London Evening Standard

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Barack Obama's broken promise to African village

David Cohen, Evening Standard

25 Jul 2008

It is an extraordinary sight to walk into a basic two-room house under a mango tree in rural east

Africa and discover what is essentially a shrine to Barack Obama.

The small brick house with no running water, a tin roof and roving chickens, goats and cows is

owned by Sarah Obama, Barack's 86-year-old step-grandmother. Inside, the walls are decoratedwith a 2008 Obama election sticker, an old "Barack Obama for Senate" poster on which he haswritten "Mama Sarah Habai [how are you?]", a 2005 calendar that says "The Kenyan Wonder

Boy in the US", and more than a dozen family photos.

But this bucolic scene in his father's village of Kogelo near the Equator in western Kenya

conceals a troubling reality that, until now, has never been spoken about. Barack Obama, theEvening Standard can reveal, after we went to the village earlier this month, has failed to honour

the pledges of assistance that he made to a school named in his honour when he visited here amidgreat fanfare two years ago.

At that historic homecoming in August 2006 Obama was greeted as a hero with thousands liningthe dirt streets of Kogelo. He visited the Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School built on landdonated by his paternal grandfather. After addressing the pupils, a third of whom are orphans,

and dancing with them as they sang songs in his honour, he was shown a school with fourdilapidated classrooms that lacked even basic resources such as water, sanitation and electricity.

He told the assembled press, local politicians (who included current Kenyan Prime MinisterRaila Odinga), and students: "Hopefully I can provide some assistance in the future to this school

and all that it can be." He then turned to the school's principal, Yuanita Obiero, and assured herand her teachers: "I know you are working very hard and struggling to bring up this school, but Ihave said I will assist the school and I will do so."

Obiero says that although Obama did not explicitly use the word "financial" to qualify the natureof the assistance he was offering, "there was no doubt among us [teachers] that is what he meant.We interpreted his words as meaning he would help fund the school, either personally or by

raising sponsors or both, in order to give our school desperately-needed modern facilities and afacelift". She added that 10 of the school's 144 pupils are Obama's relatives. Obiero was not theonly one to think that the US Senator from Illinois, who had recently acquired a $1.65 million

house in Chicago, would cough up. Obama's own grandmother Sarah confidently told reportersbefore his visit: "When he comes down here, he will change the face of the school and, believe

me, our poverty in Kogelo will be a thing of the past."

But the Evening Standard has heard that the promises he made to help the school as well as a

local orphanage appear to have been empty.


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Seven months ago I travelled to Iowa to cover the start of the US primaries and was impressed byObama's charisma and integrity as he kicked off a thrilling battle with Hillary Clinton for the

Democratic Presidential nomination. Now, with only John McCain standing in the way of himmaking history as America's first black President, and amid the fanfare over his current worldtour, nowhere is this possibility more eagerly awaited than in Kogelo, the place where his father

and grandfather are buried. Yet there is disappointment and hurt here, too. Granting us access tothe school and its records, Principal Obiero, 48, tells us: "Senator Obama has not honoured thepromises he gave me when we met in 2006 and in his earlier letter to the school. He has not

given us even one shilling. But we still have hope."

The letter Obiero refers to - dated 22 June 2005, signed by Obama and addressed to her - was

written after his election to the US Senate in 2004 and hangs, framed, on the wall of her spartanoffice alongside photographs of Obama's visit to their school. It says: "I am honoured that youhave decided to rename the Kogelo School in my name.

The land that the school is built on was donated by my grandparents and I am proud to carry on

the tradition of supporting the school."

Obiero and her board of governors followed up his letter offering " support" with a bald, formal

request for funds in the form of a nine-page proposal, a copy of which has been provided to theEvening Standard, laying out their ambitions for the school. In it they ask for 8.2 million Kenyanshillings (approximately 65,000) to upgrade the school. The money would be used, they say, to

bring water to the school by sinking a borehole and building a water tank, erect a perimeter fence,complete the science laboratory and add muchneeded new classrooms, additional latrines, and aschool dining hall.

Obiero recalls: "When the US Ambassador William Bellamy came to visit the school for the

official renaming ceremony in February 2006, we gave him two copies of the proposal, one forthe Embassy and one to give to Senator Obama. But we have not heard anything from either ofthem since."

Recently, she adds, she gave another copy of the proposal to Obama's Kenyan half-sister, AumaObama, who recently returned to Nairobi after living in England and working in children'sservices in Reading. Auma had been married to a British man but they are now divorced. "Auma

also promised to pass it on to her brother," says Obiero.

When we ask an Obama spokesperson in Kenya, who is also a family member, why no support

has been forthcoming, he says: "We have no comment, the family are not doing any interviews atthis time."

However, the school's senior teacher Dalmas Raloo, 41, who is often used as a translator forObama's grandmother who only speaks Luo, and is a friend of the family, says the family are

mystified by what they are calling "Obama's lapse". "If you ask whether Obama's family think heshould give something to the village and to the school, the answer is 'yes, definitely'. But theyfeel it should come from him spontaneously. They don't want to ask him for it."


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During Obama's visit to the school, he opened their half-finished science laboratory (built with4,900 raised by the community) and wrote in the visitor's book: "Congratulations on the new

laboratory!" Today, the lab has been mothballed because they ran out of funds to equip it andbecause, critically, there is no running water. "We must pay the man with the donkey to fetch uswater from the river four kilometres away," says Obiero. The situation in the school mirrors that

of Kogelo village where the people live without water, electricity or access to proper healthcareand on average incomes of less than $1 a day. Yet they remain diehard fans of the man who hasput their rural community on the map and have even renamed the beer, called Senator, in his

honour: locals now order "an Obama".

Obama's "lapse" is all the more difficult to understand given that he wrote in his 1995

autobiography, Dreams from My Father, that Kogelo occupies a special place in his heart asbeing where he reconciled the diverse parts of himself - American and African, white mother andblack father. Obama wrote how he fell to his knees, sobbing, between the graves of his father and

grandfather at the family compound.

"When my tears were finally spent," he wrote, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circlefinally close. I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellector obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America - the black life, the

white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed inChicago - all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away."

Obama had visited Kogelo for the first time in the 1980s after attending Columbia University andthen again in 1991 to research his memoirs after graduating from Harvard Law School. He wouldlater become a civil rights lawyer and community organiser before going into politics and serving

in the Illinois Senate in 1997 and then the US Senate in 2004.

On those two voyages of personal discovery to Kogelo, he learned that his grandfather, HusseinOnyango Obama, who lived to 105 according to his gravestone (1870-1975), had been arespected elder and witchdoctor. But it was the road travelled by his estranged father, BarackHussein Obama, that inspired and intrigued him. His father had transcended his roots as a goat

herder to get a PhD at Harvard and work for the Kenyan government before falling from graceand dying in a car accident in 1982 at just 46.

Barack's father, an economist, had split up with his white mother, Ann Dunham, from Kansas,when Barack was two. Apart from a month-long visit from his father when he was 10 years old,Obama would know him only through letters. As an adult he learned there was a darker side to

his father, reflecting in his book that he had apparently also been "a bitter drunk", "an abusivehusband", and "a defeated, lonely bureaucrat". But during this process of soul-searching he came

to know and adore the elderly woman who had raised his father, his step-grandmother SarahObama.

We had been told that Sarah's house, which is adjacent to the school, was patrolled by two armedsecurity guards - who pays their wages is not clear - but when we visited the home, Sarah wasaway in Nairobi and we were shown in by one of Obama's young cousins.


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The house is basic with a concrete floor, an outside kitchen, latrines and no running water. Theonly sign of modernity is the recently installed solar power unit that provides electricity for lights

and a television set. Chairs are neatly laid out around the sides of the living room, each with anembroidered cover and as you enter, there is a photograph of a young Barack Obama bent overunder the weight of a sack of maize.

THE graves of Obama's father and grandfather are in the yard, and Obama's cousins and uncles,including Said Obama, 41, his father's younger brother, also live on the compound in smaller

one-room houses. Behind the house there is a thriving maize plantation and a clump of bananatrees in addition to the giant mango trees that dominate the property. Villagers say that despiteher age, Sarah Obama still comes to market where she sells her homegrown fruit and vegetables.

The market is where we head next to speak to villagers about their hopes for an Obama victory inNovember and what it might do for their village. Mary Manasse, 40, who runs the Mama Siste

Mini Shop selling staples such as bread and cow's milk (packaged in old Coke bottles) says shehas a photograph of Obama shaking hands with her on his 2006 visit.

"Back then I was looking after 40 orphans at the orphan centre," she recalls. "We faced adesperate shortage of money and Obama told us that he especially liked special, dedicated

projects like ours and wanted to help. We thought he would give funds to help our project but wegot nothing. A few months later we were forced to shut down the orphan centre because of lackof funds. Just a million Kenyan shillings [6,000] would have kept us going another year. I feel

disappointed that he did not come through."

A few stalls away mango-seller Gladys Anyango, 60, does an impromptu Obama impression to

the amusement of her fellow peddlers. She places her hands on her hips, gazes into the middledistance and, mimicking his deep voice, says: "How are you, people of Kogelo?" Her friends

collapse with laughter. She also takes off Obama's wife, Michelle, who had accompanied him onhis visit along with his two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

"Oh, but there will be a big party here when Obama wins," she adds. "We still have hope that he

will bring electricity and build schools so the children have a good education. Maybe when he'sPresident of America, he'll remember his roots and look after his community in Kenya."

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23520981-barack-obamas-broken-promise-to-african-village.do

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