The Other Barack (14 page)

Several of Obama's friends recall Mooney and Obama touring through town in her 1956 Plymouth or pulled off on the side of the road with Obama repairing one of the car's seemingly perpetual flat tires. And when Obama stopped in at meetings of the Kogelo Union Association, a group that looked after affairs of interest to the Kogelo clan and provided support to the needy, she would wait patiently behind the wheel while he went inside.

Mooney waited outside partly because the discussion concerned union business and was held strictly in Luo. There would surely also have been an element of social propriety being observed on her part as well. Just six years earlier, relations between African men and white women were strictly circumscribed by law. Under the Penal Code of the Protectorate of Kenya, a man or a woman engaging in sexual relations with a person of another race could be subject to up to five years in prison. The interactions between white women and African men in particular had long been closely scrutinized. With the influx of a growing number of
wazungu
in the 1950s, including educators and government advisers, black and white relations had become somewhat less extraordinary. But though the law forbidding such unions had been repealed in 1951 and the situation was more relaxed, mixed couples still raised eyebrows on the streets of Nairobi. On the back roads leading through the countryside, Obama and Mooney drew astonished stares.

Obama minded not at all. Although many a Kenyan man would have shredded his identity card before asking a white woman to dance, Obama did not hesitate. When he came across Mooney at one of the dances at the Railway Hall not long after he started working for her, he tucked his cigarette jauntily between his lips, and extended his hand. “At that time, to go and beg a dance from a white lady, you must be very brave,” said Arthur Reuben Owino. “You must be well behaved and well dressed—you know, civilized. But Obama was all of that. And when he asked that white lady to dance, she said ‘yes.'”

And she said yes more than once. Despite the raised eyebrows, Obama and Mooney clearly took great pleasure in dancing together. He was the
one who escorted her to an invitation-only evening at the prestigious African Club, an elegant event featuring classical music and an impressive list of guests clad in their most elegant silks and smoking jackets. In a letter to friends back home, Roberts wrote, “Well, the dance was a wonderful affair. The band was excellent and the quality of guests was very high.... Betty danced many dances, without harm to her back, tho she got very tired.”
¹¹

Obama confided in a few of his friends that he was not sure how far to take the friendship, so they observed the evolving situation with keen interest. Obama, of course, paid little mind to rules or social niceties, but a middle-aged
mzungu
? One working for the government? This was a whole new level of daring. Or something.

Richard Muga, a childhood friend of Obama's who lived with Obama during the first year he worked at the Literacy Center, recalls that Obama often visited Mooney in her two-bedroom flat. A tireless letter writer and amateur photographer, Mooney took many photographs of Obama that she kept throughout her life. They are a curious collection of largely posed shots, possibly taken to be used with school or job applications overseas. In a couple of them he stands in her flat next to her boxy, brown radio, staring intently into the camera, his expression pensive. In another he frowns in a lineup with other members of the literacy staff, standing on a Nairobi street. One shows him smiling whimsically—and completely uncharacteristically—at a white flower that he appears to have just plucked. “They were so close, no air passed between them,” said Muga. “They cooked together. They spent time together. And a lot of people noticed that Barack's English got much better during that time. The Mooney lady helped him very much with that.”

Kezia, preoccupied with her new baby back at their home, seemed wholly unaware of such observations about her husband. On occasion she and Roy were included on outings with Mooney and several others from the office. As was the custom in Nairobi of the time, men routinely socialized in the evenings without their wives. Far from resenting this
mzungu
's close association with her husband, Kezia was glad that he had a job and was hopeful that the connection might bring even greater opportunity. Although Kezia acknowledges that her husband had a roving eye even
from the start, she does not believe that Mooney was one of his romantic interests.

Despite the speculation of some of Obama's friends, that Mooney would have had a physical relationship with Obama seems unlikely for a multitude of reasons. For starters, her religious convictions would have put any married man off-limits. What's more, Mooney was friendly with Obama's young family. She and other members of the office staff would sometimes picnic on the outskirts of Nairobi along with Kezia, baby Roy, and Mooney's assistant, Wanyee. Mooney herself had experienced firsthand the pain of a broken home after her father left her mother when she was a teenager, and she was deeply opposed to extramarital affairs. Mooney often declared that she was waiting to find someone as reliable as one of her two older brothers, who had long-standing marriages, for her to marry.

Soon enough, another consuming interest united Obama and Mooney, one that was sweeping the country. By the beginning of 1959, just as Obama was completing the second Otieno book, the drive for advanced education for Kenyans had begun in earnest. Education was not only an ideal; it was a practical necessity if the country was to govern itself. As independence loomed and the handover of the reins of government from the British administrators to Kenyans inched ever closer, the need for Africans trained in a host of professions became urgent, as Mboya often emphasized. In the tumultuous months of 1959 literacy became a subject central not only to Kenya's future but also to the expanding reach of the Cold War.

The numbers told part of the story. Although European missionaries had helped to spread reading and writing throughout the country since their arrival in the mid-1800s, educational opportunities for Kenyans remained extremely limited well into the twentieth century. Just as the missionary schools were devoted largely to evangelical aims, the British government schools had their own self-serving design. Most schools the colonists inaugurated were intended to produce a low-level workforce that would supply semiskilled laborers to assist the white-run farms or civil servants to aid in government administration. The last thing the colonists wanted—or so most Kenyans believed—were independent or critical thinkers.
¹²

Most Kenyans were lucky to get several years of schooling before encountering a bottleneck in the educational system. In 1958, of those completing eight years of school, only 13 percent were able to continue on to secondary school because there were neither the schools nor the teachers to accept them, as Mboya wrote in his biography,
Freedom and After
.
¹³
For the few who did manage to make it through secondary school, the opportunities for undergraduate, let alone graduate-level education, were virtually nonexistent.

At the end of the 1950s there were two institutions of higher learning available to Kenyans: Makerere University in Kampala and the Royal Technical College of East Africa in Nairobi, which only began admitting students in 1956. But both Makerere and the Technical College, later to be called the University of Nairobi, were two-year institutions and offered the equivalent of a high school diploma only. Nor were their enrollments substantial. In 1955 Makerere, then the only college in East Africa, admitted a total of 205 students from the entire region. In 1957 there were a total of 251 students at Makerere, and another 57 students were admitted to the Royal Technical College in Nairobi.
¹⁴
Those who wanted higher education had to go overseas, but few had the finances or ability to do so.

By 1958 fewer than two hundred Kenyans were studying for university degrees outside the country, seventy-four in Great Britain, seventy-five in India and Pakistan, and a few dozen in the United States.
¹⁵
Kenyan students began to trickle into the United States during the mid 1950s, and by 1957 there were at least thirty-four enrolled in colleges or universities, and in 1958 another thirty-nine arrived. However, all but a handful of those were privately sponsored students. In 1957 only seven U.S. scholarships were given to Kenyan students, with another nine were awarded in 1958.
¹⁶
All told, only several hundred Kenyans had university degrees out of a population of just over eight million toward the decade's end.
¹⁷
This tiny group was hardly enough to supply the doctors and lawyers and bankers and teachers and the thousands of other professionals that would be needed to run the country when independence arrived. Critics among the rising tide of nationalists argued that this was no accident. They charged that the colonists had deliberately crafted an educational system that served their labor needs while keeping the bulk of Kenyans chained by their own illiteracy to brute labor or low-level administrative tasks.

Part of the problem was the shortage of Kenyan secondary schools, the equivalent of American junior high schools. Another impediment to those few who had managed to get a secondary school certificate was the British government's reluctance to have Kenyan students study in U.S. schools, which it considered inferior to its own.
¹⁸
That prejudice had taken cultural hold within Kenya, and a British education was generally regarded as superior to any other well into the 1950s. But as the first graduates of American institutions began to trickle back home to Kenya and then swiftly rise to the highest posts an African was afforded, the thinking began to change. Here were Africans with university degrees who looked the white man right in the eye. Their arrival fanned mounting frustration with the colonial regime, and this was swiftly translated into political expression. America, it now seemed, might be an option after all.

Although few in number, their impact was profound. The return of these students, fresh with stories of America's relative freedom and modern ways, coincided with an accelerating urgency in the tenor of Kenyan politics. In 1957 the first LEGCO elections open to Africans had introduced a new generation of Kenyan politicians to the scene. They included Mboya; Oginga Odinga of Central Nyanza, a former teacher and president of the Luo Union; Ronald G. Ngala of the Coast, also a former teacher and a member of the Mombasa Municipal Board; and Daniel T. arap Moi, a member of the Kalenjin tribe who was already a LEGCO member representing the Rift Valley. Upon their election, the group of eight immediately formed the African Elected Members Organization (AEMO) and went on the offensive.

Just days before the Kenyan elections, a critical African milestone had been reached after the Gold Coast achieved independence from Great Britain on March 6, 1957. The country was given the African name Ghana, which was chosen to reflect the ancient empire of Ghana that had once covered much of West Africa. Kwame Nkrumah was appointed Prime Minister as he trumpeted that Ghana “our beloved country is free forever.” It was the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonial rule, and it galvanized countless others across the continent to persevere against their imperial rulers. Coupled with the stirring stories of the students returning from the United States, the Ghanian
triumph inspired the Kenyan nationalists like nothing else. As Mboya wrote to friends in London, “The battle is on.”
¹⁹

AEMO had a short but determined list of demands. Members of the group would not accept any ministerial posts unless the Africans were granted a legislative majority over the European and Asian members. They also wanted a clear articulation of the British government's plans for Kenya's future. Although the African representation was subsequently increased to fourteen seats under the Lennox-Boyd Constitution in October 1957, AEMO rejected that as well, opting instead to hold out for a more complete response to their demands.

By 1959 the tide begun to shift in favor of the African nationalists. Determined to move the government's hand, the entire group of African and Asian members of the LEGCO walked out and formed a united front behind the Constituency Elected Members Organization (CEMO). As the tempo of the political debate grew ever more aggressive, the group sent a delegation to London headed by Odinga to demand an immediate end to the Emergency and a release of all veteran political leaders. Although the British government remained noncommittal on some of their demands and refused to discuss Kenyatta's release, it consented to the need for a constitutional conference. The colonial government, it seemed, was in retreat.

Mboya would normally have been a part of the delegation, but he had earlier accepted an invitation from the American Committee on Africa, which had sponsored his first visit to the United States, to return for an April speaking tour. By not going on the trip to London, Mboya risked the possibility that Odinga, who was clearly emerging as a rival in the bid for national leadership, would benefit politically at home if the discussions were fruitful—and even if they were not. It was a risk he was willing to take. Being a politician blessed with an astute sense of timing, Mboya seized the moment for a return to the United States.

In April 1959 Mboya made his second visit to the United States, landing in New York to a hero's welcome. He was by now a figure of immense global popularity, and his first few days in the United States were crammed with speeches, press conferences, and meetings with Vice President Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, and Senator John Kennedy. Handsome,
a centrist compared to some of his rivals back home, and intellectually astute, Mboya was clearly an African that Americans could love.