I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.
—BARACK OBAMA ABOUT HIS MOTHER, ANN DUNHAM
Barack Obama prepared for elective office by moving to Chicago to work as a community organizer in his mid-twenties, obtaining a Harvard Law School degree in his late twenties and authoring an exhaustive personal memoir in his early thirties. His book, originally published in 1995 by a division of Random House, was called Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. As the title suggests, the book chronicled Obama’s life in relation to his East African father, emphasizing Obama’s search to find his own racial and spiritual identity amid America’s divisive racial spectrum. He finally reached a comfortable place after undertaking a thorough review of his mother’s and her parents’ journey from the midwestern United States to Hawaii, and then deeply exploring the life and ancestry of his father, who left Obama and his mother when he was two years old.
This wasn’t the book Obama originally sold to his literary agent and publisher. He had pitched them a work about his experiences as the first African-American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. After all, at the time, Obama was a modest thirty-three years old, and his Law Review presidency was his only claim to any modicum of fame. Besides, it might have seemed a bit presumptuous to try to sell a life’s memoir at the age of thirty-three. Nevertheless, when Obama began writing, an autobiographical memoir poured forth.
Upon its release in 1995, the book sold a few thousand copies, generated mostly positive reviews—although there were a few mixed ones (one critic considered it overwrought and self-indulgent)—and then it faded into obscurity. For years after its publication, the book was difficult to find for those few who tried, with copies hidden in corners of small independent or Afrocentric bookstores. By the early 2000s, with the advent of Internet websites that sold used merchandise in a worldwide flea market, a used paperback copy could be picked up for as little as four or five dollars, but it still was not a hot seller by any measure. That changed dramatically when Obama shot to national fame in 2004 after his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Random House quickly ran off several new printings, promoted it vigorously, and the book landed on best-seller lists, where it remained for dozens of weeks, giving Obama the first shot of financial wealth in his life.
Obama, who began reading voraciously in college, had harbored some thoughts of writing fiction as an avocation, although it’s an open question whether he seriously considered fiction writing as a full-time profession. Obama himself said he never dabbled in fiction, but others dispute that. When I asked him during the course of his U.S. Senate primary campaign to name his favorite author, he cited E. L. Doctorow, the critically acclaimed novelist and outspoken political liberal. The next day, during a phone conversation on a different matter, he made it a point to say that he wanted to change his answer—to William Shakespeare. (It’s probably safe to say that Mr. Doctorow would not feel slighted.) Some politicians are infamous among reporters for casually mentioning a high-minded work that is currently on their nightstand in order to give the impression of being a deep thinker. Even so, it is difficult to imagine most politicians digesting the heavy works of Shakespeare before extinguishing the bedroom light. Yet Obama’s erudite nature and his own ambitious writings made that answer seem quite plausible. Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who brought Obama to Chicago to help poor blacks on the Far South Side retrain for jobs, said Obama possessed a fertile, introspective mind that wandered from scene to scene and place to place—a rare trait that often lends itself to good fiction writing. In short, Obama was a dreamer. Of Obama’s fiction writing, Kellman said, “He wasn’t really talking about it as a career, for that is a whole different animal. He was talking about it as a muse kind of thing—the arts and exploring emotions and that kind of stuff.” Beginning in his college years in New York City, Obama began to chronicle the day-to-day events of his life on a pad of lined white paper that he toted around. The notebook would be filled with word sketches of everyday occurrences, conflicting emotions and personal observations of the various people who passed through his world. Later, he would upgrade that notebook, wrapping it in a more professional-looking leather-bound folder. It was from those early handwritten pages that he harvested Dreams from My Father.
To a great extent, the narrative is the story of self-discovery, of a young man in the American middle class ambiguously tethered to an unknown family tree on a faraway continent. On his quest to meet and learn about these blood relatives, Obama also seeks a sense of belonging in his home society, a country still riven by racial, cultural and economic divisions. This might be an interesting but not extraordinary tale for the many people who fit neatly into a human demographic. But Obama’s mixed racial ancestry of black and white placed him in a different category, straddling two cultures and two races that, in the United States especially, often collide. The fact that he grew up mostly in Hawaii, where there were few blacks and many people of Asian ancestry, added to Obama’s feelings of racial isolation. Indeed, in the book’s introduction, Obama conceded that he could not deliver the story of the typical African-American experience, which is often marked by deprivation of financial, educational or other resources. This was to the chagrin of his project’s promoters. Obama, again in the introduction, explained that one Manhattan publisher, who presumably rejected his book proposal, once told him, “After all, you don’t come from an underprivileged background.” Although his childhood was unique to his circumstances, Obama did claim a long-standing genetic link with African Americans. He followed that quote with this: “That I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common ancestry without pretending to speak to, or for, all our various struggles—is part of what this book is all about.”
The book’s chief message is consistent with Obama’s overriding political theme of optimism and multiculturalism—hope in the face of despair, hope in the face of centuries of struggle, harmony among people of all races and cultures and kinds of families. The first paperback cover for Dreams captured this optimism with a bright color photograph of a broadly smiling Obama on a visit to Kenya. The photo was taken by his half sister Auma, with whom he would ultimately form a close association. He is at his father’s small farming compound and seated beside his paternal grandmother, Sarah Onyango Obama, who is attired in white head scarf and traditional Kenyan dress. She is smiling just as broadly as she lovingly caresses Obama’s neatly trimmed Afro with the back of her hand.
The remarkably candid memoir is much rawer than the typical book from a politician, no doubt because Obama wrote it before firmly deciding to run for public office. It purposefully tracks the thoughts and movements of a young black American male with more frankness than a political consultant would probably advise—the teenage parties, the pursuit of young women, alcohol and drug use, anger at the white establishment, questioning of organized religion. The book opens with an anecdote describing an abrupt telephone call Obama had received from a relative in Kenya who informed him that his father, a notoriously poor driver, has been killed in an automobile accident. At the time, Obama is twenty-one and living in a spare Manhattan apartment while he attends Columbia University. He is shocked by the call, and is utterly clueless about how to respond emotionally to this news, chiefly because his father had left Obama’s family to attend Harvard University when Obama was a toddler. Obama then launches into a rich, chronological narrative of his life, beginning with his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and concluding shortly before he goes into politics by running for the Illinois State Senate. Obama states in the introduction that he has melded real people from his life into fictional characters and inserted imprecise dialogue in order to move along the narrative and protect the identities of certain individuals. These literary devices are not uncommon in personal memoirs, but over his political career they would become a source of scrutiny for journalists scouring Obama’s past for possible exaggerations or outright mendacity.
Dreams from My Father would prove an invaluable resource for political reporters, as well as a selling point for Obama when he ran for public office. In covering his Senate campaign for the Chicago Tribune, I would consistently ask Obama questions about his life. When he would grow weary of these personal inquiries, which was often, he would brush them aside by referring me to his book for answers. “I wrote four hundred pages about myself,” he would say. “What more could you want from me?” When I explained that my job was to obtain fresh anecdotes and quotes, as well as to make sure that the story in his book checked out, he would wave me off and say he understood. But his perpetually furrowed brow, together with his imperious manner, gave the appearance of being personally offended that I would dare question his authorial and personal integrity. Still, he would concede what some critics asserted: that the book was too long. “I probably should have trimmed it by fifty or a hundred pages,” he confided.
Obama’s portrayal of his childhood (when he was known as “Barry,” like his father, to better fit into American culture) was rife with vivid stories of his life in Honolulu, where he was born, and poverty-ridden Jakarta, where he lived for several years, leading up to adolescence, by which time he had returned to Hawaii. He also offered rather brief but descriptive portraits of the primary caregivers who molded his character—his mother and her parents. And he recounted his struggles adapting to the African-American community of the United States, as well as his frustrations as a community organizer in an impoverished neighborhood on Chicago’s Far South Side. But the book’s essence is Obama’s search for a heritage that was a mystery to him as a child and adolescent—the story of his once estranged and now deceased father, a gifted African politician whose personal demons prohibited him from fulfilling his great early promise. Partially because one of his parents virtually abandoned him to the other, and then that primary parent led a searching, peripatetic existence, Obama often told close friends that he grew up feeling “like an orphan.” His wife, Michelle, and close friends would later speculate that his isolated childhood and parental loss had played a significant role in feeding his desire for public attention.
So it comes as no real surprise that Obama wanted to investigate his paternal heritage and gain an understanding of why his father disappeared. The book reaches its apogee when a sobbing Obama falls to the ground between the graves of his paternal grandfather and his father in rural Kenya, his yearning questions about his absent father answered, their ghosts, which had haunted Obama, finally laid to rest. “When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me,” Obama wrote. “I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or 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 in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin.”
WITH OBAMA’S ILLUSTRATIVE EXPLORATION INTO HIS FATHER’S heritage an open book—literally—I had a wealth of information about this aspect of his life. But his wife, Michelle, advised me that to truly understand her husband, it was necessary to visit Hawaii. No matter how much Obama had philosophized in print about his Kenyan father, she told me, that Pacific island held even more answers to Obama’s complex persona. “There’s still a great deal of Hawaii in Barack,” she said. “You can’t really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii.” In fact, the Obamas still make an annual sojourn to Honolulu every Christmas season, sometimes inviting close friends to join them. The trip is cemented into Obama’s schedule, and nothing has ever dislodged it, not even his hectic political campaigns. Hearing this, I convinced my Tribune editors that a trip to Honolulu was essential in order to write a newspaper profile of Obama in the weeks leading up to the fall 2004 Senate election in Illinois.
At the time of my visit, Hawaii’s population and tourist industry had grown considerably since Obama’s youth, but the essence of the islands’ mix of various Asian, Polynesian and Western cultures had persevered, as had their tropical serenity. Obama and his campaign staff decided to make his family available to me, most likely because Obama was a candidate for the highest legislative body in the land and the Tribune was the largest and most influential newspaper in Illinois. Turning down the Tribune’s request for family interviews would not seem a wise political decision at this point in his Senate campaign. However, Obama’s top aides must have been wary about what I would turn up. After many discussions among those aides, they elected to send a deputy press aide, Nora Moreno Cargie, to track my reporting and monitor the content of my interviews. No reporter would be thrilled by this idea, and I certainly wasn’t. I balked mildly but realized that if I wanted access to Obama’s family, I had no choice but to acquiesce to Moreno Cargie’s presence.
As it turned out, she was far from obstructive, and she even became helpful in drawing out some sources. She had worked as a researcher for National Public Radio and had a habit of asking questions herself. She also brought a woman’s perspective to my discoveries. And like much of Obama’s campaign staff, she also had a great curiosity about her employer. So with Moreno Cargie in tow, Obama’s other half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, a high school history teacher in her mid-thirties, provided a tour of Obama’s favorite spots on the island, as well as places where seminal moments of her brother’s childhood transpired. Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, then ailing with various maladies, reluctantly agreed to a forty-five-minute interview. I also toured the Punahou School, the private academy where Obama studied, and interviewed teachers, coaches and childhood friends and their parents.
Meeting his grandmother, in particular, opened my eyes to Obama’s formative years in a way that I hadn’t foreseen. I initially had thought that Obama gained his practical and pragmatic side from studying his father’s life. But the interviews revealed that it surely came from Madelyn, who was his primary caregiver while his mother traveled the globe studying other cultures.
Madelyn Dunham was known in the family as “Toot,” which is short for “Tutu,” meaning “grandparent” in Hawaiian. She still lived in the same modest apartment where Obama was raised, across an inland waterway from the teeming tourist area of Waikiki Beach. Maya had moved back to Hawaii from New York City just a couple of years before, in part to look after her grandmother. She lived in an apartment a few floors below Madelyn’s unit, which was on the tenth floor of the twelve-story building in an urban section of Honolulu. The structure was rather prosaic in its beachfrontlike design. It was made of white concrete and shaped like a rectangle plopped on a short side. Triangular arches, the only real decorative treatment, rose slightly above the entrance on the first floor, and balconies just large enough for a few chairs adorned every apartment, their railings the overriding architectural feature of the building. Glass sliding doors opened to each of the balconies. The interiors of the apartments were as modest as the exterior suggested, with each unit resembling a beachfront condominium. Some families visiting Hawaii undoubtedly stay in bigger oceanfront condos than this apartment where Obama grew up.
Madelyn clearly was not one for frills. The walls of her unit were bleach-white with only a couple of pieces of artwork. A short hallway to the right led to two small bedrooms, one of which was Obama’s as a child. To the left, the apartment opened into a kitchen area and then to a medium-sized living room, with the glass doors leading to the adjoining small balcony at the far end. The most prominent ornament in the room sat on a bookshelf beside the television—a handsome family portrait of Obama, Michelle and their two young daughters, Sasha and Malia.
Moreno Cargie and I assumed seats at opposite ends of the living room couch as Madelyn, a small woman shrunken even more by a perpetual stoop, dropped into a chair. At nearly eighty-two, her age was surely getting the best of her physically, but her mind seemed taut and clear. Her black hair now was thinning and graying, and a yellowish streak ran through the middle of it, the result of years of cigarette smoking. She confessed that she still smoked too much. Her family said she was also still a consistent drinker.
Throughout our interview, Madelyn left no question that she was every bit as pragmatic and self-assured as she had been described. This was a woman who had no college education and began her professional life as a bank secretary, yet retired as the bank’s vice president. She said she retired, in part, because her colleagues and superiors were pushing her to learn how to work with computers. “New-fangled gadgets that are running the world,” she said disdainfully. I tried my best to put her at ease, but her somewhat brusque demeanor indicated that she was dubious of my intentions. She eyed my small digital voice recorder with deep suspicion. “It’s one of those new-fangled gadgets,” I explained to her with a smile, an expression she did not return.
While Maya was gracious and warm, Madelyn was cautious and protective. This interview was clearly a chore, and she had obviously agreed to it only at her grandson’s urging. Even though Obama was now a rising star in the national Democratic Party, she told me that she wished her grandson had entered a more esteemed profession than politics after obtaining his Harvard Law School degree. “International law or something like that,” she said. When I suggested that his Harvard credentials would allow him to move back easily into the legal profession if his political career grew unsatisfying or went awry—he perhaps would even be offered a federal judgeship—she replied: “The Supreme Court would be all right.” Her matter-of-fact manner about suggesting the Supreme Court for her grandson made me chuckle. After all, on this day, Obama surely looked as if he was headed to the U.S. Senate, but he was still just an Illinois state lawmaker. I wasn’t sure if this was an example of naïveté or moxie, and I eventually settled on a mixture of the two. After a half hour’s worth of questions, Madelyn announced that she was tired, and effectively ended the interview. As we stepped toward the door, she grabbed my arm gently and gave me a motherly instruction: “Be kind to my grandson.” To which I answered: “It’s not really my job to show him kindness, but to be as impartial and accurate as I can.” She responded with typical pragmatism and brevity. “Oh, I know,” she said.
DURING THIS TRIP, AND ESPECIALLY DURING MY INTERVIEW WITH Madelyn, it grew clearer that, even if the spine of Obama’s written narrative involved his absent father, it was Obama’s mother who played the most vital role in shaping the crux of his character. (His mother’s full given name was Stanley Ann Dunham because her father wanted a boy, but she understandably led her life as “Ann.” The name Stanley was “one of Gramps’s less judicious ideas,” Obama wrote in Dreams.) Indeed, the extreme importance of his mother’s part in forming Obama’s character perhaps didn’t even strike Obama himself until after she passed away in the mid-1990s from ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-three.
“His mother was an Adlai Stevenson liberal,” said Madelyn, who is nonideological herself, although prone to voting Republican. “And he got a heavy dose of her thinking, you know, as a youngster.” Obama told me that his mother’s influence was ever-present in his life. And it is apparent from private and public conversations with him that he set his moral compass not only from his readings of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Bible but from his mother’s guidance. Said Obama: “It’s always hard to talk about your mother in any kind of an objective way. I mean, she was just a very sweet person. She just loved her kids to death. And you know, [she] was one of these parents who, you know, was the opposite of remote, was always very present and would be your biggest cheerleader and your best friend and had sort of complete confidence in the fact that you were special in some fashion. And so, as a consequence, there was no shortage of self-esteem.” He once told a grassroots women’s group: “Everything that is good about me, I think I got from her.”
In an updated preface to Dreams, for its 2004 edition, Obama wrote a brief tribute to his mother: “I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book—less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. . . . I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”
* * *
ANN DUNHAM WAS THE ONLY CHILD OF A DEPRESSION-ERA COUPLE originally from Witchita, Kansas. Her father, a lifelong wanderer perpetually unhappy in his paid occupation of selling furniture, was an unceasingly restless and curious soul, consistently moving his family throughout Ann’s childhood—from Kansas to Berkeley, California; then back to Kansas; then through some small Texas towns; then to Seattle for Ann’s high school years. “It was this desire of his to obliterate the past,” Obama wrote, “his confidence in the possibility of making the world from whole cloth that proved to be his most lasting patrimony.” After Ann graduated from high school, her father accepted a job in Hawaii and took his family to their final destination far in the Pacific, the city of Honolulu. There, Ann enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. During all these childhood moves, and especially through middle school and high school, Obama’s mother sought comfort in the same place: books. She loved to read, a love that she would pass along to her only son. Academically precocious, Ann would sit quietly and immerse herself in studies of foreign cultures and deep works of philosophy. She was so gifted academically that, while still in high school, she was offered early admission to the University of Chicago, but her father forbade her to attend because he felt she was too young to be on her own. “She was extremely brilliant. She read a lot, a very great deal at a very young age,” Madelyn Dunham recalled. “She had very advanced ideas. . . . She was into all of these heavy philosophers by the time she was sixteen.”
By spending so much time alone with books, Ann could be socially awkward and innocent about the world’s less altruistic ways. She carried those qualities well into adulthood. “I remember one time when we went out to a play or concert or something,” Obama’s sister Maya recalled. “And right across the street was a TGIF [restaurant] and we decided to slip in and get some drinks. And the [waitress] asks what we want and so Mom looks at the menu and she says, ‘I think I’d like a lemonade.’ And the waitress says, ‘Would you like that virgin?’ And my mother looks and says, ‘Uh, no, I’d like a little sugar in that.’” Maya laughed at this memory. “It’s so funny because here’s this woman who traveled around the world and yet was not so worldly,” she added. “I mean, it was so sweet.” Obama wrote that “this running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems almost unimaginable,” was the most striking quality of his family.
Ann Dunham was sweet and kind-hearted, yes. But perhaps more than anything, she was a dreamer, an idealist who refused to see the flaws in humankind even as they were strewn before her. She shared a wildly romantic streak with her father, another trait that Ann undoubtedly handed down to her son. “Her feet never touched the earth,” the no-nonsense Madelyn Dunham said, in such a way that made it seem as if she had spent much time trying, and failing, to pull her daughter back to the ground. Ann had her own mind. Her intense immersion in the works of brilliant thinkers and her own intellectualism shaped her into a nonconformist. Though Obama described his grandparents as “vaguely liberal,” his mother’s political beliefs were precise. She was a “secular humanist” and an avowed New Deal, Peace Corps–loving liberal. In choosing the study of cultural anthropology and marrying an African student, she showed that she had a great attraction to other cultures, and not just to study them but to live among them. Maya’s doll collections as a child reflected Ann’s United Nations view of the world. It contained representations of various races and nationalities—a black doll, a Chinese doll with braided hair, even an Eskimo doll. “It wasn’t at all politically correct,” Maya said, again with a laugh.
When I first inquired about his mother, Obama slipped into a softer and more somber voice. He seemed to choose his words even more carefully than when talking about an important policy position that could have significant repercussions on his career or the national debate. Obama said his mother’s extreme idealism—her continued ability to see the good in people, even when they failed to live up to her lofty ideals—was the quality that he most admired. It is also the central message that he imparts in his political speeches—that all of us are bound together as one, and if we are to prosper as a country and, indeed, as a species, that we must focus on the good we see in others. In fact, he would invoke similar language in his presidential announcement speech. “With her friends, with colleagues at work, even with her ex-husbands, she was always very generous with her estimation of people and her willingness to see the best side of them,” Obama said of his mother. “It is a value that I care deeply about because I saw not only was it how she operated, but I also saw the good effect it had on other people.”
Ann had a penchant for surprising her parents about major life choices that often deviated from societal norms. “She was not exactly conforming from the time she was born,” Madelyn said. “You know, most children are stubborn. Or at least the ones in my family are. . . . I mean, you adjust to a child as she grows, and she was sometimes startling.” When I asked exactly how she was startling, Madelyn did not hesitate: “She married Barry’s father.”
Ann Dunham met a Kenyan foreign exchange student named Barack Hussein Obama in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii. They fell in love, he just twenty-three and she just eighteen. Sometime in late 1960, the two slipped off alone to the island of Maui and apparently married. Obama later confessed that he never searched for the government documents on the marriage, although Madelyn insisted they were legally married. On August 4, 1961, Ann gave birth to Barack Hussein Obama Jr.
Obama’s father had been living in a nondescript concrete dormitory building just inside the campus while he and Ann dated. (“I assume that’s where my brother was conceived,” Maya said with a chuckle, as we both looked up at the dorm building through a brilliant Hawaiian sun.) After the marriage and his son’s birth, Obama’s father moved his new family into a small, one-story white house situated not far down a hilly, narrow road from the university and across from a small park. When Obama was two years old, his father won a scholarship to study at Harvard but did not have the money to take his family with him. He accepted the scholarship and never returned to the family, leaving toddler Barack in Hawaii in his mother’s care.
In his portrayal, Obama initially offers a romanticized view of his parents’ courtship and marriage, a story of love and understanding that was recounted to him again and again by his mother and her father, who have both since died. He wrote that his grandparents, after initial wariness, accepted the union quite naturally and that his grandfather, who considered himself extremely enlightened and something of a Bohemian, viewed the interracial relationship with a sense of pride. In 1960, interracial marriage in the United States was rare, especially between blacks and whites. In fact, more than half the states still considered miscegenation a felony, even if those laws were rarely enforced. The civil rights movement was in its embryonic stages. When Obama was in his early twenties, his mother would reveal to him that her parents were livid about the marriage.
Obama’s grandfather was more accepting of the union, but Madelyn said she was not pleased by it and gave me the impression that she let her disenchantment be known at the time. Like nearly all boys, Obama idolized his father, or at least the image of his father that was presented to him—brilliant, powerful, confident, successful, moral. But Madelyn viewed her daughter’s young African husband with a healthy amount of skepticism. In contrast to the dreamer personalities of her daughter and husband (and grandson), Madelyn is a reliable purveyor of skepticism. She might even fall on the outer fringes of cynical. Her advanced age at the time of our interview could have accentuated this skeptical nature. But Obama said that his grandmother was often the reality check to the many pie-in-the-sky tales he would hear as a youngster, especially those about his exceptional African father. Madelyn also rarely feared that her words might offend the listener.
Madelyn did appear to hold back some in our interview, but it was easy to gather that she had great concerns about the cultural differences between Ann and her young husband. Her many life travels notwithstanding, Madelyn maintained a sense of midwestern provincialism. She said she was suspicious of some of the tales that Obama’s father would put forward to his in-laws. “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me,” Madelyn said. When I suggested that Obama’s father, in addition to storytelling skills, had a great deal of charm—that his own father was a medicine man in a Kenyan tribe—she raised her eyebrows and nodded to herself. “He was . . . ,” she said with a long pause, “strange.” She lingered on the a to emphasize “straaaaaange.” She then continued: “He wasn’t that handsome in a way, exceptionally dark-skinned, but he had a voice like black velvet . . . with a British accent. And he used it effectively.”
“And,” she added a bit hesitantly, “he was extremely brilliant.”
Obama’s father was the first African exchange student at the University of Hawaii. After studying in London, he arrived in the United States in 1959 in “the first large wave of Africans to be sent forth to master Western technology and bring it back to forge a new, modern Africa,” Obama wrote in his memoir. Obama’s father was the son of Hussein Onyango Obama, a prominent elder and farmer in Kenya’s Luo tribe. As a boy, Barack Sr. herded goats on the family farm near a poor village called Kolego in the province of Nyanza near Kenya’s Lake Victoria. He stood out academically in a local school established by the British colonizers and won a scholarship to attend school in Nairobi before being sponsored for study in the United States at the University of Hawaii. “He studied econometrics, worked with unsurpassed concentration, and graduated in three years at the top of his class,” Obama wrote proudly of his father. But when he came to America, his father left a pregnant wife and child back in Kenya. When he returned to Africa, he took another American woman with him, eventually marrying her and having two additional children.
Although he clearly had a gifted mind and an imperious presence that immediately captured attention, Obama’s father had a raft of personal issues, not the least being alcohol indulgence, that prohibited him from reaching his full potential once he returned to his native country. An atheist with an analytical mind, he worked for a petroleum company, and for a time he was a chief economist for the Kenyan government. But he maneuvered poorly in the thicket of Kenyan tribal politics; his influence waned and his finances fell apart. “What my father became was a victim of the clash between the Kenyan and Luo cultures and the Western culture and the expectations that were on him,” Auma Obama told me. “As the head of a family of Luo, he felt a responsibility to take care of everyone, all these many relatives, and that was just impossible.”
In a 2006 speech in Nairobi, Obama said that his father’s life “ended up being filled with disappointments. His ideas about how Kenya should progress often put him at odds with the politics of tribe and patronage, and because he spoke his mind, sometimes to a fault, he ended up being fired from his job and prevented from finding work in the country for many, many years.” Barack Sr.’s relations with women seemed to be in a consistent state of disarray—by most counts, he fathered nine children by four wives. Before coming to the United States, he had been married in a tribal ceremony in Kenya, and he told Ann he had divorced that wife. She later learned to her discontent that there had been no official divorce. “Because he never fully reconciled the traditions of his village with more modern conceptions of family—because he related to women as his father had, expecting them to obey him no matter what he did—his family life was unstable, and his children never knew him well,” Obama said of his father. After leaving Hawaii, his relationship with his American wife was less than sterling. “A lot of grandiose plans, a lot of promises that never worked out,” Madelyn said with a sigh. Ann “subsequently divorced him.”