Free The Other Barack by Sally Jacobs Page A

them. Here, at last, was a direction in which he could funnel his ambition and intelligence and also have a hand in shaping his country’s development as an independent nation. Increasingly, Obama began to adopt the Western dress and urban style that the nationalist crowd sported.
    â€œTom always surrounded himself with very smart people who helped him to develop strategies, and Barack was one of them,” recalled Phoebe M. Asiyo, a former member of the Kenyan parliament representing the Karachuonyo constituency in Nyanza Province for nearly two decades and a childhood friend of Obama’s. “Barack was always there with him. He was very dedicated to Tom.”
    And yet Obama was characteristically dissatisfied. He did not like his job and was adamant that he should be engaged in more challenging work. Although the pay was reasonable, he chafed at working for an Indian boss and had to rein in his sharp tongue every time he was given an assignment. More galling, many of his friends from the Maseno school were
heading to Makerere University in Kampala or even overseas to seek higher degrees. When they weren’t talking about the impending election, his friends were debating the relative merits of schools in the United States versus those in the Soviet Union. Education was the key to everything. But because of his expulsion from Maseno, Obama could not even consider such options even though he easily qualified intellectually. Then there was the Old Man. Obama was keenly aware of his father’s disappointment in him, and he was tired of listening to his father’s litany of complaints. Lately, Obama had stopped dropping by the Hagberg’s home to visit him.
    Nor did it seem likely that anything was going to improve. Not long after the election, Kezia discovered that she was pregnant with their first child and was already talking about the clothes the baby would need. Obama was intrigued at the thought that he might soon have a son, but he knew that a child was going to add considerably to his financial burden. Some days Obama was despondent, fearing he would be stuck in a tedious clerk’s job for the rest of his life. How could this have ever happened to him , Barack Obama, the son of Hussein Onyango and the smartest boy in the class?
    What he couldn’t know was that change was right around the corner. And it was coming in flats and a floral skirt.

4
    MISS MOONEY
    T he crowd at Makadara Hall had been waiting for nearly half an hour. It was a humid Sunday in 1957, and over a thousand men and women were eager to see their political hero, Tom Mboya, take the stage. Craning for a glimpse of the presumed next president of the Nairobi Peoples Convention Party, the crowd churned against the sheet-metal walls that framed Nairobi’s largest social hall, chanting bits of song, ever watchful of the European police officers stationed at the doorways.
    Mboya was often late, but he always showed up at this weekly event, easily one of the city’s most popular political meetings. Just as the crowd was growing impatient, a figure stepped on the stage. But it was not Mboya in his trademark red windbreaker. It was a woman. More astonishing, it was a mzungu . She was barely over five feet tall, her floral skirt falling just above her pale ankles, a tentative smile playing across her angular face. The crowd grew abruptly quiet, uncertain as Mboya appeared on the stage behind her. What did this mean? Surely, this could not bode well.
    But when the white woman began to speak, with Mboya acting as her interpreter, they listened. Her name was Elizabeth Mooney. And she had come to change their lives.
    The forty-three-year-old Texas native was a literacy teacher who the Kenyan government had employed under a U.S.-sponsored program to teach Kenyans how to read and write. In the four months since she had arrived, Mooney had had difficulty spreading word of her program. And so when the immensely popular Mboya, an