How she maintains her identity without the “Barack’s sister” tag

Last week, I went to Paa ya Paa Art Gallery in Nairobi to listen to Dr Auma Obama discuss her book, ‘And Then Life Happens’ and watch ‘The Education of Auma Obama,’ a documentary on her life.

I know Auma as US President Barack Obama’s elder sister. She is who she is because of who he is, right? But how do you tell your story when your brother is the most powerful man in the world? How do you keep your identity without the “Barack’s sister” tag?
In ‘The Education of Auma Obama,’ she honestly narrates how her father Barack Obama Senior, made them move in with their stepmother, Ruth, who later took their house — the only asset her father had — after they divorced.

She cries as she recalls seeing her father in his coffin. I was surprised that she tells the truth, not just the convenient truth but the sad truth. As I watched the film, I could not help but make a comparison between Auma and her famous brother. When she recalls receiving her first letter from him, she says he wrote exactly like their father — on a yellow legal pad, and signed “Barack Obama.”

The visit
She recalls how easy Obama’s first visit to Kenya in the 1980s was, how she just talked about certain things and he understood. That is when it hit me: They truly are their father’s children. They have the same intellectual vigour, the same urge for equality and the same dreams.

Obama Senior, depending on whom you talk to, was a great intellectual, or a drunk.
Auma lets us in on what it was like growing up with him. He liked classical music and he would wake her up in the middle of the night to listen to the music as he explained it to her.

She is sad as she remembers these moments because, like most teenagers, she pushed him away. He was to her a man of contradictions. He was still “African,” and he was polygamous. Yet, having lived in the US, he liked classical music.
He had come to Kenya with big ideas about how to build the post-Independence nation. He wanted prosperity for all but soon found out that the people at the top were more interested in prosperity for themselves.

Good sons
Auma recounts how her father helped everyone — as is expected of good African sons — often to the disadvantage of his own children. He was unable to provide for his country, so he made sure he succeeded in at least supporting his family. He had many dreams for his country, but was frustrated because nobody backed him.

Watching his children, it is clear that they are his dreams actualised. There are clips of Auma on German TV, talking about how harmful aid is, and how Africa needs trade, not aid. She may have been the token black person in that discussion, but she held her own. Even as she discussed literature with her professor, she asked him why people could only be viewed in comparison with each other.

That is an important point. Obama Senior is seen by many as a bad father, who abandoned his son in America and had many wives. He was emotionally distant and a deadbeat. But, thanks to Auma, I see him as a man who tried to do his best, who tried to keep tabs on his son abroad by asking to see his report card and tried to have his other children close to him.

He was doing the best he could, the best way he knew how. I see a man who passed on to his children the virtue of giving everybody the same opportunities.

Needy children
Through her Sauti Kuu Foundation, Auma is helping needy youth and children.
I doubt any parent tries to harm their children intentionally. People fail and sometimes do not see these failures because they are doing what they know.
The greatest thing about children, about the future, is that they adapt and, sometimes from our mistakes, learn to become better.

Auma is trying to change the perception of Africa as a needy continent.
When a member of the audience at Paa ya Paa asked the documentary’s producer to help Kenyan filmmakers, she interjected and told him to speak of collaboration, not a handout.

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The birth of Auma Obama the Afropolitan

She is sister to the most powerful man on earth, but Auma Obama is her own woman. In And Then Life Happens, she chronicles her life and search for an identity, which led her to define herself as an “Afropolitan.”

During a reading and discussion session of the book in Nairobi with Goethe Institut librarian Eliphas Nyamogo, Auma recounted her experiences in Germany.
“I came of age in Germany. This means that my formative experiences were in the context of the German language and culture,” she said.

In the book, she talks about her inquisitiveness and how, when she was eight years old, she would ask her grandmother Mama Sara so many questions she would be threatened, albeit jokingly, with early marriage. The problem was that there was nobody to answer these questions, and so she has carried over her inquisitiveness to this day.

Auma says she went to Germany in search of a freer environment, away from the limitations of her native Luo Nyanza. She had studied German in school and later got a scholarship to study German at the University of Heidelberg.

She lived with a family of counterculturalists, whose sense of personal space and familial roles was different from what she was used to.
She narrates how her host family took a liberal approach to drug use, and seemed to believe that all Africans smoked marijuana. So they were surprised by her resistance, as she never used drugs.

While she acknowledges that having a famous brother has opened doors for her, Auma contends that it has also put her in some awkward situations.
“If he (President Obama) does anything questionable, people look to me for an explanation. I always say he is his own man, and they have to understand his actions based on what he is facing at that time.”

[Eric Mugendi]