Obama, the bright economist who lived on the edge

Shem Arungu-Olende had just returned from the United States in mid-1970 when he received a telephone call from his old friend Barack Obama. Olende, an electrical engineer with a passion for economic analysis, had recently concluded a year’s stint as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had come home to consider his options.

The two men had known each other several years earlier when they had discovered they shared a fascination for mathematical programming. Now Obama was calling to offer him a job.

“He said he was setting up a consulting firm and he wanted me to work with him,” recalled Olende, who would later become the secretary general of the African Academy of Sciences.

“He said we’d make a great team. And you know, I was interested.”

But as the two men talked, Olende was shocked to learn of Obama’s circumstances. When they had met five years earlier Obama had recently returned from Cambridge.

With his Harvard degree and elegant bearing, not to mention his attractive white wife, Obama seemed set to become a powerhouse among the newly emerging cadre of elite Africans who were slowly assuming control of the country’s power structure. But here was Obama now without a job and his checkered employment record a matter of some talk in Nairobi circles.

As Olende caught up with other old friends, he heard hair-raising stories about Obama’s explosive domestic life and inexplicable behaviour on the job. Nonetheless, Olende liked Obama and seriously considered teaming up with him. As it turned out he wound up taking a job with the United Nations, where he would remain for the next three decades. But he worried that Obama’s reckless ways would eventually lead him into deeper trouble.

The consulting firm never happened. After Obama was fired from the KTDC, he managed to piece together stray bits of work, but none of them lasted long. He worked for the Kenya Water Department for some months and managed to parlay that job into a stint advising the World Health Organization on rural water supplies.

But within a few months of losing his job Obama was adrift with neither a paycheck nor the prospect of one.

Unmoored from the organising rigours of a job and increasingly at odds with both his wife and children, Obama entered a period of fitful decline that lasted for nearly six years.

Although he remained close with some of his older friends and continued to show up at his favourite watering holes— as long as someone else was buying—he periodically disappeared for long spells at a time. And when he emerged from this overcast period, he was a changed man, one whose world was considerably diminished.

With her husband now jobless and at large, Ruth struggled to keep the family afloat.

She was now the sole support of the household. Not only did she pay the rent, the household expenses, and the wages of the housekeeper, she also signed the checks for five private school tuitions.

In addition to Obama’s own four children’s schooling, there was Ezra’s school bill and sundry other expenses for itinerant Obama family members.

Nor did Obama assist much with the household logistics such as driving the children to school or to their sports activities.

As in most any other Kenyan family of the same class, such tasks were left to Ruth or the household help. Although Ruth tried to maintain a household routine as she juggled her job at Nestlé and ferrying the children, Obama came and went at odd hours.

Most afternoons he retreated to the bar at Sans Chique or Brunner’s and stayed there well into evening, railing against the failures of the government and the injustices that had befallen him.

By the time he returned to the house, he was often stumbling and barely coherent.

The children, cowering in their beds, listened as he crashed into furniture and cursed at his own clumsiness.

Auma heard the shouting too. As she told her brother Barack many years later, “The Old Man never spoke to Roy or myself except to scold us. He would come home very late, drunk, and I could hear him shouting at Ruth telling her to cook him food,” Barack [US President] recounted in Dreams from My Father.

“Sometimes, when he wasn’t home, she would tell Roy and myself that our father was crazy and that she pitied us for having such a father. I didn’t blame her for this—I probably agreed.”

Obama had long vented his anger on Ruth with verbal onslaughts and a hail of blows to her head.

But as he grew increasingly despondent in the months after he lost his job, his assaults on her grew more violent. Ruth took out a restraining order and worried constantly about what to do next.

She was anxious that one day Obama would turn his frustration on the children and that, she had decided, would be the end. Nonetheless, she did not leave him because still, somehow, she loved him. And she believed that he loved her as well:
“I loved him despite everything. I just had a great passion for the man.

And I love my children. I’m a person who stays hoping that things will get better.”
But things didn’t get better. They got worse. One night Obama returned from the bars in his usual ill humuor, except this time he had a knife.

“He came to the door one day, banging, banging and Auma let him in of course, being a child,” Ruth recalled. “And when he came in he had that knife. He laid it against my neck as he shouted at me.

I was terrified of course. He terrified me a number of times.

But I did not think he would really kill me. He was a bluffer, just a bluffer. Even the children saw all of this happening. It was Roy who went and got a neighbour. She was a Luo friend of mine and she talked to Barack. She said, ‘Don’t do this, Barack. This is wrong.’”

Even then, Ruth did not leave. Instead, she started to contemplate a divorce.

As she saw it, if she were able to get a divorce and gain custody of Mark and David, she would at last have some leverage over Obama.

Part of Obama’s singular authority over her was his ability to take them from her. Perhaps if she were able to negotiate from a position of greater strength, she could get Obama to change his behaviour and stop his chronic drinking. That, at least, is what she hoped.

In November 1971 Obama made the surprise announcement that he was going on a lengthy overseas trip. Somehow he had gotten his passport back and was now eager to try to drum up some international consulting work again. Unable to find a job, Obama continued to pursue his hope of setting up a consulting firm and hoped to reconnect during his travels with some of his contacts from his days at the KTDC.

No sooner had he walked out of the house with his suitcase did Ruth call her lawyer. One of her friends and a cousin who visited the house frequently had witnessed Obama’s abusive behavior on multiple occasions, and now they were ready to testify to what they had seen.

“I knew the marriage wasn’t going anywhere and I needed some leverage,” said Ruth. “Divorce would give me the freedom so he didn’t have any legal hold on me.

That seemed very important.”

While Ruth presented her case in a Nairobi courtroom, Obama was halfway around the world in Honolulu celebrating Christmas with the Dunhams, about whom he had told his current wife very little.

He was also getting to know the little boy on the tricycle whose photograph he had religiously kept on his bureau for the past decade.

That boy, Barack Obama II, was now ten years old and had decidedly mixed feelings about the looming dark figure with the slight limp who showed up on the doorstep a few weeks before the holiday. Since his father had left nine years ago, much had changed in his own young life.

When the younger Obama was four years old, his mother had fallen in love with another foreign student, this one an amiable Indonesian who liked to wrestle with her young son. By 1968 Ann Dunham had married Lolo Soetoro, and the family settled in Jakarta.

The marriage did not last long, however, and by the summer of 1971 Obama had returned to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and attend private school. Ann returned to celebrate the Christmas holiday that year, and eventually she and her young daughter had also returned to Honolulu to live, although she would not divorce her second husband for several more years.

Eying his father quietly from the corner of the living room on the day that he arrived, Obama observed that he was astonishingly thin, his bones pressing his trousers into sharp points at the knee.

Wearing a blue blazer and a crisp white shirt with a scarlet ascot at his neck, he was overdressed compared to the casual island style. His cane was equally elegant with a rounded ivory head. But his eyes were a bleary yellow, “the eyes of someone who’s had malaria more than once.

There was a fragility about his frame, I thought, a caution when he lit a cigarette or reached for his beer.”

Obama stayed for one month. During that time he and the Dunhams visited island sites and the family’s own architectural landmarks. They drove by the apartments in which the couple had lived, the Kapi’olani Medical Centre where their son had been born, and the trim one-story University Avenue house with the inviting veranda where Ann had ultimately retreated to live with her parents and her one-year-old son after her husband had left her.

As the weeks passed, the watchful boy noted the power of his father’s presence and the singular effect he had on other people. Obama generated electricity, a vibration that made Gramps, as Stanley was called by his grandson, more vigorous.

Even Madelyn, known as “Toot” for “Tutu,” which is Hawaiian for “grandparent,” was drawn into debate about politics and finance in the elder Obama’s presence. When he waved his elegant hands in emphasis or recounted an amusing story in his commanding, all-enveloping voice, people listened. But between father and son there was not much conversation.

“I often felt mute before him,” his son wrote, “and he never pushed me to speak.”

Obama Sr.’s visit to Hawaii generated mixed emotions on both sides of the equation. For the elder Obama the sights and sounds of the island where he had lived in the flush of great promise were bittersweet.

He did not look up many of his old friends and made no effort to connect with either Zane or Abercrombie. He sat, inexplicably, for a series of photographic portraits at the University of Hawaii, and these are filed in the school’s archive bearing no explanatory label.

In the photos Obama is dressed in a gray suit with a dark handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket, and he stares solemnly into the distance. There is little resemblance to the ebullient young undergraduate in shirtsleeves photographed amidst a throng of his friends in a photo shot a decade earlier.

Presumably aware that his marriage to Ruth was nearing a bitter end, Obama apparently initiated the Hawaii visit in part with the expectation that his former wife might return to Kenya with him.

Ann, then twenty-nine, had her own marital troubles with Soetoro and likely intuited that her marriage was not to last long either. She was already talking about enrolling at the University of Hawaii in order to pursue a master’s degree in anthropology. Although she considered Obama’s suggestion, she concluded that she and her children were better off staying in Hawaii where their lives would be more stable.
“He had come back and wanted her to go to Africa with him, finally,” recalled Ann’s old school friend, Susan Botkin Blake.
“Of course this was what she had wanted all those years he had been away. But now, she told people, she could not face leaving again.”

With the finality of Ann’s refusal generating palpable tension, Obama’s visit soon began to sour.

Toot and Gramps were growing weary of Obama’s presence and waited impatiently for him to retreat at the evening’s end to the rented apartment in which he slept. The stress finally erupted one evening when young Barack turned on the television to watch the cartoon special How The Grinch Stole Christmas!, a favoured Christmas ritual. Obama Sr. promptly ordered his son to turn off the television and head to his room to study.

When Ann argued that the boy should be allowed to watch, the matter mushroomed into a fierce family squabble that consumed four highly irritated adults. As Barack Jr. watched the green Grinch alone behind his closed bedroom door, he “began to count the days until my father would leave and things would return to normal.”

His countdown ended two weeks later when Obama gave his son a farewell hug at the airport and disappeared into the blue skies overhead. Obama would never see his father again. For a time the two exchanged letters. But by the time Barack reached his twenties and was swept up in his own quest for rootedness and identity, the letter writing had stopped and the stack of aerogrammes from his father was stored neatly away in a closet. After the painful Christmas encounter, another two decades would pass before Barack turned to the pages of his memoir to sort out some of his complex feelings about his father.

On his return to Nairobi, Obama was dismayed to encounter still more rejection.

In his absence Ruth had not only consulted with a lawyer about getting a divorce; she had managed to have their marriage terminated.