Before the end of May he was busily dispatching postcards to Sheila, Lena, Cathy Askew, and Cynthia Norris from Paris, “some quite humorous,” Sheila remembered. To Cathy, he wrote about how beautiful the buildings were, to Cynthia he described the city’s astonishing appeal: “I wander around Paris, the most beautiful, alluring, maddening city I’ve ever seen; one is tempted to chuck the whole organizing/political business and be a painter on the banks of the Seine. You’ll be amused to know that since I don’t know a word of French, I’m left speechless most of the time. Wish you a fruitful summer. Love, Barack.”
Traveling largely by bus and train, Barack was also reading a journalistic account of modern Africa in preparation for his visit to Kenya. He later told about meeting and trying to converse with a Senegalese traveler on the way from Madrid to Barcelona, but in subsequent years, Barack never referred to any experiences or memories from his four weeks on the continent. By the last weekend in June, he was in London, where Hasan and Raazia Chandoo had moved six months earlier from Brooklyn. The three of them had lunch in a brasserie before seeing Wim Wenders’s new film, Wings of Desire, at a cinema in Notting Hill.
From London Heathrow, Barack flew to Nairobi. His sister Auma and his Aunt Zeituni, the family member who had been the closest to his late father, met him at the airport, but Barack’s suitcase did not arrive until several days later. In preparation for his visit, Barack also had read a brand-new book on Dedan Kimathi, a Kenyan anticolonial warrior of the 1950s whom the British had executed in 1957, but instead of discussing Kenyan history while he stayed at Auma’s apartment, sleeping on her couch, they talked mostly about their extended clan of relatives. “There was never a moment of silence or embarrassed awkwardness” between them, Auma recalled. But with Barack wanting to meet as many family members as possible, “It wasn’t all nice. Sometimes he wanted to see a relative I didn’t really get along with, and he’d be like ‘It’s my right, and I need to see them, and I’m not going alone, and you’re coming with me,’ ” she explained.
Auma always assented, although her thoroughly unreliable Volkswagen Beetle was their primary mode of transport around sprawling Nairobi. One drive took them to see Auma’s mother Kezia and her sister Silpa Jane, who six years earlier had been the telephone caller who told Barack of his father’s death. On another, Zeituni took Barack to meet her older sister Sarah, who was living in a scruffy slum. But the most difficult visit was to Ruth Baker Ndesandjo, whose son Mark—Barack’s younger brother—was home for the summer and about to begin graduate school at Stanford after having just graduated from Brown. Barack later imagined that Ruth had invited him and Auma to come for lunch, but both Ruth and Mark convincingly remember Barack and Auma turning up with no forewarning. As Mark recounts, a “very awkward, cold” encounter ensued, as Ruth found the unexpected arrival of her ex-husband’s namesake “pretty traumatic.” Years later she recalled, “I closed up. I had nothing to say,” for “I didn’t have the capacity to talk with him or exchange with him because he was a reflection of a man I hated. So I didn’t want anything to do with him.”
Barack wanted to see more of Mark, and they arranged to have lunch a few days later. Mark remembered thinking that Barack had a “cold” demeanor, “absolutely no sense of humor,” and “wanted to shut out any emotional involvement” with his likewise half-Luo, half-white American brother, especially when Mark bluntly stated that “our father was a drunk and he beat women.” Barack later admitted that meeting Ruth and Mark, and grasping at least in part how abusively his father had treated them, affected him deeply. “The recognition of how wrong it had all turned out, the harsh evidence of life as it had really been lived, made me so sad,” far more so than he had been three years earlier when he had learned during Auma’s visit to Chicago just how deeply tragic a life Barack Obama Sr. had led.
During Barack’s second week in Kenya, Auma took him on a wild-game safari, and then the two of them plus Zeituni and Kezia took a train northwest to Kisumu and then a jitney bus to the family homestead at Nyang’oma Kogelo. There Barack met Sarah, the stepmother who had raised his father. Barack asked her if anything of his father’s still survived. “She opened a trunk and took out a stack of letters, which she handed to me. There were more than thirty of them, all of them written by my father,” carbon copies “all addressed to colleges and universities all across America” from when Obama Sr. was seeking admission to the University of Hawaii and other colleges. Holding them reminded Barack of the letters he had written a few years earlier, “trying to find a job that would give purpose to my life.”
That moment, even more than standing at his father’s unmarked grave in the side yard of Sarah’s small, tin-roofed brick home, marked the most powerful and direct paternal link Barack had ever experienced. The connection was underscored when relatives remarked that Barack’s voice sounded “exactly how his father spoke.” Barack’s visit to Nyang’oma Kogelo, like his earlier one to Aunt Sarah in that Nairobi slum, made Barack realize that his Kenyan relatives’ lives sometimes paralleled those of people whom he knew in Altgeld Gardens. Pondering John McKnight’s analysis, in Kogelo Barack wondered whether “the idea of poverty had been imported to this place, a new standard of need and want.”
Barack later wrote that while in Kenya, “for the first time in my life, I found myself thinking deeply about money,” perhaps foreshadowing the debt load he was about to take on to follow his father’s footsteps to Harvard rather than attend Northwestern cost free. He told Auma that his decision to attend law school was a response to his experiences in Chicago, because as a community organizer he could not “ultimately bring about significant change.” Back in Nairobi, everyone went to a photography studio so that a family portrait could be taken, and Barack and Auma made a brief visit to an elementary school so that he could meet his youngest sibling, George, the son of Jael Atieno.
One night Auma took Barack to meet one of her former teachers, a woman who had also known their father. Barack recounted her presciently telling him that being a historian “requires a temperament for mischief” and instructing him that when confronted with roseate fictions, “truth is usually the best corrective.” For his final weekend in Kenya, Auma and Barack took a train eastward to the country’s second largest city, coastal Mombasa. Overall, “it was a magical trip,” Barack remembered, an immersion into the life of the father who had abandoned him, an immersion that “made me I think much more forgiving of him” than he had been before experiencing Luo life and culture for the very first time.82
Before the end of July, Barack returned to Chicago, where he was all alone in the 5429 South Harper apartment until the lease expired in early August. When Asif’s friend Doug Glick stopped by, he was struck by how different the place looked without Sheila. But Barack and Sheila’s two months apart had not ended the relationship between them. Johnnie Owens had run into Sheila in Hyde Park during the summer and remembers how “upset,” even “brokenhearted” she seemed about what had happened just before Barack’s trip. But Barack’s more-than-weekly letters from Europe and Kenya had rebuilt much of their bond. Even so, in little more than two weeks he had to head to Massachusetts before the start of Harvard’s fall semester. He needed to purchase a better car than the blue Honda Civic that he had driven from Manhattan just over three years earlier, and he replaced it with an off-yellow 1984 Toyota Tercel hatchback he bought for $500 from a suburban police officer.
Barack also wanted to be sure that Johnnie’s transition was going as smoothly as possible, not just at DCP, where everyone already knew Johnnie, but also with DCP’s downtown supporters. “He made sure that the leaders were comfortable,” Johnnie remembered, but “the main thing he did was transfer those financial funder relations” with Jean Rudd at Woods, Anne Hallett at Wieboldt, and Aurie Pennick at MacArthur. Just a few weeks later, MacArthur would award DCP its second annual $20,000 grant. Barack “left the organization in a very good position,” Johnnie explained, and the effort Barack put into the transition further showed that he intended to return to Chicago