Read Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) Online

Authors: Dinesh D'Souza

Tags: #Non-fiction, #Political Ideologies, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science

Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012) (13 page)

BOOK: Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012)
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None of this is to suggest that Onyango was a modern man. He had five wives and was known to beat them even in front of visitors if they disobeyed him. He carried around a cane, and occasionally struck women who failed to keep their children quiet or even women who did not immediately respond to his call. Onyango’s daughter, Hawa Auma, said that if Onyango was caning one of his children and an onlooker asked him why he was doing it, he would swing around and cane them too. I found this caning business a bit much, so I asked African journalist Philip Ochieng, a drinking buddy of Barack Obama Sr., about it. To my surprise, Ochieng informed me that Luo women like to be caned! Caning is just one way, Ochieng said, that Luo women preserve their femininity! So let’s just say that Onyango had his “multicultural” side. He was “diverse” in other respects also: in keeping with Luo custom, his front six teeth had been removed. Yet in this case, Onyango decided to break with tradition. He grew dissatisfied with the large gap between his teeth; eventually he adopted the Western solution of getting dentures .
7
From Obama’s point of view, Onyango’s unforgivable heresy came after he returned from his confinement, returned to his farm, and contemplated the differences between Western and African ways. The question he was trying to resolve was how the British, from their tiny island, were able to conquer so much of the globe. Here I must quote Sarah Obama on her husband: “He respected the white man for his power, for his machines and weapons and the way he organized his life. He would say that the white man was always improving himself, whereas the African was suspicious of anything new.” Sarah quoted one of Onyango’s periodic sayings, “The African is thick. For him to do anything, he needs to be beaten.” According to Sarah Obama, Onyango admired three things about the British. The first was their level of knowledge. “To him knowledge was the source of all the white man’s power,” she said. Onyango also considered the British to be generally fair-minded. “If you do a good job for the white man,” he liked to say, “then he will always pay you well.” Finally, Onyango unfavorably contrasted African organization with Western organization. “How can the African defeat the white man,” Onyango would ask his son Barack Sr., “when he cannot even make his own bicycle.” Sarah Obama continued, “And he would say that the African could never win against the white man because the black man only wanted to work with his own family or clan, while all white men worked to increase their power.” In Onyango’s words, as recalled by his wife, “The white man alone is like an ant. He can be easily crushed. But like an ant, the white man works together. His nation, his business—these things are more important to him than himself.... Black men are not like this. Even the most foolish black man thinks he knows better than the white man. That is why the black man will always lose.”
8
Obama reports that as he heard this, “I . . . felt betrayed.” Of Onyango he says, “I had imagined him an independent man, a man of his people, opposed to white rule.... What Granny had told us scrambled that image completely.” Onyango’s contempt for the abilities of Africans, combined with his favorable disposition toward the West, provoked in Obama a visceral reaction. And thus it came to be that Obama began to consider his grandfather an “Uncle Tom,” a “Collaborator,” and a “House Nigger.”
9
Another sellout, in Obama’s thinking, is his half-brother Mark. Mark Obama is the son of Barack Sr. and Ruth Nidesand. When Obama met Mark in Kenya in 1987, Mark disavowed the name Obama. He called himself Mark Ndesandjo, taking the name of Ruth Nidesand’s second husband. Mark even relinquished his first name “Okoth” and switched to his middle name. Here was a young man severing himself from his past. Mark seems to have had very good reason for eschewing his biological father’s name. He vividly remembers how Barack Sr. used to come home drunk and threaten and beat his mother. Mark has written an autobiographical novel in which the main character writes of his father, “Some men are born wolves.” Mark’s character also says that “although he racked his mind for memories of love and compassion, he found none.” All he could recall is his father shouting, “This place is filthy. Do something about it. Give me food and stop tending to that brat.” And then “in a Dionysian rage” the father would “thrash his white wife and terrify his coffee-colored child.”
10
Barack Jr., most likely, didn’t know any of this. All he knew about Mark was that he had rejected the name of their father, the Great One. That is where the problem started.
When Obama showed up at Mark’s door, Ruth Nidesand met him and said, “Your name is Obama, isn’t it? But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name.” Obama writes, “I smiled as if I hadn’t understood the question.” But he is obviously already irritated at the Great One’s claims being cast into doubt. “So Mark,” Obama says to his young half-brother. “I hear you’re at Berkeley.” Mark replies, “Stanford. I’m in the last year of the physics program there.” At this point, Mark’s mother praises his academic accomplishments, saying of his father, “You must have gotten some of his brains. Hopefully not the rest of him though.” She turns to Barack Jr. “You know Obama was quite crazy, don’t you? The drinking made it worse.” Young Obama is furious, and it gets worse over dinner when Ruth contrasts Mark’s achievements with Barack Sr.’s failures. Obama finds this excruciating. He writes, “I wanted to leave as soon as the meal was over.”
11
The next week, young Obama and Mark had lunch. Here is a sample of the conversation, as recounted by Obama himself. Obama asks Mark how it felt to be back in Kenya for the summer.
Mark
: Fine. It’s nice to see my mom and dad of course.... As for the rest of Kenya, I don’t feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.
Obama
: You don’t ever think about settling here?
Mark
: No. I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.
Obama
: Don’t you ever feel like you might be losing something?
Mark
: I understand what you’re getting at. You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing. Well, you’re right. At a certain point I made a decision not to think who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.
Obama
: It made you mad.
Mark
: Not mad. Just numb.
Obama
: And that doesn’t bother you? Being numb, I mean?
Mark
: Toward him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know—it’s not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I should and shouldn’t care about?
 
At this point Obama is crushed. “We stood up to leave,” he writes, “and I insisted on paying the bill. Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache.” Basically Obama never intends to see the guy again. Their sister Auma, who was present, describes the event as “The Reluctant Meeting of Two Brothers.”
12
Mark is guilty of two heresies: he doesn’t pay obeisance to the Great One, and he seems to prefer Western culture and the Western way of life to living in Kenya. In some ways I cannot help but admire Mark. He managed to exorcise his father’s ghost. He moved to China and became a business consultant in Shenzhen. He married a Chinese woman and started a new life. But there is an ironic conclusion to the story. Obama recently visited China, and he dropped in on Mark. Mark’s Chinese wife, it turns out, is a big Obama fan. And so Mark responded warmly to Obama. Mark has even started using the name Obama, perhaps to help with sales of his novel.
13
This sellout may be trying to rejoin the fold.
Finally we come to George Obama, who is, like Mark Obama, the president’s half-brother. I mentioned earlier how George has been living in a hut in the slums of Nairobi. When I first heard about George in 2008, he expressed the hope that he could one day become an auto mechanic. I found it extremely odd that Barack Obama, multimillionaire and presidential candidate, would not lift a finger to help George. Obama, after all, had met George twice and knew his circumstances. The first time was in 1987, when George was just a young boy. He was playing soccer when Obama showed up. The meeting was, from both their points of view, awkward. George said that his half-brother Barack “was light skinned, and to me he looked more like a
mzungu
, a white person, than he did a black African.... He spoke with an odd, foreign-sounding accent, so I could barely understand him.” Obama for his part described the encounter as “painful” and possibly “a mistake.” Even so, he concluded the meeting with this observation: “Perhaps one day, when he was older, George too, might want to know who his father had been, and who his brothers and sisters were, and that if he ever came to me I would be there for him, to tell him the story I knew.”
14
George met Barack Jr. a second time, in 2006, when Obama visited Kenya as a U.S. senator from Illinois. George took public transportation from the slum to the Serena hotel, which George describes as “the best hotel in the entire city . . . popular with aid workers, UN officials, diplomats and businessmen.” George saw Obama in the lobby, but he was just leaving. “George,” Obama said, shaking his brother’s hand. “It’s good to see you again. But listen, I got to rush to a meeting. I’ve got two days in Nairobi, and I’ll call you. We’ll arrange a time so we can meet.” George waited two days for the call that never came. “I got the strong sense that the failure to fetch me was less by forgetfulness and more by design.”
15
Okay, so Obama didn’t have time to hang out with George. I didn’t find this surprising. Much more surprising was Obama’s complete refusal to help George. What made this particularly strange was that Obama was going around the world talking about our responsibility to the less fortunate. Obama was particularly fond of quoting from the Bible: “We are our brother’s keeper.” Recently at the National Prayer Breakfast, he repeated that phrase, noting it meant “treating others as you want to be treated,” “requiring much from those who have been given so much,” and “caring for the poor and those in need.”
16
Yet here was his actual brother, very much in need, and for some reason Obama made no effort to “keep” him. What was going on?
In 2008, I was doing a daily blog for AOL and there I announced I was starting the George Obama Compassion Fund. My blog entry read, “Help George Obama Move Out of His Hut.” I put up $1,000, and I asked people to send me small amounts—a dollar, two dollars—to help Obama’s brother get some training and become self-reliant. I didn’t want big sums because it doesn’t take big sums to overcome poverty in Kenya. George was living on a few dollars a day. A couple thousand dollars would be sufficient. And in a couple weeks I had the money. I found a Christian missionary working in Kenya who offered to deliver it to George. But then I heard from a Kenyan journalist that George had disappeared. Even the missionary could not locate him. I was told that the Obama family got to George. They convinced him that I was doing this in part to embarrass Barack Obama—which of course was true. They convinced George that he should not take help from me, because the Obama family would be there for him. So George went into hiding, and that, I thought, was that.
But when planning my Kenya trip, I got the idea of contacting George and seeing if he would be willing to do an interview. I approached George through a British journalist, Damien Lewis, who knew George and had co-authored a book with him, telling George’s story. Damien contacted George and, to my surprise, George said yes. Later I learned that George had been given assurances by the Obama family that turned out to be lies. They made him give up the money that I had for him, and then they didn’t help him at all. George felt betrayed, because he had been. And so George decided that maybe I wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Perhaps it even crossed his mind that if he granted the interview, I might have a present for him.
I met George in the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel. He came with an entourage—an adviser, a security guy, and an affable woman with her teenage son. The son, I learned, was a soccer player, and George is now a coach for a soccer league in the slums. I paid for brunch for the whole group, and we got acquainted. Then we moved to an outdoor location for the interview. But George wanted to talk first. Where, he asked, is my money? I had brought $2,000 to give him, but I said it was a present, not only from me but from a number of hard-working Americans who wanted to help him. I asked if I could film my presenting the check to him. George said no. Then he said, “How do I know you only raised $2,000 using my name?” I said, “George, half of this money is mine. I didn’t have to bring any of it to you.” George responded, “So this is the money you raised to help me. But what is my payment for doing the interview?” He insisted on an additional $1,000 to do the interview, and somewhat reluctantly I agreed.
I now realized something about George that I didn’t know before. He was not an innocent—he had been hardened by the slums. I knew from Damien Lewis, whom I’d met in London, that George was not a bad guy. He used to be a teenage delinquent, but he had reformed his life. Now he was, as Lewis put it, “on the side of the angels.” But it’s not easy to live so close to the edge of survival. George, I saw, was sly and cunning; he was a survivor. And yet I wanted to interview George because I wanted to find out why his rich brother didn’t help him get out of the ghetto. I had read George’s book, and I had some theories. But I wanted to ask him directly.
BOOK: Obama's America 2016 (Non-Fiction)(2012)
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