out of Chicago on a Wednesday in late August, had a long wait in the airport in
Frankfurt, Germany, and then flew another eight hours to arrive in Nairobi just
before dawn, stepping outside in the Kenyan moonlight and into what felt like a
different world altogether.
I had been to Jamaica and the Bahamas, and to Europe a few times, but this
was my first time being this far from home. I felt Nairobi’s foreignness—or really,
my own foreignness in relation to it—immediately, even in the first strains of
morning. It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as I’ve traveled more, the way a new
place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight
from what you’re used to; it carries smells you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of
wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in
the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you
know.
Barack’s half sister Auma met us at the airport, greeting us both warmly. The
two of them had met only a handful of times, beginning six years earlier when
Auma had visited Chicago, but they had a close bond. Auma is a year older than
Barack. Her mother, Grace Kezia, had been pregnant with Auma when Barack
Obama Sr. left Nairobi to study in Hawaii in 1959. (They also had a son,
Abongo, who was a toddler at the time.) After he returned to Kenya in the mid-
1960s, Barack senior and Kezia went on to have two more children together.
Auma had ebony skin and brilliant white teeth and spoke with a strong
British accent. Her smile was enormous and comforting. Arriving in Kenya, I was
so tired from the travel I could barely make conversation, but riding into the city
in the backseat of Auma’s rattletrap Volkswagen Bug, I took note of how the
quickness of her smile was just like Barack’s, how the curve of her head also
resembled his. Auma also clearly had inherited the family brains: She’d been
raised in Kenya and returned there often, but she’d gone to college in Germany
and was still living there, studying for a PhD. She was fluent in English, German,
Swahili, and her family’s local language, called Luo. Like us, she was just here for
a visit.
Auma had arranged for me and Barack to stay in a friend’s empty apartment,
a spartan one-bedroom in a nondescript cinder-block building that had been
painted bright pink. For the first couple of days, we were so zonked by jet lag it
felt as if we were moving at half speed. Or maybe it was just the pace of Nairobi,
which ran on an entirely different logic than Chicago did, its roads and British-
style roundabouts clogged by a mix of pedestrians, bikers, cars, and matatus—the