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What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void? I could list various possibilities. But I’d never arrived at a definite answer, aware early on that, given my circumstances, such an effort was bound to fail.
Instead, I drew a series of circles around myself, with borders that shifted as time passed and faces changed but that nevertheless offered the illusion of control. An inner circle, where love was constant and claims unquestioned. Then a second circle, a realm of negotiated love, commitments freely chosen. And then a circle for colleagues, acquaintances; the cheerful gray-haired lady who rang up my groceries back in Chicago. Until the circle finally widened to embrace a nation or a race, or a particular moral course, and the commitments I’d made to myself.
In Africa, this astronomy of mine almost immediately collapsed. For family seemed to be everywhere: in stores, at the post office, on streets and in the parks, all of them fussing and fretting over Obama’s long-lost son. (…) At first I reacted to all this attention like a child to its mother’s bosom, full of simple, unquestioning gratitude. It conformed to my idea of Africa and Africans, an obvious contrast to the growing isolation of American life, a contrast I understood, not in racial, but in cultural terms. A measure of what we sacrificed for technology and mobility, but that here – as in the kampongs outside Djakarta or in the country villages of Ireland or Greece – remained essentially intact: the insistent pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth.
As the days wore on, though, my joy became tempered with tension and doubt. Some of it had to do with what Auma had talked about that night in the car – an acute awareness of my relative good fortune, and the troublesome questions such good fortune implied. Not that our relatives were suffering, exactly. Both Jane and Zeituni had steady jobs; Kezia made do selling cloth in the markets. If cash got too short, the children could be sent upcountry for a time; that’s where another brother, Abo, was staying, I was told, with an uncle in Kendu Bay, where there were always chores to perform, food on the table and a roof over one’s head.
Still, the situation in Nairobi was tough and getting tougher. Clothes were mostly secondhand, a doctor’s visit reserved for the direst emergency. Almost all the family’s younger members were unemployed, including the two or three who had managed, against stiff competition, to graduate from one of Kenya’s universities. If Jane or Zeituni ever fell ill, if their companies ever closed or laid off, there was no government safety net. There was only family, next of kin; people burdened by similar hardship.
Now I was family, I reminded myself; now I had responsibilities. But what did that mean exactly? Back in the States, I’d been able to translate such feelings into politics, organizing, a certain self-denial. In Kenya, these strategies seemed hopelessly abstract, even self-indulgent. A commitment to black empowerment couldn’t help find Bernard a job. A faith in participatory democracy couldn’t buy Jane a new set of sheets. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply about money: my own lack of it, the pursuit of it, the crude but undeniable peace it could buy. A part of me wished I could live up to the image that my new relatives imagined for me: a corporate lawyer, an American businessman, my hand poised on the spigot, ready to rain down like manna the largesse of the Western world.
But of course I wasn’t either of those things. Even in the States, wealth involved trade-offs for those who weren’t born to it, the same sorts of trade-offs that I could see Auma now making as she tried, in her own way, to fulfill the family’s expectations. She was working two jobs that summer, teaching German classes to Kenyan businessmen along with her job at the university. With the money she saved, she wanted not only to fix up Granny’s house in Alego but also to buy a bit of land around Nairobi, something that would appreciate in value, a base from which to build.
She had plans, schedules, budgets, and deadlines – all the things she’d learned were required to negotiate a modern world. The problem was that her schedules also meant begging off from family affairs; her budgets meant saying no to the constant requests for money that came her way. And when this happened – when she insisted on going home before Jane served dinner because things had started two hours late, or when she refused to let eight people pile into her VW because it was designed for four and they would tear up the seats – the looks of unspoken hurt, barely distinguishable from resentment, would flash across the room. Her restlessness, her independence, her constant willingness to project into the future – all of this struck the family as unnatural somehow. Unnatural… and un-African.
(...)
Toward the end of my second week in Kenya, Auma and I went on a safari. Auma wasn’t thrilled with the idea. When I first showed her the brochure, she grimaced and shook her head. Like most Kenyans, she could draw a straight line between the game parks and colonialism. “How many Kenyans do you think can afford to go on a safari?” she asked me. “Why should all that land be set aside for tourists when it could be used for farming? These wazungu care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children.”
For several days we parried. I told her she was letting other people’s attitudes prevent her from seeing her own country. She said she didn’t want to waste the money. Eventually she relented, not because of my persuasive powers but because she took pity on me. “If some animal ate you out there,” she said, “I’d never forgive myself.” And so, at seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, we watched a sturdily built Kikuyu driver named Francis load our bags onto the roof of a white minivan. With us were a spindly cooked named Rafael, a dark-haired Italian named Mauro, and a British couple in their early forties, the Wilkersons.
We drove out of Nairobi at a modest pace, passing soon into countryside, green hills and red dirt paths and small shambas surrounded by plots of wilting, widely spaced corn. Nobody spoke, a discomfiting silence that reminded me of a similar moments back in the States, the pause that would sometimes accompany my personal integration of a bar or hotel. It made me think about Auma and Mark, my grandparents back in Hawaii, my mother still in Indonesia, and the things Zeituni had told me.
If everyone is family, then no one is family.
Was Zeituni right? I’d come to Kenya thinking that I could somehow force my many worlds into a single, harmonious whole. Instead, the divisions seemed only to have become more multiplied, popping up in the midst of even the simplest chores. I thought back to the previous morning, when Auma and I had gone to book our tickets. The travel agency was owned by Asians; most small businesses in Nairobi were owned by Asians. Right away, Auma had tensed up. “You see how arrogant they are?” she had whispered as we watched a young Indian woman order her black clerks to and fro. “They call themselves Kenyans, but they want nothing to do with us. As soon as they make their money, they send it off to London or Bombay.”
Her attitude had touched a nerve. “How can you blame Asians for sending their money out of the county,” I had asked her, “after what happened in Uganda?” I had gone on to tell her about the close Indian and Pakistani friends I had back in the States, friends who had supported black causes, friends who had lent me money when I was tight and taken me into their homes when I’d had no place to stay. Auma had been unmoved. “Ah, Barack,” she had said. “Sometimes you’re so naïve.”
I looked at Auma now, her face turned toward the window. What had I expected my little lecture to accomplish? My simple formulas for Third World solidarity had little application in Kenya. Here, persons of India extraction were like the Chinese in Indonesia, the Koreans in the South Side of Chicago, outsiders who knew how to trade and kept to themselves, working the margins of a racial caste system, more visible and so more vulnerable to resentment. It was nobody’s fault necessarily. It was just a matter of history, an unfortunate fact of life.
Anyway, the divisions in Kenya didn’t stop there; there were always finer lines to draw. Between the country’s forty black tribes, for example. They, too, were a fact of life. You didn’t notice the tribalism so much among Auma’s friends, younger university-educated Kenyans who’d been schooled in the idea of nation and race; tribe was an issue with them only when they were considering a mate, or when they got older and saw it help or hinder careers. But they were the exceptions. Most Kenyans still worked with older maps of identity, more ancient loyalties. Even Jane or Zeituni could say things that surprised me. “The Luo are intelligent but lazy,” they would say. Or “The Kikuyu are money-grubbing but industrious.” Or “The Kalenjins – well, you can see what’s happened to the country since they took over.”
Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways. “It’s thinking like that that holds us back,” I would say. “We’re all part of one tribe. The black tribe. The human tribe. Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia.” And Jane would say, “Ah, those West Africans are all crazy anyway. You know they used to be cannibals, don’t you?” And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry. He also had such ideas about people.” Meaning he, too, was naïve; he, too, liked to argue with history. Look what happened to him….
We followed the road into cooler hills, where women walked barefoot carrying firewood and water and small boys switched at donkeys from their rickety carts. Gradually the shambas became less frequent, replaced by tangled bush and forest, until the trees on our left dropped away without warning and all we could see was the wide-open sky. “The Great Rift Valley,” Francis announced. We piled out of the van and stood at the edge of the escarpment looking out toward the western horizon. Hundreds of feet below, stone and savannah grass stretched out in a flat and endless plain, before it met the sky and carried the eye back through a series of high white clouds. To the right, a solitary mountain rose like an island in a silent sea; beyond that, a row of worn and shadowed ridges. Only two signs of man’s presence were visible – a slender road leading west, and a satellite station, its massive white dish cupped upward toward the sky.
A few miles north, we turned off the main highway onto a road of pulverized tarmac. It was slow going: at certain points the potholes yawned across the road’s entire width, and every so often trucks would approach from the opposite direction, forcing Francis to drive onto embankments. Eventually, we arrived at the road we’d seen from above and began to make our way across the valley floor. The landscape was dry, mostly bush grass and scruffy thorn trees, gravel and patches of hard dark stone. We began to pass small herds of gazelle; a solitary wildebeest feeding at the base of a tree; zebra and a giraffe, barely visible in the distance. For almost an hour we saw no other person, until a solitary Masai herdsman appeared in the distance, his figure as lean and straight as the staff that he carried, leading a herd of long-horned cattle across an empty flat.
I hadn’t met many Masai in Nairobi, although I’d read quite a bit about them. I knew that their pastoral ways and fierceness in war had earned them a grudging respect from the British, so that even as treaties had been broken and the Masai had been restricted to reservations, the tribe had become mythologized in its defeat, like the Cherokee or Apache, the noble savage of picture postcards and coffee table books. I also knew that this Western infatuation with the Masai infuriated other Kenyans, who thought their ways something of an embarrassment, and who hankered after Masai lad. The government had tried to impose compulsory education on Masai children, and a system of land title among the adults. The black man’s burden, officials explained: to civilize our less fortunate brethren.
Francis was waiting for us when we returned to the van. We drove through the gate, following the road up a small, barren rise. And there, on the other side of the rise, I saw as beautiful a land as I’d ever seen. It swept out forever, flat plains undulating into gentle hills, dun-colored and as supple as a lion’s back, creased by long gallery forests and dotted with thorn trees. To our left, a huge herd of zebra, ridiculously symmetrical in their stripes, harvested the wheat-colored grass; to our right, a troop of gazelle leaped into bush. And in the center, thousands of wildebeest, with mournful heads and humped shoulders that seemed too much for their slender legs to carry. Francis began to inch the van through the herd, and the animals parted before us, then merged in our wake like a school of fish, their hoofs beating against the earth like a wave against the shore.
We set up camp above the banks of a winding brown stream, beneath a big fig tree filled with noisy blue starlings. It was getting late, but after setting up our tents and gathering firewood, we had time for a short drive to a nearby watering hole where topi and gazelle had gathered to drink. A fire was going when we got back, and as we sat down to feed on Rafael’s stew, Francis began telling us a little bit about himself. He had a wife and six children, he said, living on his homestead in Kikuyuland. They tended an acre of coffee and corn; on his days off, he did the heavier work of hoeing and planting. He said he enjoyed his work with the travel agency but disliked being away from his family. “If I could, I might prefer farming full-time,” he said, “but the KCU makes it impossible.”
“What’s the KCU?” I asked.
“The Kenyan Coffee Union. They are thieves. They regulate what we can plant and when we can plant it. I can only sell my coffee to them, and they sell it overseas. They say to us that prices are dropping, but I know they still get one hundred times what they pay to me. “The rest goes where?” Francis shook his head with disgust. “It’s a terrible thing when the government steals from its own people.” ”You speak very freely,” Auma said. Francis shrugged. “If more people spoke up, perhaps things might change. Look at the road that we traveled this morning coming into the valley. You know, that road was supposed to have been repaired only last year. But they used only loose gravel, so it washed out in the first rains. The money that was saved probably went into building some big man’s house.”
Francis looked into the fire, combing his mustache with his fingers. “I suppose it is not only the government’s fault,” he said after awhile. “Even when things are done properly, we Kenyans don’t like to pay taxes. We don’t trust the idea of giving our money to someone. The poor man, he has good reason for this suspicion. But the big men who own the trucks that use the roads, they also refuse to pay their share. They would rather have their equipment break down all the time than give up some of their profits. This is how we like to think, you see. Somebody else’s problem.” I tossed a stick into the fire. “Attitudes aren’t so different in America,” I told Francis. “You are probably right,” he said. “But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”
At night, after dinner, we spoke further with our Masai guardsmen. Wilson told us that both he and his friend had recently been moran, members of the bachelor class of young warriors who were at the center of the Masai legend. They had each killed a lion to prove their manhood, had participated in numerous cattle raids. But now there were no wars, and even cattle raids had become complicated – only last year, another friend had been shot by a Kikuyu rancher. Wilson had finally decided that being a moran was a waste of time.
He had gone to Nairobi in search of work, but he had little schooling and had ended up as a security guard at a bank. The boredom drove him crazy, and eventually he had returned to the valley to marry and tend to his cattle. Recently one of the cattle had been killed by a lion, and although it was illegal now, he and four others had hunted the lion into the preserve. “How do you kill a lion?” I asked. “Five men surround it and throw their spears,” Wilson said. “The lion will choose one man to pounce. That man, he curls under his shield while the other four finish the job.” “It sounds dangerous,” I said stupidly. Wilson shrugged. “Usually there are only scratches. But sometimes only four will come back.”
The man didn’t sound like he was boasting – more like a mechanic trying to explain a difficult repair. Perhaps it was that nonchalance that caused Auma to ask him where the Masai thought a man went after he died. At first, Wilson didn’t seem to understand the question, but eventually he smiled and began shaking his head. “This is not a Masai belief,” he said, almost laughing, “this life after you die. After you die, you are nothing. You return to the soil. That is all.” “What do you say, Francis?” Mauro asked. For some time Francis had been reading a small, red-bound Bible. He looked up now and smiled. “These Masai are brave men,” he said. “Were you raised a Christian?” Auma asked Francis. Francis nodded. “My parents converted before I was born.”
Mauro spoke, staring into the fire. “Me, I leave the Church. Too many rules. Don’t you think, Francis, that sometimes Christianity not so good? For Africa, the missionary changes everything, yes? He brings… how do you say?” “Colonialism,” I offered. “Yes – colonialism. White religion, no?” Francis placed the Bible in his lap. “Such things troubled me when I was young. The missionaries were men, and they erred as men. Now that I’m older, I understand that I also can fail. That is not God’s failure. I also remember that some missionaries fed people during drought. Some taught children to read. In this, I believe they were doing God’s work. All we can do is aspire to live like God, though we will always fall short.”
Mauro went to his tent and Francis returned to his Bible. Beside him, Auma began to read a story with Elizabeth. Dr. Wilkerson sat with his knees together, mending his pants while his wife stared at the fir beside him. I looked at the Masai, their faces silent and watchful, and wondered what they made of the rest of us. They might be amused, I decided. I knew that their courage, their hardness, made me question my own noisy spirit. And yet, as I looked around the fire, I thought I saw a courage no less admirable in Francis, and in Auma, and in the Wilkersons as well. Maybe it was that courage, I thought, that Africa most desperately needed. Honest, decent men and women with attainable ambitions, and the determination to see those ambitions through.
The fire began to die, and one by one the others made their way to bed, until only Francis and I and the Masai remained. As I stood up, Francis began to sing a deep-voiced hymn in Kikuyu, with a melody that I vaguely recognized. I listened a while, lost in my own thoughts. Walking back to my tent, I felt I understood Francis’s plaintive song, imagining it transmitting upward, through the clear black night, directly to God.
*Extracts from "Dreams from My Father - A Story of Race and Inheritance", Copyright © 1995, 2004 by Barack Obama.
Here’s where I stand with Toni Morrison: she has my utmost respect and admiration as the first, and so far only, black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, I must confess that I have some difficulty in naming her as my ‘preferred writer’, for the simple (difficult) reason that her books, generally, don’t make easy reading for me. Her fictional writing is so complex that in the end I’m never quite sure that I really understood what she meant to convey to the reader. Of course I can always rely solely on my own presumed understanding of it, on my own take – and isn’t this all we can claim to get at the end of any reading, anyway? But I wish I could make more sense of it all.
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