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: A Story of Race and Inheritance.”

“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.

To be continued — From Nation Newspaper Online, Kenya

Related: How Obama’s Father’s Dream Was Ruined By Nairobi’s Happy Hour and Ethnicity (Tribalism)

Barack Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, grew up in El Dorado, Kansas. Obama was raised by his mother and his grandparents in Hawaii; his father left the family when Obama was just 2 years old and then returned to his native Kenya.

Stanley Dunham served in World War II and was educated on the GI Bill, while his grandmother stayed in Wichita with their baby — Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham — and worked on a bomber assembly line. The family eventually moved to Hawaii, where Obama was born and raised.

Obama’s upbringing in a white household contributed to some questioning early in his campaign about whether he is “black enough” to win over black voters. That is no longer the case, as he now draws support from blacks at a 90+% clip — The ‘Clinton Goons’ helped that come about….when they unleased blatant Racial Politics in South Carolina.

| Why is Obama called black anyway? |

Stanley Dunham died in 1992 and Obama’s mother, Ann died in 1995. Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, follows the campaign closely, even though severe osteoporosis keeps her from traveling out of Hawaii.

More from Wikipedia: Madelyn and Stanley Dunham

Who is Barack Obama — Part 1

…For Parts 2,3… [Go Here]

In his book: ‘Dreams From My Father,’ Obama pays tribute to his mother Ann

The “skinny kid with a funny name” is now a political ‘Rock’ star, the golden child of the Democratic party — Who has systematically clobbered the Clinton THUGS into “Racist ‘We Hope You Are Assassinated’ Submission,” and is on the verge of grabbing the highest office in the world…..from the ‘Hyena Jaws‘ of McSame and McDumb Bush — the dumbest and the most unqualified man ever, to lead the United States of America.

   McDumb & McSame in a Tight ReTHUGlican ‘Orgy Embrace‘

By: KEVIN J KELLEY

Right-wing Christian Activists in the United States are attempting to use Senator Barack Obama’s Kenyan links to discredit him.

Sen. Barrack Obama [L] & Prime Minister Raila Odinga [R]
The activists, most of them conseervative Christians, claim that Mr Obama is a relative of Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whom they describe as a “socialist who plans to introduce Sharia Law in Kenya“.

Mr Obama is leading his party’s presidential nominations and is almost certain to win against Senator Hillary Clinton.

He also stands a good chance against Senator John McCain of the rival Republican Party, thus making history as the first non-white to become a US president.

For the past two decades, American presidential campaigns have been conducted with every aspect of a candidate’s life placed under the microscope.

Analysts expect the Republicans to scour Mr Obama’s Kenyan links to find anything that they can use against him.

Some of the most widely circulated allegations originated last month in a chain e-mail from Celeste Davis, an American Christian missionary who, together with her husband Loren Davis, claims to have worked in Kenya for 12 years.

The Davises allege that Senator Obama donated nearly $1 million (approximately Ksh61 million) to the Orange Democratic Movement’s campaign last year. “Obama and Raila speak daily,” the Davises add, claiming that the two men are cousins.

Bizarre and discredited

Mr Odinga’s spokesman, Mr. Salim Lone, dismissed the allegations as bizarre and discredited.

“These are bizarre accusations that lack credibility. The allegations that the Prime Minister has socialist and pro-Mulism leanings were discussed and discredited in the last campaign,” he said.

“This is the work of right-wing activists who are trying to puncture holes in Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House by attempting to resurrect allegations that were discredited in Kenya during the campaign,” he said.

Nairobi-based political scientist, Tom Wolf, an American, said that the Internet smear campaign against Mr Obama was an act of desperation.

“It just shows how desperate the Republicans are that Obama is viewed as a serious threat that they would have to use such irrelevant campaign tactics. If the Americans were worried, would they be so close to him? You recall that someone tried to use the Somali robes to discredit him,” he said.

If the Cold War were still on and communism were still alive, and Raila had spent a weekend with some communist leader like Fidel Castro, he said, it would be much more of an issue.

“But if you criticise Obama because he is related to a Kenyan leader who arrived at a compromise over the disputed election to save his nation, how would that hurt him?” Mr Wolf asked.

Mr Lone described the e-mail campaign as one of the last gasp efforts by right-wing activists in the US to dent Senator Obama’s campaign to become the Democratic Party’s standard bearer in the race to the White House.

Mr Lone, however, claimed that Mr Odinga and Senator Obama were related by blood and came from the same clan.

“It is true that the Prime Minister and the senator are related. Senator Obama comes from a family and clan to which the Prime Minister’s mother belongs, and they are cousins,” he said.

In the American sense, a cousin is the child of your parents’ siblings. But in Luo culture, the members of your father’s or mother’s clans are your cousins.

A clan would typically have hundreds of thousands of members, and the relationship is more social than biological.

Mr Obama is the son of Barack Obama Sr of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas.

He was raised by his maternal grandparents. In October last year, Mrs Lynne Cheney, wife of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, announced that she had discovered, while researching a book on their family, that Mr Cheney and Mr Obama were blood relatives.

They were eighth cousins, she said, with a common ancestor, a 17th-century immigrant from France.

The Illinois senator is acknowledged as perhaps the most charismatic American politician since John F Kennedy.

December election

Mr Davis and his wife, noting Mr Odinga’s contention that the December 27 presidential voting was rigged, said in their message, “As we watch Obama rise in the US we are sure that whatever happens, he will use the same tactic, crying rigged election if he doesn’t win and possibly cause a race war in America.”

A conservative Internet commentator, Michael Gaynor, speculated earlier this month that Senator Clinton’s campaign might play “the Kenya card” against Mr Obama.

Mr Gaynor says “the Kenya card” involves unspecified connections between the Kenyan-American senator and “the radical Kenyan prime minister.”

An author who succeeded in smearing Democratic Senator John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential race may also make negative use of Senator Obama’s Kenyan heritage.

A February 27 report by the McClatchy-Tribune News Service in the US says that author Jerome Corsi intends to research “Obama’s connections to Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga and Odinga’s ties to Muslim groups.”

Mr Corsi wrote Unfit for Command, a text effectively used by Republican Party partisans seeking to discredit Senator Kerry’s service in the US military during the Vietnam war.

Evidence assembled by Mr Kerry and his supporters showed that these charges were either exaggerated or flatly false.

The Davises’ allegations concerning Senator Obama and Mr Odinga “are all kinds of false,” states an online commentator for The New Republic, a respected US political magazine.

But one effect of the response to the Davises’ lies by so prestigious a magazine will be to call further attention to those lies.

Politifact, a political accuracy check maintained by two reputable and non-partisan publications — The St Petersburg (Florida) Times and Congressional Quarterly — published a detailed rebuttal of the Davises’ claims in a May 2 analysis by researcher Amy Hollyfield.

She quoted Mr Lone as saying: “This is absolutely ridiculous” in regard to the Davises’ claim that a group associated with Senator Obama donated nearly $1 million (Sh62 million) to the ODM campaign. “Mr Obama did not donate a single cent to Mr Odinga’s campaign,” Mr Lone told Politifact.

He said the group the Davises say gave the money to ODM does not exist, Politifact reports, citing several US election campaign monitoring organisations, including one sponsored by the US government.

Politifact also investigated the Davises’ claim that Mr Obama is a cousin of Mr Odinga.

That assertion is based on a BBC interview in January in which Mr Odinga said, “Barack Obama’s father is my maternal uncle.”

The BBC then asked, “You’re related to him?” Mr Odinga replied: “Yes, I am.”

The Obama campaign denies that the senator and Mr Odinga are cousins. And three Kenya experts interviewed by Politifact also dismissed this claim, Ms Hollyfield reports.

Normal sense

“To my knowledge, they are not first cousins in the normal sense,” Kenya election expert Joel Barkan, a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, told Politifact.

“To my knowledge, there’s absolutely no relationship at all.”

Prof Barkan also took issue with the Davises’ characterisation of Mr Odinga as a “socialist.”

Such a charge is intended to incite still-virulent anti-communist sentiments among many Americans and to suggest that Senator Obama has a sinister, far-left agenda that he is concealing from US voters.

“He’s a populist politician,” Prof Barkan says of Mr Odinga, “but he’s no socialist.”

Because the Davises’ e-mail was written by missionaries long active in Kenya, “it somehow carries more credence than your average blog posting — and it’s spreading rapidly,” Politifact commented.

“But even with the credibility of a real author, the claims in this e-mail are as baseless as anything you’ve read from an anonymous blogger.”

Speaking to the Sunday Nation Saturday, Mr Lone said Mr Odinga and Mr Obama enjoy good relations.

However, Mr Lone was categorical that Senator Obama and the PM have never sat down to discuss their ideological commitments owing to the fact they play politics in different environments.

“Claims that the two have discussed their ideological commitments are completely far-fetched. The senator has Kenyan roots, but he is an American first and foremost,” he said. He further dismissed claims that Senator Obama, or groups connected to him, contributed to Mr Odinga’s campaign kitty, stating that they never received a cent from the Illinois senator.

Mr Davis and his wife claim to have preached among Muslims for 20 years, 12 of them in Kenya.

Their ministry is said to be based in Meru.

The Sunday Nation’s efforts to track them or their Kenyan ministry down Saturday were fruitless by the time of going to press.

REFERENCES:

1. Odinga says Obama is his cousin — Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga has said he is a cousin of US presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
2. Could US elect a Luo before Kenya? — It is said there is a bitter joke among Kenya’s Luo community that the United States of America will elect a member of their tribe as president before the East African country does.