And Then Life Happens (11 page)

We visited him in his ministry several times. From there he sent us to various people with the request to help us. But even though we met with many influential figures—ambassadors, ministers, businesspeople—our efforts came to nothing.

I had been enrolled at Kenyatta for a year when I finally got a scholarship on my own initiative from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the German Academic Exchange Service. My friend Trixi, one of the four girls with whom I had taken German at Kenya High, had left for Germany a year earlier on a Goethe-Institut scholarship to study the language.

Trixi was from Tanzania and a few years older than I. She was pretty, worldly, and seemed very grown-up. While I lived at boarding school and had to go home to my father during break, she lived with her sister Ade and some others in the Westlands neighborhood of Nairobi. There they ran their own household and could do as they pleased. I was impressed by the fact that they did not have to obey anyone. But Trixi's life was not simple. Besides Ade, she had eight other younger siblings and helped her mother raise them. I had never been saddled with such a responsibility.

Trixi and her flat mates had their own rooms, while the kitchen and bathroom were shared. At the time, I didn't know that I was getting a taste there of what I would later come to know in Germany as a
Wohngemeinschaft,
or
WG,
a communal living situation.

The campus of Kenyatta University, on which I lived, extended over a huge area several miles outside the capital. Because there was nothing but the university buildings far and wide, the place was tailor-made for studying. You also made friends quickly. I enjoyed that time and forged some friendships. But during those days I never lost sight of the desire to go abroad.

*   *   *

More than a year and a half had passed when I received the acceptance letter for the DAAD scholarship. Finally, my dream would come true! I would have the chance to leave the narrow world of my childhood and spread my wings. And although I really enjoyed my art studies, particularly painting and drawing, I told myself that I could pursue that activity any time, even without higher education. The opportunity to study in Germany would definitely not come a second time.

I shared my joy about the scholarship with only a few people—for I was afraid that my father would find out about it and prevent me from accepting it and going to Germany.

Our relationship had remained difficult; the sad events of the past stood between us and prevented us from getting closer. In my eyes, our family situation had improved only minimally, and I still held it against him that he had not fulfilled his fatherly duties—to give us a sense of safety, stability, and financial security.

I was convinced that he would forbid me to study abroad. The mere fact that I had not asked his permission before I applied would surely displease him, the strict father. Not least among the reasons I wanted to get away was the desire to escape the cultural constraints and his authority. But I would not have been able to make that clear to him—especially as I was the only girl in the family and, despite our tensions, he had a special love for me.

The fact that I had the desire to study German, of all things, and not economics, mathematics, law, or medicine—as my father probably would have wished—made everything still more difficult. For my father, the learning of a language was only a means to an end. When he visited me several months after I moved to Germany, he asked me what I wanted to do with my German. The disappointment in his voice was unmistakable. Before I could even answer his question, he added: “Child, it's not enough to be able to speak German. In Germany, every homeless person under the bridge speaks German. It has to lead to something more.”

Years later, I had to admit that my father had been right. The German language alone was not enough to practice a “decent” profession in Germany (or elsewhere). The subjects that I chose in addition to my major—pedagogy, sociology, and media studies—formed the actual cornerstones of my later career. But back then, with my nineteen years, when I held the scholarship in my hands, I could think of only one thing, and that was that I would not only be able to “really” learn German, but would also expand my own horizons. That was enough for me.

But there was still one more hurdle, which threatened to destroy all my plans. Because I was not of age, which in Kenya was twenty-one, I could not apply for a passport without my father's signature. According to Kenyan law, my mother, who knew about my travel plans and supported me, could not sign the application on her own. I was beside myself when I found out about this. Why did I need my father's permission, too? Because he was a man? Why didn't my mother's signature suffice? She was a grown woman, after all. My fear of asking my father was based on the fact that he had up to then made virtually all major decisions about what I could and could not do. For me, contradicting him was unheard-of and I did not know whether he would tolerate it. Now I imagined all sorts of scenarios, which all amounted to the same thing: being prohibited from going to Germany. And that must not happen.

I was firmly resolved to accept the scholarship, and because I did not receive support from the Kenyan authorities, I turned to those who had granted it to me. I sought out the German cultural attaché and explained my situation to him, describing to him honestly how things stood between my father and me. Luckily, he had a sympathetic ear and decided to help me. He made some calls and hinted that certain exceptions could be made. He promised to plead with the proper agencies to treat me as a special case.

And, as luck would have it, after some back and forth and a number of sleepless nights, my mother finally received permission to sign the all-important application. I got my passport and the path to Germany was clear. Only once I was there did my father find out that I had left Kenya.

 

GERMANY

 

9.

A
S THE PLANE DESCENDED
and approached Frankfurt Airport, I looked with curiosity out the porthole at the neatly divided landscape below me. The borders between the individual parcels of land looked as if they had been clearly demarcated with a ruler. The city, with its mass of houses, seemed like a compact whole, systematically and precisely sectioned by means of streets, highways, and train tracks.

It was early morning in Germany in October 1980. Was I afraid of what this first day in a foreign land would bring? I no longer recall. In any case, I had gotten through my first long-distance flight. Apart from a scenic flight in a small sport plane, which I had won in a Sunday school competition when I was about ten (I could name the separate books of the Bible by heart), I had never flown before in my life. Back then, I had gotten ill in the shaky plane, and I remember that I was given a pill to settle my nerves and my stomach. But now I was landing in a wide-body aircraft on an unknown continent. I was so curious and excited that there was probably no space left for the fear of being away from home for the first time.

What first impressed me in Frankfurt Airport were its vast dimensions. Nairobi's airport seemed to me tiny in comparison. Besides the information desks and check-in counters of the countless airlines, there were also stores, cafés, and restaurants here. People walked around, sat on benches and at tables, ate, shopped. Some even lay stretched out and fast asleep on the rows of seats in the waiting areas. The confusing activity all around me reminded me less of a place of arrival and departure than of a shopping mall or a large, indoor market. Only the scattered scenes of farewell that were taking place and the fact that almost all the people had baggage with them confirmed for me that I was in an airport.

The next leg of my journey would be the train ride to Saarbrücken, which was four hours away. Contrary to my expectation that a representative of the DAAD would pick me up in Frankfurt, no one had showed up. But I had also been told that it was no problem to find the way to Saarbrücken: “Just go to the information desk and ask where the train to Saarbrücken departs.” That would have posed no great difficulty, if I had found my bearings among the countless signs that confronted me everywhere. But most of them I did not understand, and the symbols were foreign to me. When I realized that the signs were not helping me, I tried asking someone.

“Excuse me?” I said in German to a woman who was coming toward me at a hurried pace. I must have spoken too softly, for she simply rushed past me.

Next, I addressed an older man, who was walking more slowly than his predecessor. When he got close to me, I said, a bit louder this time, “Excuse me! Can you please help me?”

To my relief, the man stopped.

“How can I help you?” he asked with a smile.

He understood me, I rejoiced inwardly. Until now, I had spoken German with another person only during role-playing at school, a relatively stress-free exercise, during which I always knew that I could switch to English if necessary. But this was not role-playing. I really had to get to Saarbrücken. I searched my memory for the German word for “information desk.” But it simply would not come to me. The man looked at me patiently.

“How can I help you?” he repeated.

“Um … information desk?” I stammered in English. Then, in German, “Please, information. Train?”

Damn it, I thought in frustration. Here was someone who wanted to assist me, and I could not think of the right words. Suddenly, all the German I had learned had vanished into thin air. How often we had practiced such dialogues in class! Actually, I could have recited whole travel scenes, with all the questions and answers.

“Do you want to take a train?” Thank God, the man spoke English—albeit with a strong German accent, but I understood him. All was not yet lost.

“Yes, please!” I answered with relief. “To Saarbrücken. I need the information desk.”

The man smiled and said,
“Den Informationsstand.”
He took my baggage and said, “Follow me. I will show you where it is.”

As we marched to the information desk, the terms came back to me bit by bit: information was
Auskunft,
train station was
Bahnhof,
round trip was
hin und zurück
, one-way to Saarbrücken was
eine einfache Fahrt nach Saarbrücken
 … I softly said words and phrases to myself as I walked. At the information desk, I wanted to finally show how well I could speak German.

When we arrived there, my companion explained to the man on duty, before I could even open my mouth, that I had to get to Saarbrücken and needed a suitable train connection. The first real chance to demonstrate my German—out the window. But still: I had understood almost everything he had said. When the official spoke to me in German, the helpful older man broke in, “You should explain it to her in English. She can't speak German.”

Immediately, I wanted to protest. Just when all the words were coming back to me! Instead, I smiled politely and was silent. The man at the desk explained to me how to get to the train station, which was also in the airport, and how I could buy a ticket and obtain all other travel information there. After I had, to be safe, repeated the instructions to the helpful older man, who was still standing next to me, he pointed to a sign showing a train, the word
Bahnhof
, and an arrow.

“Everything is okay now?” he asked kindly. I nodded and thanked him in German. “I must go now,” he said.
“Auf Wiedersehen und viel Glück!”
And with that he turned around and disappeared.

For a few seconds, I stood forlornly next to my duffel bag. In that brief time, I had gotten used to the nice man and had secretly hoped that he would bring me to the train. But then I dispelled the sense of disappointment. He had already done enough for me; I would manage the rest on my own. I took my baggage and followed the sign toward the train station.

*   *   *

All that I remember about the trip to Saarbrücken is that I had several brief conversations with other passengers. At the time, I was happy to provide information and did not shy away from answering unusual questions about myself. I also wanted to use my knowledge of German and test my mastery of the language. If anything from that day has impressed itself deeply in my memory, it is the sense of joy and pride that I could actually make myself understood in German. I still recall that, having arrived in the Saarbrücken train station, I got off the train feeling satisfied with myself and immediately found a taxi that brought me to the university. And once I was there, I made it to student services without any problems.

Outside the office that had been indicated in my documents as the first place to go, several young women and men were waiting. I sat down with them. Finally, I had reached my destination.

With curiosity, I observed the students sitting next to me and passing by, impressed by the fact that they all spoke German, even the foreigners. The African students stood out from the crowd, not only because of their skin color, but also because none of them passed me without looking in my direction and giving me a friendly nod, which I experienced as a greeting of camaraderie.

Finally, it was my turn. I entered a small room, in which there was a huge desk. Behind it sat a man who looked like an Arab and somehow seemed too large for the room. He made a slightly irritated, impatient impression, which I ascribed to the fact that he had had to deal completely on his own with all the students who had been with him before me.

I gave him a warm smile. Something told me that I had to cheer him up. But his eyes showed no sign of friendliness.

“What can I do for you?”

I sensed that I would make headway with him only in German. “Um … I'm Rita Auma Obama. I'm from Kenya.”

“Na und?”

I didn't understand what he meant by that.

“Excuse me?”