Obama: The untold story

Onyango Obama was part of the first generation of Luo boys to benefit from education in a mission school. Onyango was clever and ambitious, and by 1914 he could read and write both English and Kiswahili; Sarah Obama claims that he also learned about administration from the British, and was familiar with paper records and land titles.

So it was inevitable that he was drafted into the King’s African Rifles, although like many young Luo men it was against his will. Here, the Africans worked mostly as porters, scouts, cooks, guards and wagon drivers. Onyango’s grasp of administration, as well as his ability to speak Dholuo, Kiswahili and English, made him an ideal recruit for the KAR.

Sarah Obama claims that Onyango’s first job in the KAR was to be in charge of African teams who were building roads as part of the war effort. Later in the war, when the German forces began to retreat south, Onyango was sent into German East Africa (Tanganyika), and towards the end of the war he also spent time in British-controlled Zanzibar.

It was here that he encountered Islam for the first time. For Onyango, like many Africans at the time, there was confusion over the teachings of Christ. They could not reconcile the Christian message of love and compassion towards all men with the white man’s apparent willingness to go to war and kill his own kind.

However, members of Onyango’s family think there were other reasons why Islam should appeal to Onyango. John Ndalo (a close relative) thought that at least part of the appeal were the Muslim women: ‘Onyango was an adventurous person and he went to many places, including during the First World War. He met many different people, including Muslims. He even married Muslim wives. So, he had a liking of the Muslim people and he had a liking of the Muslim ladies.’

As part of his conversion, Onyango took the Arab name Hussein, which he later passed on to his eldest son, who in turn gave it to Onyango’s grandson, President Barack Hussein Obama.

However, Onyango’s conversion to Islam was an anathema to his family back home, who were adopting Christianity under the teachings of the evangelical Seventh Day Adventists.

Onyango stayed in Zanzibar for a couple of years after the war, and did not return to Kendu Bay until 1920. By this time, his family had given up any hope of seeing him alive – after all, he had been away for six years without making any contact and when he returned he had to persuade them he was real: ‘See, this is the real Onyango – it is me!’ he is claimed to have said.

He was still only 25 and under normal circumstances he would have moved back to his father’s homestead and looked for a wife. But Onyango was too proud to return and, besides, he had taken the Islamic faith and this made him even more of an outsider in the eyes of his family so Onyango set about clearing an area some distance away from his father’s homestead so that he could establish his own compound.

He did not initially build himself a traditional simba, but chose instead to live in an ex-army tent. People thought that he was crazy, and this only added to his estrangement from his family.

He only added to the overall impression of mystery about him when he produced a small wooden box which could speak like a human. The whole community congregated to witness this miracle. One of the elders, his great-uncle Aguk, suggested they should destroy it as it was obviously their ancestors who had come back to life – they could only be the much feared jachien.

Onyango patiently explained that the box was called a ‘radio’, and it allowed people to talk to each other across long distances.

Around the time that Hussein Onyango decided to work in Nairobi, his older brother, Ndalo Raburu, left Kendu Bay and returned to the ancestral home in K’ogelo, which his great-grandfather Obong’o left in the 1830s.

It was a big step for Ndalo – he had two wives and young children, and all his immediate family were in Kendu Bay. The circumstances surrounding his departure comprise a typical Luo story of squabbling and infighting.

His grandson, Charles Oluoch, explained to me what happened: ‘Ndalo was a very proud man. There were three sons, but Ndalo and Onyango were similar in character. Oguta – their youngest brother – was somebody very polite. But Ndalo was always aggressive and he was very boastful. He was told he was jadak [a foreigner] – “You are disturbing us!” [they said] He got annoyed, so he decided to come and tell his brothers, “I’ve decided to go to Alego. He was a very proud man. So he took his two wives and his cattle – he took everything – and he walked from here up to Alego [a distance of 130km].’

In 1920 Ndalo moved onto the land his great-grandfather Obong’o had vacated nearly a hundred years previously. He cleared the land, planted his crops, and built huts for himself and his two wives.

Two years later Ndalo’s senior wife Odero gave birth to their second son, Peter Oluoch, who became the father of Charles and his older brother, Wilson. However, when Peter was three, Ndalo and his two wives died unexpectedly, leaving their oldest son Gerishon Odero, Peter Oluoch, and their young daughter Judy orphaned. People say that the three adults died very suddenly, within a couple of days of becoming ill. The people in K’ogelo were convinced that a curse had been placed on the family and their homestead was bewitched. In practice, the cause of their deaths was almost certainly smallpox.

After the funeral, distant relatives of Ndalo offered to take care of the three young children, as is the Luo custom. But Hussein Onyango would have none of it, and despite not being married, he insisted on taking his two nephews and his niece with him back to Kendu Bay: ‘Onyango took them and brought them back here [to Kendu Bay], to their grandmothers. When my father [Peter] was of school age, Onyango adopted him. So where he worked – all these whites – they knew him as the son of Onyango. They never knew this was his brother’s son. He also converted him to be a Muslim – even these Muslims in Kendu Bay – they thought my father was the first son of Onyango.

Onyango decided that Peter Oluoch should join him in Nairobi, and together they left to take the ferry from Kendu Bay to Kisumu.

Onyango prospered. He was earning good money in Nairobi, and this allowed him to acquire more cattle back in Kendu Bay. But his family and neighbours in Kendu Bay still thought he was odd – Onyango lived like a white man, even when he was home in Luoland. He ate at a wooden table with a knife and fork, and he wore European clothes. Inevitably, Onyango, the misfit, became the focus of village gossip, especially as he had not married.

According to President Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, Onyango is said to have married three women. However, in talking to several elders in Kendu Bay, I found the reality was much more complicated than that.

By the late 1920s, Onyango found a respectful and gentle woman who tolerated his outbursts and beatings. Halima came from Ugenya, a region in central Nyanza, north of Siaya, and he met her when he was working for a white man in the area. Onyango was now in his early thirties.

Unfortunately their union was not blessed with children; so Onyango married again, this time a young girl called Sophia Odera from Homa Bay. John Ndalo recalls that Onyango paid 15 head of cattle this time as the bride price, but when Sophia and Onyango parted company, childless, Onyango again was too proud to reclaim his cows.

It was around 1930 that Onyango’s father Obama died. Although they had been estranged when Onyango was young, father and son had been reconciled and Obama had contributed cattle to Onyango’s bride prices.

Obama was successful and he left five widows – Nyaoke (who was the mother of Onyango and great-grandmother to the President), Auma, Mwanda, Odera and Augo. Between them they bore him eight sons and several daughters.

In the small village of Kanyadhiang I met a close relative of Onyango called Laban Opiyo – his father’s sister was Nyaoke, Obama’s first wife; this makes Laban a first cousin to Onyango. Laban is a small, thin, frail man who has spent his whole life working in the sun, and he looked every one of his 87 years.

Born in 1922, Laban was only about eight when Onyango’s father died, but he still has a razor-sharp recollection of the event: ‘I knew him very well. Obama was a tall man, a huge man, and well built. I know he was very, very old when he died. Onyango was in Nairobi [at the time]. He brought a gun – a rifle. He said that by 9 p.m., everyone had to be at his father’s home. When he reached the compound, he fired into the air. At the first gunshot, everybody ran into the houses because they had never heard anything like this before. I counted six gunshots. He fired up into the air and I kept asking him, “What is this that is sending fire into heaven?”

And we were very much afraid, because we had never heard a gun before, never. That is one thing that I can really remember about Hussein Onyango. He used that gun to send off his father in a dignified way.

After the Great War, all Kenyans had to be registered with the colonial authorities. Onyango was issued with a small red book; on its cover was printed DOMESTIC SERVANT’S POCKET REGISTER.

During his first visit to Kenya in 1988, Barack Obama Jnr’s half-sister Auma showed him Onyango’s registration document, which Sarah keeps in her hut in K’ogelo. The booklet is faded now and the spine is broken, but it gives a fascinating insight into Onyango’s life at the time.

Admirable diligence

Inside the cover are Onyango’s two thumbprints – a standard identification mark at the time, even though Onyango could sign his own name as well as read and write English proficiently.

The back of the book is reserved for notes, mainly references from previous employers. From the citations, it is clear that Onyango was highly thought of by most of his white employers.

Captain C. Harford, who gives his address as Government House in Nairobi, wrote that Onyango ‘performed his duties as personal boy with admirable diligence’. Dr H. H. Sherry was equally flattering and commented that Onyango ‘is a capable cook but the job is not big enough for him’.

By the early 1930s, Onyango was approaching his 40th birthday, but still he had no children. He soon found a beautiful young girl called Akumu Njoga in the most unusual circumstances. The events surrounding their elopement are one of the most unexpected and extraordinary stories that I ever heard about Onyango.

Throughout his marriage to Halima and Sophia, Onyango continued to work in Nairobi, and this allowed him to buy many head of cattle. He was now a wealthy man. In 1933 he was back in Kendu Bay on one of his regular visits when he saw a young girl walking along the road to market. She would eventually become the paternal grandmother of the President of the United States of America.

Akumu was from the village of Simbi Kolonde, just a short distance outside Kendu Bay; she was tall, young and very beautiful, and Onyango was smitten. Akumu’s youngest daughter Auma (aunt to President Obama) told me how they met: ‘My mother was taking fish into the market and she was carrying one of the traditional baskets [on her head]. And when my father saw my mother, she was very beautiful. My father forced my mother to leave the fish and then grabbed her and put her into the car and sped off.’

It was a typical, impetuous act by Onyango – he was nearly 40 and Akumu was only 16 or 17 years old. Akumu came from a Christian family, but Hussein Onyango insisted that she convert to Islam, and she took the Muslim name Habiba.

Their union quickly brought a result, and Habiba Akumu’s first child, Sarah Nyaoke, was born in 1934, followed by Barack Snr (father to the President) two years later. Their third child, Hawa Auma, was born in 1942, and a fourth child, Rashidi, was born in 1944, but Auma explained to me that he died from a fever when he was about 10. All of Hussein Onyango’s children were raised as Muslims.

Throughout the 1930s Onyango continued to work in Nairobi as a cook whilst Akumu and her two young children lived in Kendu Bay.

As the marriage began to fade, so Onyango took a fifth wife. Sarah Ogwel was born in 1922 in Kendu Bay, and she told me that she married in 1941, when Onyango was 46. Sarah was born into a Muslim family and she shared the faith with Onyango. Sarah’s youngest brother, Abdo Omar Okech, is 76 and he still lives in the Muslim quarter of Kendu Bay, a stone’s throw from where he was born.

He explained that his father, Omar Okech, had been a good friend of Onyango’s, and the family had strong ties going back years: ‘At that time I was only a small kid, but I overheard that my sister Sarah was to be given to Hussein. They were very good friends and my father said, “Will you marry my daughter?”

Onyango loved my father, Hussein gave many cows to my family for her bride price.’

Sarah remained married to Onyango for more years than all his other wives combined, and I asked Abdo what was Sarah’s secret: ‘The difference between Mama Sarah and these other women was that Sarah would not talk back to him. He loved Sarah because whatever he said, Sarah complied.’

As a young man, John Ndalo knew Onyango well: ‘I was born in 1924. I have lived here [in Kendu Bay] all my life, but I worked in Nairobi for the whites in big hotels, and also at the airport. Hussein Onyango taught us how to work. He prepared us for these jobs and he moved me to Nairobi in 1941 and found me a job. He did not want us to be lazy. He always said, “If you do a good job for the white man, then he will always pay you well.”

Many whites loved him because he was a good worker. But he was harsh, a strict man, a disciplinarian.’

On 1 September 1939, the world was plunged into another global conflict. The Second World War was fought on a larger scale even than the Great War, and over 100 million military personnel were mobilised around the world.

Even though he was now in his mid-40s, Hussein Onyango joined the KAR for a second time in 1940. Sarah told me that he saw service in both theatres: ‘The white man he was working for was called Major Batson . . . They went to Addis Ababa, they went to India and Burma and everywhere. He was old, but he was a man who could cook very well and they liked him. He was a cook, but when the enemies came, he had to put on all the uniform and he was ready for combat. This was in 1940 and he came back in 1941 and didn’t go back again.’

I had been told that shortly after his return from the war, Onyango moved his family back across the Winam Gulf to his family’s ancestral home in Alego. I had always been puzzled why the Obama family was divided, living as they still do on opposite sides of Winam Gulf. I knew that Onyango’s great-grandfather Obong’o left their village in K’ogelo and moved south to Kendu Bay because of the pressure on land and the constant fighting between the sub-clans.

I also knew that Onyango’s older brother, Ndalo Raburu, returned to K’ogelo after the Great War, only to die suddenly from smallpox, together with his two wives, leaving three young children orphaned. But I never understood why Onyango took the big step and left Kendu Bay to return to his ancestral village with his two wives and young children. Only when I was talking with John Ndalo in Kendu Bay did I discover the extraordinary story about why Onyango left Kendu Bay.

By 1943 Hussein Onyango was nearly 50 years old, a wealthy middleaged man, well respected within the community by all accounts, with two wives, three young children and with his extended family living around him.

The problem started, apparently, with a football trophy. At the time, Onyango was working for the local British District Commissioner. The DC knew that the local boys were passionate about playing soccer, so he gave Onyango a trophy and suggested that Onyango should organise a local soccer tournament.

John Ndalo then explained to me how things suddenly went so terribly wrong: ‘Onyango was very proud of the trophy and he wanted to call it the “Onyango Cup”.

The local chief, Paul Mboya, did not like this and he insisted on renaming it the “Karachuonyo Cup”.

‘Mboya became very angry and he accused Onyango of being jadak – a settler [because his family had moved to the area three generations previously].
Onyango was furious! “I know my roots,” he said, and he immediately went back home and told his family that they were leaving.

It was exactly the same argument over being called an outsider that Onyango’s brother Ndalo had had more than 20 years previously – and Onyango’s response was the same.

Onyango’s move to K’ogelo created a rift in the Obama family which still exists today, made worse because the family in K’ogelo are all Muslim because of Onyango’s faith, and the Obamas who stayed behind in Kendu Bay remain Seventh Day Adventists.

At least the story explains why Onyango lived out the last of his days in K’ogelo, and why both he and his only son Barack Snr are buried there today, and not in Kendu Bay.

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK