Amos Otieno Odenyo sits with his son in 1981. (devin wagner / argus leader)
Amos Otieno Odenyo lived almost all his life without a home.
Odenyo left his homeland of Kenya in 1961 to study at Augustana College.
In the years before his death in July 2007, he traveled back to the Gem area of Kenya frequently. But Odenyo no longer fit in.
“He could never leave permanently, and he could never go back,” says his son, Odera Odenyo. “He was so educated. What could you do in the village where there’s no jobs for you? Yet his whole being was part of that village.”
Odera Odenyo has chronicled his father’s life in a book he is publishing, “Staring at the Nyanza Sun: A Kenyan-American Memoir.”
He has used his father’s own journals and more than 20 hours of interviews for the book.
Odera Odenyo recently stopped in Sioux Falls during a move that he, his wife and their children were making from the West Coast to Virginia. It gave him an opportunity to walk on the campus his father first set foot on in Sept. 7, 1961.
It was an emotional moment.
“I feel joy, and I feel pain,” Odera Odenyo says, barely able to squeeze the words out through a throat tightened by emotion. “I feel like it’s my campus. It was the embodiment of every hope and dream my father had in 1961, and they accepted him so I feel great appreciation for that school.”
Otieno – he used his middle name, pronounced o-t-n-o – was 26 years old. His family, among the first converts to Christianity in the Gem region, prized education.
At age 7, Otieno left home to become a houseboy, one who was promised an education. When he reported to his father that he was being beaten and half-starved, that received no attention.
But when Otieno said he was not always allowed to attend school, his father removed him from the situation.
“My grandfather thought pain and perseverance was part of everyday human life, especially in Africa,” Odera Odenyo says. “But he prized education.”
Odera Odenyo is compiling a memoir of his father's experiences. His father, Dr. Amos Otieno Odenyo, came to America from Kenya through the Kennedy Airlift in 1961 to study at Augustana College.
Otieno was a policeman in Kenya when he first heard of the Airlift Africa project, organized by Kenyan politician Tom Mboya and the African-American Students Foundation in the United States.
Its goal was to fly Kenyan students to the United States to study at American universities. Midwestern colleges were popular because they were less expensive, Odera Odenyo says.
Its goal was to fly Kenyan students to the United States to study at American universities. Midwestern colleges were popular because they were less expensive, Odera Odenyo says.
In 1960, the Kennedy Foundation agreed to underwrite the airlift, after Mboya visited future President Jack Kennedy to ask for assistance, and it expanded to other countries besides Kenya.
In his memoirs, Otieno talks about how lonely he felt in his first two years at Augustana, living alone in Solberg Hall’s Room 213.
Gradually, he began to fit in. He would speak to rural church congregations about life in Africa where he was the first black person many of those in attendance had seen.
“They asked me very silly questions: ‘Did you wear clothes in Africa? Have you ever driven in a car before?’ ” he wrote in his memoir.
High school students were receptive to learning about Africa. Otieno recalled a “frank and lively” discussion with a Washington High School social studies class on the old and new Kenya.
Often conversations included questions about his teeth. Otieno had undergone an adult-initiation ceremony that involved the removal of his six lower teeth. When South Dakotans found out the teeth had been removed deliberately, they recoiled in horror or showed pity.
“What was a badge of honor in my culture was a badge of shame in another,” he notes.
Otieno found a solace, however, in the themes of country-western music. Songs of family, tradition, love and loss had a parallel in the folk tales of his Luo culture, he wrote.
Off-campus jobs brought Otieno into contact with others. He was hired by a man named Coakley, one of the first black Americans Otieno ever met, to work as a night custodian at the Argus Leader.
Otieno found himself welcomed, but he recognized a possible reason for that: “I was considered a temporary guest who came to learn, not agitate.”
Before Otieno left Kenya, he was married because Luo tradition dictated that sons marry from oldest to youngest, and he didn’t want to make his younger brothers wait.
A son was born in Kenya, but distance doomed the marriage. At Augustana, he met Mayone Dahlk of Grove City, Minn. She had other suitors before the two married, their son says.
“However, when she closed her eyes and pretended color did not matter, it was to Otieno that she was most drawn,” Odera Odenyo writes.
Otieno also attended the University of Wyoming and the University of Minnesota. He was a professor of sociology at York College in Queens, N.Y., for 35 years.
Throughout his life Otieno struggled with the constant pain of being away from Kenya. He helped his family back there through his last days.
“There’s a difference in Kenya between a house and a home,” Odera Odenyo says. “A house you can buy and sell. A home is where your parents are buried and your grandparents are buried. Home for him was his village.”
He loved America, there was nothing he didn’t like about coming here, yet his home was a little village in Kenya that he could not return to.
Otieno did return to Kenya, after his death.
“Inspiration, education, compassion - I engraved on his gravestone in Kenya when I took him home,” Odera Odenyo says. “That was my inheritance, and that’s what I’m passing along to other people with this book.”
Reach Jill Callison at 331-2307.
Comments