A Boy Called Fortune

2008-04-20T03:22:00.000-07:00

A BOY CALLED FORTUNE!

This article pays tribute to Barack Obama, a man I often stumbled into dressed in khaki shorts in the grounds of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and to Thomas Joseph Mboya, whose dream it was to send over 1,000 African students from East Africa to the US for graduate and postgraduate studies even before Kenya was independent in 1963. Tom Mboya's efforts caught the attention of John and Robert F Kennedy, who offered help to his ambitious project, enabling that education for the African students. Barack Obama's father was among those students when he unwittingly planted the seed that has changed America and the world today. Through this seed even Africa may gain its true and long-awaited independence.

This story explains how Barack Obama's father became a student in the US, drawing attention to the extraordinary work of a man Africans came to know simply as Tom Mboya. In 1960, Tom Mboya's face graced the cover of Time Magazine. Today, his dream that Africa may one day help itself is entrusted to the son of one of his students!

A Boy Called Fortune!

Ø Edward Nobel Bisamunyu

I read in the Times of London recently that the city of Obama in Japan, which, just for having the same name as Barack Obama, has been excited about his possible election and displays his pictures wherever they can find space! Apparently, the city initially became involved in a joke campaigning for a man whose name was an echo of their own but, as Senator Obama went from strength to strength, his dream inspired the people of Obama and Barack Obama became one of their own sons. When I asked a Japanese friend in London about Obama City recently she said, "I have never even heard of Obama City!" A few weeks later, she told me she was very surprised to learn that it was true, the city exists!

Barack Obama’s family comes from Nyanza Province in Kenya. His people, the Luo, occupy a region that once included the final stretch of a heavily forested path that brought British, German and other European explorers, missionaries and colonialists to the inland Kingdom of Buganda, after which Uganda was later named. At the time, what the Luos of Kenya call "Luoland" was part of Uganda. The journey from the coastal port at Mombasa, Kenya then took six months on foot! It was in Luoland that the monotony of forests and land was broken by the extraordinary view of Lake Victoria along whose shores the Luos farmed and worked as fishermen. A railway built by Britain and travelling through Luoland reduced this journey to three days and still includes this extraordinary view of the shores of Lake Victoria.

Nyanza Province, which includes Luoloand, was part of the Uganda Protectorate when Dr. Albert Ruskin Cook of Mengo Hospital, formerly of Hampstead Heath, London, and Anglican Bishop Alfred Tucker of Uganda drove the first ideas of development of education and science-based medicine in the region. Their work ultimately led to the growth of some of the finest traditions of education in Uganda and Western Kenya. Today, this region has humble but ambitious schools built with the support of Dr. Cook and Bishop Tucker. Their work led to the construction of some of the most successful schools and medical institutions in rural East Africa. Dr. Cook's and Bishop Tucker's dream led also to the erection of Roman Catholic Church-inspired schools and hospitals because wherever the Protestants went the Roman Catholics also followed and vice versa. One of these, a Roman Catholic missionary establishment in the 1940s, produced East Africa’s most prominent politician, Thomas Joseph Mboya, who came to be known simply as Tom Mboya.

Tom Mboya’s is best summarised by this short but apt anecdote: Once, when pre-independence talks were in progress in Kenya, Tom was challenged by a European Kenyan political colleague at a meeting, who had thought that a hard stance would solve their problems: “You can sign or go to hell!” he said to Tom Mboya. With typical disdain for disrespectful conduct, Tom replied, “Thanks very much, I will go to hell!” He promptly walked out of the meeting. Tom Mboya had had a secondary education but nothing more but he had a gift for languages and relished the English parliamentary debate. With poor parents, he pursued a career as a sanitary inspector in Nairobi to help his family. It was through this that he joined trade unionism.

Inspired by the study of the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington (a great black American educationist and rhetorician who lived during the 1800s) and Winston Churchill, Tom Mboya became a hero of Kenyans everywhere. His death alone – he was one of at least 5 former cabinet ministers put to death mysteriously under the “peaceful” government of President Jomo Kenyatta – proves what has gone wrong with African democracies. And yet the deceit and corruption of leaders in East Africa, particularly in Kenya and Uganda following the leaders’ deployment of government-trained thugs during and after elections, cannot conceal from the people the legacy of the ideal politician that was embodied in the frame of such men as Thomas Joseph Mboya.

Tom Mboya’s intelligence, talent for hard work and abilities of organisation marked him out for trade unionism and, ultimately, for politics. In the late 1950s, he had the vision to start the Kenya Educational Trust, an organisation that raised funds and sent students from East Africa to the US. After Vice President Richard M. Nixon declined to support his trust, Tom Mboya found an opportunity to meet with Senator John F. Kennedy at his home in Hyannis Port, near Boston, Massachusetts.

Senator Kennedy listened intently. Inspired by Tom’s passion for education, the future President urged his family’s charity for mentally retarded children, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, to diverge from its rules and give $100,000 to the KET. US Vice President Richard Nixon, learning that Kennedy had supported the KET project, had a change of heart. Deciding that he did not want to be outdone by John F. Kennedy, then a growing political rival, Nixon offered a further $100,000 to Mr. Mboya. It was time again for Tom to invoke the same principle with which he had walked out on his fellow politician in Kenya. Tom kindly declined Mr. Nixon’s offer.

On the basis of financial support Tom had received from Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, the NAACP and the Kennedys, Tom carried out his now famous airlift of 1,000 students. Among these was a Barack Hussein Obama, who, like any East African student, was noted more for his affinity for hard work than for his religion. Thankfully, the KET organisation did not denude the students of their various identities before asking them to board the plane for the US. Their names remained what they had been and they religious beliefs did not change. Education, for East Africans, did not entail the loss of personal history.

Barack Hussein Obama, Barack's father, was a simple Islamic African man. Imbued with the same educational ethic as many Christian boys and girls in his region, formerly part of Uganda before it was ceded to Kenya, Mr. Obama pursued his education with energy to improve his family's lot. That he obtained a PhD from Harvard University is of enormous credit to the coexistence of peoples of diverse cultures and religions in East Africa and indeed to the Christian missionaries whose educational work in East Africa fostered relationships and toleration that did not exist before between the different peoples of East Africa. Clearly, despite its material privation, East Africa is a unique lesson in the coexistence of peoples of different faiths. The recent flagellation of Islam in the US and indeed of Barack Obama himself for his Islamic father is just not possible in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

While working in science research at Harvard University during the early 1990s, I saw the name Barack Obama and assumed confidently that it had Ugandan origins. "Obama" had the same syllabic rhythm as "Obote," the name of Uganda's first Prime Minister and later President. It was also distinctly African for any African in the US except that one often stumbles into Latin American and Japanese people with African-sounding names and words. I first read about Barack Obama in the Harvard Gazette and the Harvard Independent. Later, I met Barack Obama at a talk hosted by the Harvard African Law Association and addressed by Uganda’s former Ambassador to the UN, Olaara Otunnu, a former Harvard Law School graduate. As Editor of the Harvard Law Review, Barack was sought after by Harvard papers for his thoughts on everything concerning the Harvard University community.

Having met and known Barack Obama as a fellow common man at Harvard, where I worked as a Research Assistant in medical and biological sciences, I am indeed moved to see the impact he has made on American society. His warm, shy African smile has not changed under the national and global focus. His popularity has made him what my father, an MP in his day in Uganda, often called "a Man of the People." Barack has inspired all of us who know and understand the origins of the best and worst traits of American society to believe, as Jack London did, that "spiritual sweetness and unselfishness shall conquer the gross gluttony of Man."

Sixteen years ago, at Harvard University, then occupying the post of President of the Harvard Law Review, Barack transcended the dominating stereotype of “the angry young black man” and gave insuperable credence to the notion that, even in the American “Ivy League” universities, the unexpected black man could wield influence. His friends adored him not just for his charm and joie de vivre – there were other black and white men who had this in abundance – but for his interest, consideration, curiosity and affinity for genuine human brotherhood. There is nobody who recorded this period without taking note of the camaraderie of multiple colour and culture that had Barack Obama as its quiet, respectful but indispensable nucleus.

Barack held cerebral and dispassionate views on issues concerning Harvard, often in tandem with the opinions of the respected and much-loved President Derek Bok of Harvard, who was recently recalled from retirement to act as President for an interim period after Larry Summers was removed following a debacle in which he referred to women as having inferior intelligence to men. For black students and staff at Harvard, the issue of unfair treatment was then quite common. False or mistaken arrests by Cambridge City Police were widespread.

The police, even their black members, often assumed that black men found on the grounds of the university must be engaged in some criminal activity. They were not alone. Two lawyers I had met at Harvard Memorial Church, during post-Sunday church services, told me on more than one occasion that blacks were responsible for all the crimes that took place in the US. I didn't have to believe them, of course, but I was shocked by the racist bile that drove them to make such comments. My persistent scepticism and "counterpoints" in one of these debates led to one of them pouring her hot cup of coffee over my head, ending a friendship that I had once thought transcended colour!

When addressing these and other contentious issues, Barack Obama was always lawyerly and diplomatic but firm. As a black man, he had the same unjust and ill police experiences as everybody else or occasion to speak up for his friends. He spoke without equivocating about what had to be done to ensure that people do not suffer unduly because of their colour, gender or religion and yet without blaming the police generally. It is always important to know that, in these issues, the predilections and traditions one is fighting were forged at the anvil of human wickedness over hundreds of years. To overcome them will not take a measure of action driven by equal and opposite anger. One must act decisively but using intelligent coercion, superior argument and premeditated thought that overcomes their irrational and unnatural preference for a group's complexion rather than for the more appealing attributes of human individuals.

My own arrest by Cambridge Police in the middle of Harvard Yard had taken place after a theft of $400 from a restaurant in Harvard Square by a young white man who worked for that restaurant but found it convenient to blame it on the first black man within his sight. As I walked out of a restaurant opposite his, he took money out of his own till and then raised the alarm. When the Police arrived, my description was given to the police, who followed him as he pointed me out, as I made my way to one of the Harvard University Libraries within the Harvard Yard. My fortunate release was immediate. I had never been interesting for the police in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Illinois, Ohio, Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts until this date.

In the US, I was often stopped by the police and asked to accept them as my escort to houses in which I claimed to live but I had never seen a false arrest until now. It was my indignant shock at the allegation of theft that led Cambridge Police to see that I could not have stolen the money in question. The Biochemistry books I held in my hands and my walking calmly in a sparsely populated Harvard Yard told them a different story from the claims of the young white man. I spent 9 months, however, seeking redress for comments that were made by a black policeman: "You are lucky, young man," he said after their false arrest, "if this had been Uganda you would have suffered worse!" I was not worth, in their eyes, an apology.

Later, my equally incensed and determined white friend Susan, an intelligent Harvard member of staff, used her skills to establish what had actually happened in Formaggio's restaurant: the Cambridge Police, she learned a week later, had known that the young white man was the culprit even as they arrested me. The restaurant had told them about his working record and did not trust him. Given that it was his last working day, they were even more suspicious than usual. However, even with a black policeman leading the investigation, I was more suspicious than that wicked miscreant. This was the regular lot of black and brown men at Harvard and in Cambridge.

Later, I began to understand the US when another white man, Charles Stuart, killed his own pregnant wife Carol DiMaiti Stuart in their car as he drove her home from a birthing class in the Harvard Medical Area, close to Harvard Medical School where I worked. Charles then shot himself in the stomach and handed over the murder weapon to his brother Matt for immediate disposal. Charles found immediate support from the Boston Police. His insurance company paid him $480,000 after he blamed the black man for the crime. In a poor black neighbourhood, Mission Hill, across the road from Harvard Medical School, the black residents were terrorised by a police detachment determined to shake the described a murderer out of it. Charles, poor man, could not explain the discrepancies in his story, including the insurance he had bought a few days before his wife's murder. As his brother told him he had to tell the police, Charles drove to Tobin Bridge and threw himself over.

Charles had, apparently, grown up in a Boston neighbourhood in which blacks were despised and derided. Still later, however, my cousin Roger was arrested for rape while visiting friends in Boston from his base near Washington DC. The two detectives who pursued the case against him had decided to ignore their own knowledge that a member of the girl's family had committed the rape and decided to describe a black man he had made up in his own great imagination! Even though Roger did not fit the description, he was in a police cell for 6 weeks without access to a lawyer. Later, Roger was defended by a vigorous, established and female Boston lawyer from the Civil Rights era as well as the Boston Globe, a national newspaper that discovered that the detectives in the case had made up their cases against other innocent people in the past.

The Boston Globe had no reason to believe that the man the police insisted on bringing before the courts had not been similarly disadvantaged by an indolent pair of police detectives who created fact from fiction. When they had helped to have him exonerated, Roger was awarded close to a million dollars after his lawyer sued the police and won. It was incidents such as these that pulled taut any young black American man’s nerves and made him angry, whether he was educated or not. At Harvard Law School, many of Barack’s black American friends whose opinions overlaid such anger were assuaged by the election of Barack Obama and his calm but firm reason.

I took note when the Boston Globe, a national newspaper, featured Barack Obama in an article. It was then that one knew that the world would not shut its eyes to his light for much longer. All of us in that Cambridge community were aware of his eloquence and manner and that his friends constituted the full complement of the United Nations. Always modest in dress, Barack had his trim African legs in jeans in the winter and in unremarkable khaki shorts in the summer, when he had the look of an East African colonial office clerk.

Barack had that permanently athletic African look, complete with attenuated limbs at the lower periphery of his trim torso. He cut that rare and arresting figure of an athlete who was also an inveterate academic. For him, there was none of that colourful Ivy League scarf that betrayed pretentious privilege. And yet the air was lit up by a shy but brotherly African smile, not just to black friends but to white and brown ones as well. The members of the United Nations were at their best in the friendships that Barack inspired in the microcosm of Harvard Law School while their delegates jostled and cajoled foolishly at the UN Plaza in New York.

I often stumbled into Barack Obama when I least expected it in the paths between the history-burdened buildings of Harvard Yard and Harvard Square. One memorable occasion that comes to mind because it was the only time I came in contact with Barack without a trail of adulation around him. It was a brief meeting at a bus stop near Harvard Square a few days after the talk we had both attended. Even though I had learned more from him during the talk the bus stop encounter was the one that remained ingrained on my mind. As he walked from the Harvard Law School area towards Harvard Square in the shorts that determined the mental photograph of him that I would carry in my memory, his eyes lit up as recognition interfered with the flowing stream of his thought.

We greeted each other without stopping and passed, recalling the inspired meeting at which we had met and at which we had learned that we were united in our wishes for Africa. As we gained distance from each other I looked back at Barack and remarked the head of the man many of us in the Harvard University community who met him knew would one day become the voice of calm in the storm that some of our lives endured daily while on American soil. It was his passion for Africa, a continent that has caused black Americans more embarrassment than pride, which reveals the private intima of Barack Obama.

Three global political assassinations disturbed my childhood: John F Kennedy’s, soon after my mother returned from an annual programme his genius had founded and Americans funded; Martin Luther King’s, whose representations for Civil and Human Rights is still without equal; Robert F. Kennedy, who made politics logical, human and personal; and his friend, Tom Mboya. Like his tragic-fated friends John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya was assassinated as he stepped outside a chemist’s shop in Nairobi in 1969. Much as the Kenyan Government of the day would have us believe his death was not a mystery at all.

Even though he was a Luo, born on the small and strategically insignificant Rusinga Island on Lake Victoria, his parliamentary constituency was among the Kikuyu people of Nairobi. His portrait graced the cover of Time Magazine before Kenya was independent in 1960 and before he was a Cabinet minister in the Kenyan Government. Tom Mboya traversed the boundaries of clan and tribe in Kenya, identifying with the sons and daughters of the poor amongst whom he had grown up and become educated when his father laboured for the family’s wages on an American industrial farmer’s expansive property.

In East Africa, there are many boys and girls whose names infer “Fortune.” In the different cultural groups found there, it’s a more common name than one would imagine. Both Fortune and Lucky, in their English versions, also exist. In Swahili and the inland languages of East Africa, Baraka is not at all uncommon. Its origin, barack, is an Arabic word. In Hebrew, baruch has the same meaning. I understand from a Hebrew scholar that barak also means “lightning.” In view of the events of the last few months, one can hardly suggest that Lightning is the wrong name for Barack Obama. If Tom Mboya were here today he would celebrate the rise of Africa’s “grandson” on America’s shores and encourage him to hoist his country to the mountain top and see the fortune of true common brotherhood in its Promised Land and say, “Yes we can!” Today, Tom Mboya’s daughter, Susan Mboya, runs a program known as Zawadi Africa, whose objective is to continue her father’s work, placing African students in American universities.

Who knows then what fortunes, both for Africa and the United States, may spring from Susan’s exertion in the near future?

The Obama Times

A Boy Called Fortune