not worked in Kenya since 1987. Within just a couple of weeks of Obamas election as the new president, I flew to Kenya with the intention of researching a film about the village where his family originated. I met many members of the Obama family; some had been in the media spotlight in the run-up to the election, but there were many more whose voices had never been heard. Even though I only scratched the surface of the history of the Obamas and the Luo people on this first visit, I realized that there was a fascinating story to be told. Putting the documentary on hold, I decided that the story of Obamas familyand the extraordinary history of the Luo peoplecould best be told in a different way.

This book, then, is the fruit of several more visits to the shores of Lake Victoria, to the part of western Kenya that is called Luoland. Barack Obamas upbringing and education in America and Indonesia have been well covered elsewhere, both by the president himself and by other writers. I hope, therefore, that this book will offer some insight into the little-known half of President Barack Obamathe half of him that is Luo and that comes from a long line of formidable African warriors. Of this rich family lineage, the president himself is only vaguely aware.

In 2006, President Obama made his third visit to Kenya, but this time it was in an official capacity, as a member of the U.S. Senate. He upset many senior Kenyan politicians on that trip because of his outspokenness against corruption, but the ordinary people loved him. His visit was brief and he had only a short time to visit the village where his father grew up. His relatives told me that he had less than forty-five minutes to meet his extended family, who lined up by the dozen in the hot equatorial sun outside Sarah Obamas hut, waiting for their brief few seconds with their most favored son. Barack Obamas aunt, his closest living Kenyan relative, showed me with obvious pride the set of drinking glasses she had been given on that visit; yet, sad to say, in the few seconds that she spent with her nephew, Hawa Auma did not have time to tell him about the extraordinary story of how his grandfather fell in love with his grandmother, nor the tragic circumstances of their separation; Charles Oluoch did not tell the senator his suspicions about how Barack Obama senior