AND THEN LIFE HAPPENS. Copyright © 2012 by Auma Obama.

English translation
copyright © 2012 by Ross Benjamin. All rights reserved. Printed in the United
States of America. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fift h Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10011.

www.stmartins.com

Design by Steven Seighman

ISBN 978-1-250- 01005- 6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250- 01059-9 (e-book)

First published in Germany by Lübbe

First U.S. Edition: May 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 1.

h, my god! Oh, my God! I can’t believe it!”

O For the second time, Lucy, my assistant, read the letter
she was holding in her hand. Flustered by its unexpected arrival,
I had desperately needed to show it to someone.
I stood next to Lucy’s desk and could tell clearly by the look
on her face that she was itching to read the letter once again—
this time aloud. Immediately, I emphatically gestured to her not
to do so. The last thing I wanted was for the whole office to find
out what was in the letter—or even worse, who had sent it. For
some time now, I had been getting an enormous amount of
attention—because my brother Barack had, against all odds, be-
come the first African-American president of the United States.
Almost overnight, I—as a member of his family in Africa—
found myself in the spotlight. And now it seemed that even lev-
elheaded Lucy was getting caught up in all the excitement.
“You absolutely have to frame the letter! Absolutely!” she
cried. Laughing, I took the letter from her. “Really, Auma!” she
added in earnest. “Imagine how much it will be worth in a few
years.” Now I really had to laugh.
“You Kikuyu,” I teased, feigning reproach.
4 AUMA OBAMA

The Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, have a repu-

tation for good business sense. Lucy grinned. She is actually
Kamba, a different ethnic group, but is married to a Kikuyu man.
“Must have rubbed off on me,” she replied with a shrug and a
mischievous smile.
I noticed our coworkers looking at us with growing curiosity.
“Don’t you think it would make more sense to answer the let-
ter instead of keeping it as a museum piece?” I went on, lowering
my voice and trying to bring not only Lucy but also myself back
down to earth. All the while, another question was whirling
around in my mind: How on earth was I to go about answering
a letter from Hillary Rodham Clinton?

Only a few minutes earlier, the letter had been brought to me

personally by a U.S. embassy staff member. It was preceded by a
call to my office at the international humanitarian organization
CARE to confirm that I would be available to take delivery of
the letter. Before I knew what this was all about, my immediate
reaction was to go on the defensive. I thought it was just another
of the numerous interview requests I had been receiving. Over-
whelmed by the volume of calls, I had started to feel like a cor-
nered animal trying to take cover from the journalists. The fact
that those inquiries always reached me exclusively on my cell
phone and that only a few people knew my office number had at
that moment completely slipped my mind.
At the height of the election in 2008, I had intentionally
given out my cell number, so that anyone with questions about
the Obama family could contact me. I had believed that I could
easily deal with the media. After all, I thought, I had worked as a
journalist myself when I lived in Germany. By providing my
 AND THEN LIFE HAPPENS 5

number, I had mainly wished to protect my grandmother, whom

everyone called Mama Sarah, from all the media fuss. But I had
not been prepared for such a flood of calls.
Because Mama Sarah was also Barack’s grandmother, every-
one wanted to speak to her. They wanted her to tell them about
his family, to bring to light the missing pieces of the puzzle that
Barack Obama was for them. Who exactly was this black man
and son of an African who had dared to aspire to the office of
president of the most powerful nation in the world? Where were
his roots? Who was his family?
In search of answers to these questions, scores of reporters
from across the globe boarded planes and traveled to Nairobi,
the capital of Kenya. From there they continued on to rural
western Kenya, to Alego Nyangoma Kogelo, an unassuming little
village not far from the shores of Lake Victoria that was our an-
cestral home. There, on the Obama family homestead, lie the
mortal remains of Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (1936–1982) and
Onyango Hussein Obama (1879–1975), the father and grandfa-
ther, respectively, of the forty-fourth American president. And
to this day, it is the home of our grandmother, Mama Sarah.
On many occasions I was at my grandmother’s side when she
was interviewed, and I never ceased to be amazed and delighted
at how well she, eighty-seven years old at the time, was able to
grasp the intricacies and dynamics of the American electoral
process. She answered all the questions with intelligence and
humor, sticking to the point and not digressing. That being said,
I was also always conscious of not wanting to overtax her at her
age and tried to keep the media interest from getting out of
hand.
6 AUMA OBAMA

I carried Hillary Clinton’s letter around with me for days. I felt

that any response had to be well thought through. Not only was
I in a state of mixed emotions—overjoyed at my brother’s suc-
cess, while at the same time not fully prepared for the unre-
lenting attention I now received as a member of the Obama
family—but the letter from the U.S. Secretary of State also brought
back some painful memories. During the primaries, she had run
against my brother for their party’s nomination. Both were
Democrats, but they had also been the fiercest opponents. Recol-
lections of negative attacks on my brother from the Hillary camp
were still fresh in my mind. And because I was not accustomed
to the rules of political campaigning, at the time everything had
seemed to me to be playing out on a very personal level. I had
feared that his rival’s team wanted not only to win the election,
but also to ruin my brother’s political career. And now here was
a letter from Hillary Clinton thanking me for the wonderful
moments we shared in Washington and wishing me all the best.
I could hardly believe it.
On the occasion of the inaugural luncheon, I had been seated
with Hillary and Bill Clinton and other dignitaries of American
politics. As we ate, the conversation revolved around Barack’s
swearing-in, global politics, development aid, Kenya, and my
work with CARE. I even received a number of tips to pass on to
my brother and his wife, Michelle, wise advice on how to lead a
somewhat “normal” life in the White House.
Even though I was not sitting next to Hillary, the opportu-
nity arose for a brief one-on-one chat. To my pleasant surprise,
the former senator from New York was a charming, amusing,
and engaged conversation partner. I really enjoyed talking to her
and would have gladly spoken longer with this energetic, intel-
ligent woman. I could see why so many people had so passion-
 AND THEN LIFE HAPPENS 7

ately supported her during the campaign. From up close, I also

realized why female voters in particular had wanted to help
Hillary become the first female president of the United States.
She simply exuded enormous “woman power.”
The dialogue with Hillary—during which I crouched down
next to her—was interrupted when it was time for dessert. Feel-
ing the strain in my thigh muscles, I returned to my seat next to
her husband, the forty-second president of the United States.

Almost a month went by before I finally found the right words to

reply to Hillary. It was not an easy task. On the one hand, I
wanted to keep open the possibility of getting to know her
better—a response along the lines of “Thank you for your letter”
seemed insufficient. On the other hand, I was aware that this let-
ter was most likely just a polite gesture, a matter of political eti-
quette without further implications. I was not sure how to take
it. This was all very new to me. With my brother taking center
stage in global politics, I could not help questioning all the inter-
est in me as “Barack Obama’s sister.”
 2.

rowing up, i never understood why there were so

G many things I was not allowed to do merely because I was a
girl, while my brother Abongo—who was just two years older
than I was—not only had more freedom than I did but also felt
entitled to boss me around.
I fiercely resisted this situation. Being the only, somewhat
headstrong girl in a patriarchal African family—my siblings were
all boys—I had no choice but to fight to hold my own. On many
occasions, I sought refuge in books, where I could lose myself in
the lives of others.
Stories about compassion, suffering overcome, and powerful
emotions were my favorites. Not only did they suit my tempera-
ment, but their gripping content also enabled me to block out
my own reality. In high school in Nairobi, I discovered German
postwar literature and immediately took to it. I was sixteen at the
time, and like most teenagers, I was intense and soul-searching,
struggling to establish an identity.
First I read the books in English, and later on in German. I de-
voured Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, and Wolfgang
Borchert, and I admired Christa Wolf. These authors’ protagonists
 AND THEN LIFE HAPPENS 9

felt things deeply, and I felt with them. For hours, I buried myself
in their books. Sometimes I even read two books at a time, one
before falling asleep at night and the other during the day.
It was only by chance that I came into contact with German
literature and the German language. Kenya was once a British
colony, and not until 1963 did it gain its independence. As a re-
sult, the official European language of the country is English,
next to Kiswahili, a regional East African language. In those
days, German was an unlikely language for a Kenyan to encoun-
ter, but in 1976, German classes were offered at my high school.
The subject was new, and none of us students really knew what
you could do with it. Up to that point, the only foreign language
offering had been French. And since most of us were busy enough
with that, only a few students registered for the German class. I
was one of them. That was my first step toward my later decision
to go to Germany and study in the land of my literary heroes.
But long before my escape into German literature, I ques-
tioned many things and searched for a way to free myself from the
constraints of our traditions. My family belongs to the Luo people,
in which the man occupies the undisputed role of patriarch.

The Luo are one of more than forty ethnic groups living in
Kenya. They are among the Western Nilotic peoples, who mi-
grated centuries ago from Sudan, from the banks of the White
Nile, to Uganda and onward to Kenya, settling on Lake Victoria.
Today the region of the Luo-speaking peoples extends across
southern Sudan, Ethiopia (Anuak), northern Uganda, and east-
ern Congo (Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC), as well as
across western Kenya into northern Tanzania. In Kenya, the Luo
are the third largest ethnic group after the Kikuyu and the
10 AUMA OBAMA

Luhya; in total, over four million people are said to speak their
language.
I was the only girl in our nuclear family. While our city life
had modern features, in the countryside with my grandparents,
where things were particularly traditional, I experienced how
the boys were always treated differently than the girls. Women
and girls were constantly occupied with various activities in
house and home—at least that was how it seemed to me—while
the male family members did next to nothing in the household
and only rarely made themselves useful on the homestead.
I remember that my grandfather Onyango, in accordance with
Luo custom, always ate with the boys and men of the house, never
with the girls and women, who dined separately in the kitchen.
We women—among us were also cousins and aunts—cooked,
served the meals, cleaned up, and did the dishes, while the men
and boys had everything brought to them. It especially rankled
me that my older brother visibly enjoyed this allocation of du-
ties. But it bothered me even more that most of the women and
girls seemed not to mind waiting hand and foot on the male
family members. I resisted fiercely what I experienced as gender
inequality and tried not to subordinate myself—though without
great success. I had to fall into line.

Years later, when I delved deeper into Luo traditions, I learned

that the gender roles in our ethnic group had originally been
distinct but rather balanced. The main tasks of the male family
members were raising livestock (usually they herded cattle),
hard physical farming work, fishing, building huts, and produc-
ing a variety of objects. For example, they made musical instru-
ments, did metalwork and carpentry, wove baskets, and tied
 AND THEN LIFE HAPPENS 11

fishing nets. Their jobs also included herbalism and the protec-
tion of the community in times of war. Girls and women were
responsible for the household. They fetched water in gourds,
plastered the house walls, made pottery, and, like the men, wove
baskets. It was their duty to sow the fields, to bring in the har-
vest, and to store the grain. Among the animals, they were re-
sponsible for the goats, sheep, and calves; in case the men went to
war, they learned how to herd the cattle as well. And, of course,
they took care of the children and their upbringing.
By learning these tasks, girls and boys prepared for their fu-
ture lives as husbands and wives. Taught obedience, a sense of
responsibility, and deference from an early age, they largely ac-
cepted these traditions. Only by passing them on could the Luo
ensure the economic and social survival of their people.
But then the time-honored structures, as they had existed for
centuries, fell victim to the colonization of Kenya. The colonial
rulers introduced the so-called hut tax: Overnight the native
Africans had to pay taxes on their huts in the form of money. As
a result, they were forced to work on the farms of the white peo-
ple, because not paying the taxes was a punishable offense—at the
worst, with imprisonment. Because the men could only earn
money from white people, they had to leave their own land and
seek wage work in the areas of Kenya settled by white people.
While the men now worked for the colonists, the women and
girls who had stayed behind had to take over their duties. When
the men returned home, it was usually only for a few vacation
days. During those stays, they did not have the necessary time to
participate in a meaningful way in the farming activities. As a
result, they did not take on larger tasks; most of the time, they
just let their wives and daughters serve them, until it was once
again time to return to the cities or to the white peoples’ farms.
12 AUMA OBAMA

In this way, all the farming work became the women’s re-
sponsibility. In marriage, great value was attached to the bride’s
ability to work in the fields and perform all the necessary tasks
on the homestead. This did not, however, alter her position in
the hierarchy of the family.

As an eight-year-old girl, I did not grasp this development.

Though the traditional societies had changed under external
pressure, which also affected how boys and girls were brought
up for adult life and the customary division of their roles, the
Luo families preserved their child-rearing principles. They did
not question all too much how and whether these were compat-
ible with the altered circumstances. And I, too, was expected to
submit unquestioningly to the old values.
Unfortunately, no one took the time to explain contexts and
backgrounds to me, the inquisitive girl. My grandmother Sarah
was only amused by my constant questions, or shook her head
when I was too persistent. Occasionally, she jokingly threatened to
marry me off to an old neighbor, who was already over fifty, if
I would not stop questioning everything. She would certainly get a
few fine cows from him in exchange, she always added with a laugh.