And Then Life Happens (7 page)

I always took part when we organized the garbage can race, which, in retrospect, was not entirely without risk either. In those days, the streets of Nairobi were in very good condition, which is hard to imagine for anyone who knows their present state. In any case, the well-maintained asphalt surface was excellently suited for our garbage can race. For that game, we utilized the sturdy, bucket-shaped garbage cans, just over three feet high, which stood on every property. We took off the lids, which sat loosely on the containers, and laid the cans on their sides on the ground. At most, four garbage cans fit side by side on the street. Every can pilot now stepped onto his vehicle and balanced on it until the starting whistle sounded. As fast as possible—without falling down, of course—the metal container now had to be rolled with the feet to the finish line at the end of the street. That worked best if you took many tiny steps. But until you had really mastered this special technique, you fell repeatedly onto the hard asphalt and got scrapes and bruises. This was especially true if you were so courageous—as I was—that you organized the race on a slope instead of on a flat stretch. Although I was an enthusiastic fan of this game and got more and more skilled at it over time, some of the scars I got back then remain visible today.

*   *   *

Although I often played with the boys, I spent just as much time with my friend Barbara. We met practically every day, when we were not busy with schoolwork, usually at my house. At her place, I always had the feeling that her mother was not thrilled about my presence. She never said anything to that effect, but I sensed from her manner that she didn't like me, just from the way that she would look at me and from the fact that she would very rarely talk to me or allow me into the house. I think that she was not comfortable with the fact that her daughter's best friend was a black girl. In the early sixties, shortly after the end of the colonial era, she had to accept that many Africans moved into her neighborhood, in which only white people used to live. The fact that my stepmother was white probably mitigated my blackness in her eyes a bit—and I suspect that was the only reason she tolerated my friendship with her daughter—but Ruth's marriage to an African must at the same time have been a considerable demerit.

My friendship with Barbara lasted only until the end of primary school. Afterward, our ways parted because I went to a different school than she did. Shortly thereafter, Barbara's family became one of the last white families to move away from Woodley. Little by little, all the white people had left the neighborhood, and besides the African families, only a few Indian families now stayed behind. I never saw Barbara again. Thus ended an almost six-year friendship, without either of us ever inquiring about the other again.

Shortly before Barbara's departure, my friend Sharon's family had also moved away. They left the country when it became known that the Ugandan head of state Idi Amin was expelling the Indian population en masse from his country. He claimed that they would exploit the country and deprive the indigenous people of the chance to participate in Uganda's economic success. Fearing that the same fate could befall them in Kenya, Sharon's parents ultimately decided to immigrate to Canada.

Suddenly, due to events beyond my control, my world changed radically once again. From the familiar primary school, I entered high school, my two best friends moved out of the neighborhood, and—what hit me hardest—my stepmother then divorced my father and left us forever, taking my two younger brothers with her.

This time, I was actually glad to go to boarding school, because an oppressive emptiness had permeated our home. Not only because my stepmother was gone, but also because she took many household objects with her, which made the rooms look bare and dismal, as if no one was living in them anymore. The house turned into a quiet, depressing place. On top of that, Ruth was awarded our father's only real estate—it was in Lavington, an elegant neighborhood of Nairobi—after the divorce. He thereby lost the bulk of his wealth.

One might have thought that Abongo and I would have grown closer in our shared fate. But the opposite was the case. My brother showed barely any interest in me, took pleasure in teasing me, and acted as if it meant nothing at all to him that three important people vanished from our lives. Only years later did he confess to me that he, too, had cried himself to sleep at night in his room out of sheer grief.

 

6.

A
S A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL
, I experienced the new boarding school as a true salvation. Without the security of Kenya High School, I might not have recovered my shaken balance so easily—for the six years I spent there were among the most difficult in my life. Far from the ruins of my former family, this all-girls high school became a second, more stable home. The school's orderly world with clear rules and structures provided me with an urgently needed foothold.

The large offering of academic and extracurricular activities proved to be an additional source of help in that. We were advised to make full use of them, and with this wide palette of possibilities we were instilled with the sense that the world was at our fingertips. There were no limitations at all, and the school subjects generally reserved for boys were regarded at Kenya High School as fully appropriate for us girls. As long as our grades permitted it, we could learn anything we pleased in addition to the required curriculum. Apart from our own laziness, nothing and no one could stop us from becoming whatever we had set our mind to. And that really was the case. To this day, over thirty years later, I run into alumnae of “Boma”—as we fondly called our school (
boma
means “cattle pen” in the Maasai language)—who have since become scientists, engineers, lawyers, judges, professors, or politicians. Most former students go through life with a confidence that can certainly be traced back to their Boma education.

While during the week a packed academic and extracurricular schedule provided me with the necessary distraction from the pain smoldering inside me, on some weekends the emotions kept in check in the midst of the school routine rose powerfully to the surface. This happened most often when we girls dealt with typically female questions, which a mother would have been best equipped to answer. Such topics usually came up on Saturday evenings after dinner—because we were free to do what we wanted with those evenings. In the common rooms of the several residence halls, we could play records and dance and visit each other in our respective living quarters.

In a group of friends, we moved from one residence hall to another, usually boisterous and laughing loudly. We stayed longest where songs were played that we knew by heart and could sing along to at the top of our voices. In that joyful atmosphere, I was sometimes seized unexpectedly by a profound sadness. My friends struck me as so happy and carefree; their only concern seemed to be the choice of a common room with the best dance music. But I sank deeper and deeper into a feeling of loneliness, which threatened to nearly suffocate me. On such evenings, I withdrew from the group of friends unnoticed, in order to be alone. I crept over to the “Five Acre,” an elevated semicircular stretch of land that separated the residence halls, each of which housed about a hundred students, from the academic buildings. There I sat in the dark for hours on a bench, from which I watched all the girls walking back and forth between the various residence halls. The bench was under a large tree directly in front of the residence hall in which I was living.

I spent many Saturday evenings in that familiar place. Sometimes I only wept softly, but often my emotions rumbled fiercely in me, and I stared angrily into space. I felt betrayed by my father, blaming him for not holding the family together, and abandoned by my stepmother. If the separation only applied to my father, then where was she now? I asked myself, furiously hurling the words into the darkness. My father had promised me that everything would turn out all right, after I had asked him for the hundredth time what was going to happen now that they had left. But everything was not all right! Why else was I so unhappy? And why hadn't my stepmother been in touch with me at all?

One evening, I almost cried my heart out on my favorite bench. I had been sitting with a few friends, and our chat had turned to the problem of eyebrow plucking. Should we or shouldn't we? Was plucking your eyebrows part of becoming a woman? Suggestions, considerations, and arguments went back and forth, but we did not reach a clear conclusion. Actually, none of us really knew at that point what it meant to be a woman. Even though I was looking forward to it, I was at the same time afraid of it, as many other girls must have been as well. One of my schoolmates finally suggested that we ask our mothers what they had to say on the topic. Everyone nodded enthusiastically, and I nodded, too—knowing all the while that there was no mother I could ask. I barely held back the tears. Shortly thereafter, I stole away and visited my spot under the tree. And there I longed desperately for the mother who would have been able to advise me on the difficult question of eyebrow plucking, among other things.

*   *   *

Even more difficult for me than those Saturday evenings were the weekends when the students went home. Every other weekend we were allowed to visit our families. On Saturday morning, we were picked up at an appointed time by our parents or a relative and had to be back at the boarding school punctually the next evening. All the girls seemed to look forward to it, and it was considered the worst punishment to lose the privilege of going home. For me, however, it was not a punishment; I was happy to be able to stay at school.

To be in our empty house, without my stepmother and little brothers, was much worse. If I spent a weekend there, I was mostly alone. My father worked a lot, putting in long hours, and did not come home immediately afterward, but instead spent the evenings with his friends. That was nothing out of the ordinary in those days. Kenyan fathers rarely dealt with the children; that was a woman's job. Only there was no woman in our home anymore. Abongo, who attended his school as a day student, came home every day, but after a brief greeting spent most of his time elsewhere. Both of them, my father and my brother, seemed to flee the silence of our house as often as possible. Frequently, I was already asleep when they got back. And from time to time, it would happen that my returning father would wake me up to talk with me.

While I sat on the sofa in the living room, rubbing my eyes sleepily and pretending to be listening to him attentively, he talked to me late into the night about all the great things he was planning for us. He spoke about his love for us children, about the fact that he was doing everything in his power to provide for us.

On those nights, my father would also talk about my brother Barack and his mother, Ann. Over the years, I had heard a lot about this brother in the United States whom I had never met. But I was never particularly curious about him. Despite the fact that my father spoke regularly about Barry, as he called him, to us children and our extended family, ensuring that he was definitely part of the Obama family, he was too far removed from my everyday life for me to show real interest. Even now I only listened with half an ear as my father repeated the stories from letters and showed me photos sent to him by Ann updating him on Barack's progress. He was very proud of Barack and also seemed to still care a lot for Ann.

Longing for a return to a tight-knit family circle, I would prick up my ears only when my father talked about Barack and his mother coming to live with us in Kenya. I detected in his voice a desperate need to believe that with the two of them he could re-create a home that was not tarnished by a sense of failure and discord. I did not question how likely this reunion was. When talking about it, my father's voice was tinged with sorrow and loneliness, and deep down I probably knew it would never become a reality.

Sometimes he simply played a piece of classical music and told me this and that about the composer. I thus became acquainted on those nights with Bach, Schubert, Brahms, and other great figures of European classical music.

I often have vivid recollections of those nighttime scenes. I can see us sitting together on the couch, my father talking, me nodding. I rarely respond to what he is saying and am distant toward him. I did not understand his deep sadness, and his loneliness did not arouse my sympathy. At that time, I firmly believed that he himself was to blame for the situation into which he had brought all of us, which had resulted in a broken family.

*   *   *

Ultimately, my father's attempt to get closer to me during those late-night conversations was doomed to fail. My pain was simply too great to allow any intimacy. I remained distant and mistrustful and felt as if I were sitting opposite a man I didn't know at all. I resented the fact that he made me sit through his suffering when I felt that he did not acknowledge mine, when in my eyes he was, in fact, responsible for it. Not only did I sense that he did not grasp how great my loss was, behaving as if everything would soon be back to normal, but he had also been too much of an absent father for me to share my feelings with him. Previously, he had only rarely done anything with us of his own accord. When my stepmother was still living with us, she always planned a family outing on the weekends, and my father always submitted to her wishes. Or if nothing was planned with the family, he met up with friends after he had read the newspaper and solved the crossword puzzle. At the time, it was basically quite all right with us children that we didn't have all too much to do with him. We were in great awe of him and were glad when he didn't meddle in our affairs. We also had my stepmother and each other.

But there were also times when I asked my father for help, such as one day when Abongo was playing soccer with his friends and he refused to let me join them despite my persistent pleading and begging. I fetched my father, who put his foot down. My brother reluctantly gave in and made me goalie. Unfortunately, I did not last very long. After a short time, a ball hit me with full force in the belly, knocked the wind out of me, and brought tears to my eyes. That ended the game for me for the time being. I ran to my father, who immediately rushed out of the house and reprimanded my brother.