Laubach agreed. And early in 1959 Mooney wrote to thank him. “Thank you so much for the secretarial help,” she wrote to Laubach. “Barack is a whiz and types so fast that I have a hard time keeping ahead of him. I think I better bring him along and let him be your Secretary in the USA.”
2
Obama could not have had less in common with his new boss. Sara Elizabeth Mooney, known as Betty, was the granddaughter of the cofounder of the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. Single, she had spent virtually all of her life teaching. At age thirty, she met Laubach, a congregational minister and the father of a global literacy program known as “Each One, Teach One,” a method by which each new reader teaches another person what they have learned, thus passing on the new skill one person at a time. Inspired by his personal faith in God and messianic zeal, Mooney committed herself to literacy. For eight years she worked in India, first running a mission boarding school and then teaching in an adult literacy center. Before accepting the post in Kenya, she spent two years as the supervisor of a literacy training program at the Koinonia Foundation in Baltimore, Maryland, at the time a Christianbased training center for literacy workers. Laubach served as president of the board of Koinonia.
A straightforward woman with a tight cap of brown curls, Mooney was prone to prim cotton dresses and flat shoes. A “spinster” in the jargon of the day, family members believed she had long ago given up on the idea of marriage. She was a deeply committed Christian who believed that God had brought her to Kenya on a “literacy safari,”
3
as she described it, to empower people to read. She said devotions daily.
Then there was Obama. He was twenty-one years old, a racehorse at the gate, already sporting the “academic” look that was in vogue in some Nairobi circles. His jacket was finely cut, his glasses a donnish horn rimmed, and the occasional pipe provided the crowning touch. Never mind that once he put the pipe down he invariably resumed his chronic chain smoking. On the brink of becoming a father for the first time, he was consumed with a single burning passion, which was to be a player in the development of a newly independent Kenya. But with a record already marred by rejection from Maseno and a series of small, short-lived jobs on his résumé, his prospects were moderate at best.
Mboya had urged Kenyans to think practically as they prepared for independence. He wanted them to get training in the fields that would be of service to the country, particularly in areas such as economics and administration. With his impressive mathematical skills, Obama was convinced his calling was to serve as an economist who could help develop
the country's fiscal foundations and project its needs in the future. All he needed to do was find some way to get a university degree, possibly even at a college overseas as some of his friends were planning to do. Mooney was the first personâother than the Old Manâwho tried to channel his strengths in such a direction rather than punish him for his audaciousness. That she was a white woman only added intrigue to the relationship.
Mooney had been hired to help the Kenya Department of Education set up a pilot literacy program, funded by the U.S. International Cooperation Administration (ICA), then an arm of the U.S. Department of State that administered aid for a host of development purposes. Her job, for which she was paid $6,355 a year, was to develop a country-wide literacy campaign that would instruct adults how to read and write first in their native language and then in English. The first step was to assemble a skilled administrative staff and launch a series of classes both in Nairobi and in the field.
The need was huge. Eight out of ten African adults in Kenya could neither read nor write,
4
a fact that loomed as a huge impediment to a nation fast approaching independence. Another one of Mooney's tasks was to produce reading materials and primers written in the tribal languages, such as Dholuo and Masai, that could be used in the classroom. The Laubach method used a series of familiar pictures coupled with related sound associations to teach words. Once the student grasped the relationship between the sound and the thing, they could then master syllables and, ultimately, the words. For the millions of Kenyans who could neither read nor write in the 1950s, the political implications of such a campaign were huge, as Laubach well knew. “You think it is a pity they cannot read, but the real tragedy is that they have no voice in public affairs, they never vote, they are never represented in any conference, they are the silent victims, the forgotten men,” Laubach wrote in his 1943 book,
The Silent Billion Speak
.
5
Mooney launched the Literacy Center in a pair of roomsâNo. 19 and 20âin Ribeiro House in the heart of Nairobi. She was soon assisted by another white woman, Helen Roberts, who had left her home in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 1958 to volunteer as a literacy teacher. Roberts, a grandmother of eleven and the author of children's books, had heard Laubach speak and soon learned his method herself. Although
Mooney was a skilled manager, Roberts, her senior by more than a decade, was the “people person,” and the two worked well as a team.
They were a curious pairâtwo middle-aged women navigating the crowded city streets in Roberts's blue Volkswagen Bug. Undaunted, they soon managed to introduce themselves to an emerging group of Kenyans who had begun to address the country's dire need for educational opportunities. Mooney and Roberts also traveled widely “up country” to hold teacher training courses and distribute readers.
Although the Laubach method caught on quickly and Mooney's classrooms were soon packed with adult students, getting started had been challenging. In the beginning most Kenyans regarded Mooney with a deep-seated suspicion, wary of anything that hinted of the colonial government's largesse, one of the legacies of the bloody Mau Mau years. Although many Kenyans were hungry for education, they were fearful of the government publicity vans and radio announcements that broadcast the program under the banner “
Kusoma Ni Faida
,” Swahili for “reading is profitable.”
6
Most were convinced it was all part of a scheme to raise taxes or move them elsewhere, just as they had been forcibly relocated to the brutal detention camps during the Emergency.
Indeed, Mooney's appearance in the politically charged atmosphere of the day prompted a flutter of suspicion far beyond the audience at Makadara Hall as well. Days later a columnist for the
Sunday Post
, a Nairobi weekly newspaper, sniffed at the impropriety of her appeal, writing, “I know that Miss Mooney merely talked about Adult Literacy but a political platform is not the place for such talk by a representative of a Government Departmentâparticularly a representative of a nation who are on record as being against the idea of the Colonies.”
7
And a week after her address a member of Nairobi's Criminal Investigation Department dropped by her office to “discuss” her breach of protocol. But Mooney, an earnest law abider, had acquired approval from educational authorities before she made her appearance.
Deeply moved by the plight of those who could not read or write, Mooney was sure that her mission was divinely led. In a letter she wrote several weeks after she arrived, Mooney described watching a group of illiterate women leaving a community hall and heading “over the fresh green hillside to their homes, some of them ten miles away. And at last I
felt that my own trail had stopped going in circles and had led me to the reason for being here.... I no longer doubt God's time table. There is some reason for my being here at this particular time.”
8
Mooney's efforts attracted the interest of two of Kenya's most prominent college graduates, who were among a tiny handful of Kenyans who could boast of college degrees. One was Dr. Julius Gikonyo Kiano, who had earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkley in 1956 and was the first Kenyan to receive a doctoral degree, and the other was Kariuki Karanja Njiiri, who earned a Master's of Arts degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
9
Kiano, a savvy Kikuyu economist, helped Mooney overcome the Kenyan people's widespread mistrust of government and guided her in the recruitment of teachers. Njiiri, the son of a senior Kikuyu chief who had his pick of jobs on his return in 1959, became her chief assistant. Both men would be instrumental in assisting Tom Mboya to raise money and select candidates for the student airlifts. One of the names that would come across their desks for consideration would be Barack Obama.
In the crowded Ribeiro Street office, Obama started out as a low-level clerk assigned to basic office tasks. He took dictation, helped organize the office, and assisted with translations in Luo and Swahili. But he was soon promoted to the writing committee, composed of half a dozen young men assigned to write elementary adult readers in their native language. Dressed in jacket and tie, Obama and the other writers sat at long wooden tables, carefully penning the pamphlets used as follow-up to the literary primers. If the high-arching Obama grumbled that the work was somewhat menial, he also realized that the job was a critical first step toward fulfilling his dream. First, the work was exceptionally well paying. But more important, teaching literacy was a critical component in the advance toward independence.
In all, Obama wrote three books in Luo that employed “Otieno” the wise man as a model instructor. The first book was
Otieno Jarieko, Kitabu Mokuongo: Yore Mabeyo Mag Rito Ngima
, or “Otieno Jarieko, the Wise Man, the First Book: Wise Ways of Health.” Otieno describes a variety of healthy foods, demonstrates how to use a knife and fork, and gives instruction in the proper way to build a latrine. The second and third books center on Otieno's teachings of the wise ways of farming and
citizenship, respectively. Obama worked on the three books almost the entire year and a half that he assisted Mooney, and he proudly included them on his résumé.
Working closely with the American women and a handful of their Kenyan assistants, Obama kept his bravado under close wraps and toed the line. The style in the office was highly cooperative and the staff represented a host of different tribes, due in part to the need for materials written in varied tribal languages. Obama worked closely with one of Mooney's early hires, a young Kikuyu named George Wanyee, who recently returned from India with a BA. Wanyee helped prepare Kikuyu charts and was the first editor of the
Key
, a newsletter for new readers.
A photograph of Obama, in the fifth issue of the
Key
, shows him at the chalkboard in the Center during Laubach's visit in the fall of 1958. Obama is at the ready with his chalk, helping to write the story of Jesus's birth in Luo, a project he worked on for several weeks. Part of the point of the project was the religious story itself, but Laubach also noted that “the 1,000 most common English words are used in such stories.”
10
Obama impressed Laubach, who chose him to appear in his farewell photograph with a group including Laubach, Njiiri, and Mooney.
A highly organized person, Mooney ran a tight ship on Ribeiro Street and was well aware that the eyes of both the Kenyan and British governments were on her after her appearance at Makadara Hall. But she was also deeply interested in the lives of the Kenyans she was working with and went out of her way to help many of them achieve their personal goals. In addition to Obama, she assisted nearly a dozen other young Kenyans accomplish their educational goals. She kept a running “wish list” of projects and people for whom she hoped to find funding or contacts, often turning to Laubach for help. Even after she returned to the United States, she was instrumental in assisting another young Kenyan to enroll in a high school just outside Bohemia, New York, where he lived with her brother for two years.
Over the course of long hours spent poring over the evolving texts with Obama, the serious-minded Mooney gradually warmed to Obama's ironic sense of humor. In Obama she found a keenly intelligent student bristling with potential, one who also happened to have a powerful magnetism with women. That he was desperately eager to perfect his English and advance
the rudimentary social skills the Old Man had taught him may have drawn her to him even more. At the time they met, Obama was just coming into his manhood. Obama was now a young father, for early in 1958 Kezia had given birth to his first son. They named him Roy Abongo Obama, although he later assumed the name Malik. Kezia took care of the baby almost entirely herself, but Obama was aware of his responsibilities as the father of an infant son. Mooney had no children of her own, but she delighted in young people and took a great interest in Obama's small family.
Although not a tall man, his broad face and often earnest expression gave Obama a commanding appearance. Along with his elegant demeanor, he possessed an intense physical allure. The same fluidity that drew admiring stares on the Kendu Bay dance floor of his youth was now present in an everyday grace of movement. The power of his appeal, however, had as much to do with his aura of self-confidence and ebullience as it did with his physical attributes, at least as a young man. And then there was the trumpeting voice, now matured, that could snap a sleepy room to attention from a corridor away. Obama, clearly, was not to be passed over.
What Obama found in Mooney was more complex. Part of her appeal for him was certainly the job. Working at the Literacy Center provided both social standing and the opportunity to rise. But Mooney and Obama also spent time together outside the office, enjoying rural drives and attending some of the popular evening dances. And that association brought a different kind of benefit for Obama. Among a certain kind of African man, just keeping company with a white woman provided considerable social status. Doing so was a bold act, the behavior of a man who no longer intended to blindly knuckle to European social mores. Although certain elements among both the colonists and the Africans disapproved of interracial unions, others felt it was high time that things began to change. C. M. G. Argwings-Kodhek, the lawyer who squared off with Mboya in colorful political debates, had openly thrown down a gauntlet when he married a white woman while he was studying outside the country in the early 1950s, a time when, in Kenya, it was against the law to do so. Kenyatta had also married a white woman in England, although he did not bring her home until after independence. And if others speculated
about the precise nature of the relationship between Mooney and Obama, well, all the better from Obama's point of view.