From Home Squared to the US Senate:  How Barack Obama Was Lost and Found
 

By PHILIP OCHIENG

When Barack Obama Junior first visited "Home Squared" – Barack Senior's native village in Alego in the early 1990s – they confronted him with the perplexing accusation: "You're lost!" The words are English. Yet Barack Junior had never heard them in that context. For the idea they express is totally Luo.

It is a literal translation of the phrase ilal – from the intransitive verb lal, to disappear or to be away for a long time without an explanation, and the transitive verb lalo, to lose something. In Chicago's South Side, Barack Junior's adopted home, they have a homely way of expressing ilal: "Long time no see!" 

But lal has a number of figurative meanings – to lose a line of thought, to deviate from the norm, to discard tradition. Simply by being born and growing up in America, Barack Junior had never been a Luo: He had lal. 

And yet – because ours is a fiercely patriarchal community – Barack Junior is a Luo by the sheer fact that Barack Senior was a Luo. Barack Junior was thus doubly "lost." For, in important of ways, Barack Senior himself had for a long time "lost the way." 

First, through classroom tutelage, he had imbibed the white man's culture. It was in this sense that Abong'o (as Roy now prefers to be known) and Auma – Barack Senior's children by his original (Luo) wife – had also "gone astray."

Educated in Germany and now a University of Nairobi lecturer, Auma was living in a relatively comfortable suburban home in Nairobi when Barack Junior came to Kenya. It was for this reason that she considered her Alego home to be "Home Squared. As we learned in the S.M. Otieno case, the Luo elite consider their urban residences to be mere "houses.

Their real homes are in the countryside, where they or their parents were born. Which is why whenever one takes a vacation, one pronounces with great pride: "Adhi dala!" – "I am going home!" Auma preferred to give the two places equal significance. To which Abong'o quipped that, in that case, for Barack Obama Junior, Alego was "Home Cubed."

Finally, Barack Senior had lost his way by marrying a white woman – Barack Junior's mother. This is the fate that he shares with James McBride, the black American autobiographer.

McBride’s book, The Colour of Water, is subtitled A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. Barack Obama Junior's book is titled Dreams from My Father. If he had inserted the word "black" in the title, the parallel would have been more striking.

But, even inside the covers, the community of themes is stark. No matter where he is, a black person always lives in two worlds. Obama Junior shares with my daughter Juliette Akinyi the fact that they are Americans with Kenyan fathers whom they never really knew. 

Obama Senior left Anne – Junior's mother – almost as soon as Junior was born. Junior met Senior only once. When he was 12, Senior visited him in Honolulu, Hawaii, where Junior was growing up under the care of his white grandfather and grandmother. They never saw each other again.

Because I recognise myself in it, this is the most moving theme in Barack Obama’s book – the scar that this fact left in Junior's mind, the enduring crisis of identity that will not go away.

Like Obama Senior, I too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities]. I first met Obama Senior in Tom Mboya's Nairobi office [Mboya was then the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour]. Obama and I met up again on returning to Nairobi and remained drinking buddies for many years.

Back in the US, Nova Diane and I had left each other as soon as Akinyi was born in Chicago. Akinyi is now in her early 40s and yet we have never seen each other. We never even communicated until three years ago, when she finally traced me by e-mail.

Barack Obama Junior's book only serves to remind me of the agony that has oppressed Akinyi's mind all these years. The only consolation, if it is one, is that all black people – no matter where they are – really live in two worlds and, therefore, have an identity crisis. 

One might even say that they live in no world. Even in our native Africa, walal ("we are lost"). When, by agency of Christian missionaries, European imperialism drove our forefathers’ communal spirit away from the land, we stopped being African. We started trying to think like Europeans. But we never became Europeans either. We became ghosts flitting into and out of European imagination.

Our own Ngugi wa Thiong'o has been telling us for decades – what we have refused to hear – that as long as we continue to worship European gods, European ideas on governance and European paradigms of development, all our endowments – labour, natural resources and markets – will continue to belong to Europe for the fleecing.

By seeking to enter white America's centre of power, Barack Obama Junior, who is almost certain to become a US Senator in this week’s elections, may himself be accused of surrender to a "democracy" that is in essence an "elective tyranny," the white liberal's political prescription for perpetuating an economic-intellectual system that dehumanises the black person.

But we must also reject simplistic solutions, such as the all-or-nothingism that posits – like Ngugi's own position on the English language – that nothing at all can be gained through the institutions of the oppressor. There is much that a would-be liberator can glean from the inside.

Barack Obama Junior's grassroots activities among the oppressed of Chicago's South Side show that he is keenly aware of his people's suffering and needs. They prove that he has not gone over to the white man's world. 

Mention in his book of certain Chicago locations – like Cottage Grove, 95th Street, Hyde Park, Michigan Avenue, Buckingham Fountain, the Lakeside Drive, the Gold Coast – rekindle fond memories of when I was an undergraduate in the Loop. Having spent four formative years in the "Windy City", I easily identify myself with them and with him.

I know that, elected to the Senate, he will not forget his people in Hawaii and Home Squared. Indeed, throughout the black world. Nay, throughout the whole world because – as Mwalimu Julius Nyerere used to say – all oppressed people of all colours ni Waswahili. 

This was perhaps why marrying a white woman didn't bother Barack Senior. And there is much to be said for that woman's own mental and moral courage that she was willing to join a black man whose world was as far away as the moon and in a country where such a marriage could prove opprobrious.

There was, however, another white woman. That was why, when I first heard of Obama Junior, I assumed that he was Ruth's son. Ruth was the wife I knew after Obama Senior came back from America and worked for Tom Mboya in the Ministry of Economic Planning.

After Obama Senior had left Anne in Honolulu, he studied at Harvard, where he met and befriended Ruth. She afterwards followed him all the way to Home Squared. I assumed that Junior was either David or Mark, Ruth's two sons whose names I no longer remembered. 

What I remember, however – and much of it emerges from Obama Junior's book – was that Obama Senior's marriage to Ruth was not a happy one. Like his father, although charming, generous and extraordinarily clever, Obama Senior was also imperious, cruel and given to boasting about his brain and his wealth.

It was this kind of boasting that proved his undoing in the Kenyatta system – although, as he said, there was tribalism in it –and left him without a job, plunged him into prolonged poverty and dangerously wounded his ego. 

Like me, he was excessively fond of Scotch. In his later years, he had fallen into the habit of going home drunk every night. This was what forced Ruth to sue for a divorce to marry another friend of mine, a Tanzanian.

Scotch, indeed, was what proved to be Obama Senior's final undoing. Driving a car always excited him excessively.

Obama Senior had had many extremely serious accidents. In time, both his legs had to be amputated and replaced with iron. But his pride was such that he could not tolerate "crawling like an insect" on the road. I was not surprised when I learned how he had finally died.

 I was more surprised when Obama Junior emerged, as if from the blue. I knew that Home Squared, Luoland, Kenya and Africa might soon be represented in the world's most powerful council.

In this way, Barack Obama Junior was not lost.

Philip Ochieng is an editor with the Nation Media Group

Comments\Views about this article