19th New York African Film Festival:
“The Education of
Auma Obama”
April 13, 2012 By 2 Comments
Republican Party propaganda wants to paint President Barack Obama’s Kenyan family as alien to America. In this propaganda Kenyans are reduced to anti-American zealots. The propaganda especially play up refer to his father Barack Hussein Obama Snr’s supposed “anti-colonial” and left-wing biases. (What is conveniently forgotten is that Obama Snr. is a product of elite American education–he studied economics at Harvard.) Yet the strongest impression one gets from the Obama family in director Branwen Okpako’s beautiful, and substantive documentary of Obama’s half sister, Auma Obama, is how familiar and American (including some of the values Republicans proffer of hard work and guile), the Obamas are. At the same time it is clear that Obama’s strengths–his intellectual sharpness, charisma and drive, can be traced to this branch of his family. These qualities seem present especially in Obama’s father and sister Auma. (Barack and Auma Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango, a colonial cook, freedom fighter and oral historian, also emerges as a key influence.)
Auma is no stranger to media as she has been profiled by countless journalists seeking information on the American president’s African roots. Obama himself has credited Auma for reconnecting him with his African relatives. But those profiles and reporting never go beyond the mundane and soundbyte. Auma it turns out has built an impressive life herself. She left Kenya after high school–she did not tell her father–to study linguistics, dance and film (some of the footage in the film is hers) in Germany. There she also built a career as a public intellectual (she was a regular pundit on German TV; the scenes of her sparring with German pundits are great to watch). Back in Kenya she runs a foundation and works with young people.
“The Education of Auma Obama” situates itself in 2008 when Okpako traveled with Auma Obama (they met in film school in Germany in the early 1990s), to her grandmother’s house in Kogelo and where both Obama’s father and grandfather are buried. There Branwen, Auma and the rest of her family, well-wishes, locals and the media, await the result of the elections. We know the result of that contest (Barack Obama would become the first person of African descent to become president of the United States). The Kenyans celebrate Obama’s victory lustily. When a news reader announces the win, Obama’s relatives walk to where his father is buried on the property and break into song about “going to the White House.”
Auma Obama emerges as a compelling figure. Her father’s absences and complicated personal life had a profound impact on her–he had been married three times (sometimes polygamously) before he died in a car accident (his sister alleges it was an assassination) in 1982. “My father was not the best father … in planning for his family.” Her youth life comprised multiple movings and boarding school. Auma speaks with affection and regret of Obama snr.’s second wife, Ruth Obama (an American) who taught her to be more assertive. But her relationship with her father also include tender moments. Barack Obama snr. loved classical music and spent hours listening to Chopin, sometimes inviting his daughter along. The film also suggests that leaving Kenya–implied as very socially conservative and predictable existence for its middle class–allowed Auma to grow into her own.
American viewers will be looking for Barack Obama sightings. But that would miss the point of the film, though Barack Obama makes multiple appearances; it was after all Auma who contacted him first about their father’s death (when Barack Obama writes back, Auma notices that “he writes just like my father”). We see him in photographs as Auma visit him in Chicago in the late 1980s where he worked as a community organizer (she describe heated political debates between Obama and her friends). Barack Obama then traveled to Kenya (Auma films a goateed Obama sitting on a porch talking about how “family draws you” and about belonging). In 1991 he brings his fiancee Michelle Robinson. Auma Obama made a short film about that visit. In clips from the film (which I now want to see more of), she explores, among others, what she deemed the different ways in which she and brother’s who is fundamentally a visitor/tourist–to Kenya, viewed or experience the country (especially tourism).
Given the kinds of falsehoods and half truths that are out there about the Obama family–especially its African branch–this film serves as a welcome corrective. But more importantly this is a film about a post-colonial generation of Africans (the “born frees” of the post-1960s independence era in Auma’s case) who want to forge their own futures on their own terms) but who are also shaped by the struggles of their parents. I strongly recommend it.
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AND THEN LIFE HAPPENS
A Memoir
Auma Obama; Translated by Ross Benjamin
St. Martin's Press
While her younger brother Barack grew up in the U.S. and Indonesia, Auma Obama’s childhood played out at the other end of the world in a remote village in Kenya, the birthplace of the siblings’ shared father. Barack and Auma met for the first time in the 1980s, and they built a lasting relationship which lead to travels together in Kenya, research into their family history and finally Auma’s support for her brother’s political career and eventual bid for the U.S. presidency.
Auma spent sixteen years studying and living in Germany, moved to England for love, and gave birth to a daughter there. The tension between her original and chosen worlds and cultures was a constant challenge, and eventually Auma returned to Africa and worked to support young men and women in shaping their futures.
In And Then Life Happens, her candid and emotional memoir, Auma shares her own story as well as recollections of and experiences with her famous brother, who says about their first encounter: “I hugged her, we looked at each other, and laughed. I knew right then that I loved her.”
>via: http://us.macmillan.com/andthenlifehappens/AumaObama
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Branwen Okpako's "The Education of Auma Obama" is a captivating and intimate portrait of the U.S. president's older half-sister, who embodies a post-colonial, feminist identity. An academic overachiever, she studied linguistics and contemporary dance in Heidelberg, Germany, before enrolling in film school in Berlin, where she met Nigerian-born director Okpako in the nineties.
After living in the United Kingdom for a short period, Auma Obama eventually moved back to Kenya to mentor a young generation of community activists, social workers and other ambitious young men and women who lacked her privileged education and training, but were nonetheless determined to make a positive contribution to their society.
Okpako has always been interested in questions of identity, affiliation and belonging. Although she frames her film as a biographical portrait of Obama, she goes much further, providing a layered historical context and discussions of postcolonial African identity from a feminist perspective. Okpako collects testimonies almost exclusively from women, echoing the African tradition of women as chroniclers of oral history. When coupled with these accounts, Okpako's use of archival footage — filmed during colonization for an entirely different purpose — offers a new reading of history and the present. Obama is also the daughter of a charismatic man who fought for the liberation of his country and participated in the shaping of the first years of independence. She witnessed his hopefulness and rise as well as his disillusionment and demise, coming into adulthood as her country — and continent — fell prey to despotism, corruption and poverty.
The Education of Auma Obama is also a film about a generation of politically and socially engaged Africans whose aspirations are informed by their parents' experiences, and whose ambition to forge a better future for their communities starts from the ground up.
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The Story of Obama's Kenyan Sister
A documentarian discusses
The Education
of Auma Obama
and how families
shape our identities.
- By: Akoto Ofori-Atta | Posted: April 18, 2012
Branwen Okpako (Courtesy of Branwen Okpako); Auma Obama
(Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
"I don't know if he's seen it, but I do know that he's requested a copy and that it was delivered to the White House and received," said Nigerian-born filmmaker Branwen Okpako on whether or not the president has seen her most recent film, The Education of Auma Obama, about his older half sister.
Auma, whom Okpako describes as "mellow, enlightened and insightful," is a brilliant scholar who studied linguistics and contemporary dance in Heidelberg, Germany, before enrolling in film school in Berlin in 1992, where she first met Okpako. Auma eventually moved back to Kenya to help young Kenyans develop into community activists.
The film is an intimate portrait of her life -- her education, beliefs and politics, as well as her relationship with both her father and her half brother. But it is also about the complex histories that make us who we are; the traits that we inherit from our families that shape our identities, beliefs and desires.
After a screening at the African Film Festival in New York earlier this month, The Root spoke with Okpako about her project, what it was like to film her friend and what she wants people to know about the Obamas.
The Root: How did this movie come about? What made you decide to do a documentary on Auma Obama?
Branwen Okpako: My films are all personal to my own experiences. I've made both documentaries and fiction films about identity, place, belonging, representation and visibility. These themes were always present in my films because of being Nigerian, going to school in Germany and having a mother from Wales.
The whole multicultural experience has very much been part of my life, and I tried to put that in my films. So I had a three-picture deal with a TV station in Germany and had already done two films. They asked, "Why don't you do a portrait about Barack Obama?"
There are so many aspects of his life that were of great interest to me. But with him, I would miss the personal thing because I don't know him, and he's such a public figure. I thought that better suited to me would be the story of Auma. Knowing the kind of understanding that she has, and her dynamism as a protagonist, I thought it would make a great film.
TR: Auma and President Obama's father, his life and his legacy, are featured prominently in the film. How do you see the three of them connected?
BO: I think that they, the Obamas, as a family have a specific characteristic. Every family has a characteristic. What is important to us in our family? What are the themes we push? What do we represent? And I think that with [the Obamas] this idea of civic responsibility, this idea of adventure and curiosity, are all present. It was even there with Barack Sr.'s father.
My father is a pharmacologist. He studied abroad and was a professor in the U.K. and got his Ph.D. He came back [to Nigeria]. He's an old man now, but he always says, "We have all these herbs and all these ways of healing ourselves, and we went away to get answers when the answers are all right here."
Who do they tell all of these things to? Us, their children. So we go on and take up the responsibility and say we have to do this, we have to do it better and live up to the expectations of our parents. And that's why we are the way we are. And that's why Auma is the way she is. That voice, her father's voice, is there in her ear, you know.
TR: What did you learn about your friend Auma while filming the documentary?
BO: I didn't know her life story. We had always talked about our politics and our ideas, but it was through making this film that I got to know her story. Her friends are like family to her. Her aunts are important to her. I learned of one of Auma's aunts, who is younger than Auma because her grandfather married a younger woman. She is the one who told the story of Barack Sr.'s death [in the film]. I learned so many things that you can't anticipate.
Even though I talk to mostly women in the film, her father's presence is there. I hadn't read President Obama's book until after I did the film, but look at the title: Dreams of My Father. There is something about the aspirations of our fathers. Anyone whose father was young at the beginning of the independence of African countries knows this.
Those guys were taught at a young age that they could take charge of their countries. The torch wasn't given to the old or to the experienced. It was given to the young. They were in their 30s when they took over their countries. They were full of dynamic ideas, and then of course the disappointment comes, the reality of politics and the global situation and so forth. And who gets to hear about how [disappointment] feels? It's the kids. It's us.
TR: Disappointment comes up quite a bit. What were you trying to convey to your audience about being let down?
BO: I don't see disappointment as a main theme. The main theme is empowerment. You can change the world. It doesn't have to be in some lofty position. Right in your backyard, with your friends, colleagues and young people around you -- just sharing ideas and treating each other with respect and listening to each other and just trying to understand yourself. It's all a contribution to making [the] world a better place.
And Auma's story is all about a simple woman, a simple family. Even if you are president, you're just a simple person. Everyone is. Nobody is more than anybody else. No one is more important than anybody else. I feel strongly about this. Some people live in a village, but they are royalty in their own way. And there is nothing disappointing about that. That is wonderful.
Akoto Ofori-Atta is The Root's assistant editor. Follow her on Twitter.
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>via: http://www.theroot.com/views/obamas-kenyan-sister?page=0,0
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