Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (1936 − 24 November 1982) was a Kenyan senior governmental economist, and the father of the President of the United States, Barack Obama. He is a central subject in his son's memoir, Dreams from My Father .
Early years
Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kanyadhiang village, Rachuonyo District on the shores of Lake Victoria just outside Kendu Bay, Kenya, at the time a colony of the British Empire. He was raised in the village of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Nyanza Province. His family are members of the Luo ethnic group.
He was a son of Onyango Obama (c. 1895-1979), who had at least three wives. Barack Obama Sr. was the son of Habiba Akumu Nyanjango of Karabondi, Kenya, the second wife. However, he was raised by Onyango's third wife, Sarah Ogwel of Kogelo, after Akumu left her family and separated from her husband in 1945. Before working as a cook for missionaries in Nairobi, Onyango had travelled widely, enlisting in the British colonial forces and visiting Europe, India, and Zanzibar, where he converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam and took the name Hussein Onyango Obama. Hussein Onyango was jailed by the British for two years in 1949 due to his involvement in the Kenyan independence movement. According to Sarah Onyango Obama, Onyango was subjected to brutal torture.
Although Obama Sr. was born into a Muslim family, he rejected it as a young man.
Education and fatherhood
While still living near Kendu Bay, Obama Sr. attended Gendia Primary School and transfered to Ng’iya Intermediate School once his family moved to Siaya District. From 1950 to 1953, he studied at Maseno National School, an exclusive Christian boarding school in Maseno that is run by the Anglican Church of Kenya. ( Dreams from my Father , 2004 edition, p. 418). The head teacher, B.L. Bowers, described Obama Sr. in his records as "very keen, steady, trustworthy and friendly. Concentrates, reliable and out-going." In 1954, after attending the Maseno Mational School, Obama Sr. was married for the first time. At the age of eighteen, he and Kezia Aoko were married in a tribal ceremony. They had Malik and Auma during their marriage and while Obama Sr. was married to his third wife, he and Kezia allegedly had Abo and Bernard.
Obama Sr. received a scholarship in economics through a program organized by nationalist leader Tom Mboya. The program offered Western educational opportunities to outstanding Kenyan students. President Obama said of his father's scholarship, "The Kennedys decided: 'We're going to do an airlift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. ' " An article by Michael Dobbs in The Washington Post , however, states that the Kennedy family did not become associated with the educational airlift until 1960, a year after Obama Sr. was studying in the United States. Initial financial supporters of the program included Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson, and Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, a literacy advocate who provided most of the financial support for Obama Sr.'s early years in the United States, according to the Tom Mboya archives at Stanford University.
At the age of 23, Obama Sr. enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, leaving behind a pregnant Kezia and their infant son. He had abandoned Islam and become an atheist by the time he moved to the United States. On 2 February 1961, Obama Sr. married fellow student Ann Dunham in Maui, Hawaii, though she would not find out that her new husband was already married until much later. Obama Sr.'s and Dunham's son, Barack Obama II, was born on August 4, 1961. Dunham quit her studies to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962 (and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa), leaving shortly thereafter to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate study at Harvard University in the fall. Later that summer, Dunham and year-old baby Barack stopped to visit her friends in Mercer Island, Washington, the Seattle suburb where she had grown up, before joining Obama Sr. in Cambridge. However, mother and son soon returned to Seattle, where she enrolled at the University of Washington. Dunham, missing her family, then moved back to Hawaii and filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964. Obama Sr. did not contest, and the divorce was granted on March 20, 1964. He visited his son only once, in 1971, when Barack was 10 years old.
While at Harvard, Obama Sr. met an American-born teacher named Ruth Nidesand. She followed him to Kenya when he returned there after he received a master's degree (AM) in economics from Harvard in 1965. Nidesand eventually became his third wife and had three boys with him, David, Mark and George. She divorced Obama Sr. amid allegations of domestic abuse. The first son David died in a motorcycle accident. The second son, Mark Obama Ndesandjo (Ndesandjo is Ruth Nidesand's second husband's surname), has written an semi-autobiographic novel. The hero in the novel, David, is patterned on himself and many of the episodes this David experiences are based on Mark's personal experiences. The novel's David remembers his father smelling of cheap pilsner and beating Davids' mother. The novel does not mention the character David being related to a future U.S. president.
Later years
On his return to his native Kenya in 1965, Obama Sr. was hired by an oil company and then served as an economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Transport and later became a senior economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance.
In 1959 a monograph written by him had been published by the Kenyan Department of Education, entitled Otieno jarieko. Kitabu mar ariyo. 2: Yore mabeyo mag puro puothe. (English: Otieno, the wise man. Book 2: Wise ways of farming. )
In 1965 Obama Sr. published a paper entitled "Problems Facing Our Socialism" in the East Africa Journal, harshly criticizing the blueprint for national planning, "African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya", which had been produced by Tom Mboya's Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. The article was signed " Barak H. Obama." As his son described it in his memoir, Obama Sr.'s conflict with President Kenyatta destroyed his career. ( Dreams from my Father , pp. 214-216.) The decline began after Tom Mboya's assassination in 1969. Obama Sr. was fired from his job by Jomo Kenyatta, was blacklisted in Kenya, and began to drink. He had a serious car accident, spent almost a year in the hospital, and by the time he visited his son in Hawaii in late 1971, he already had a bad leg. ( Dreams from My Father , pp. 64-71, 212-219). Obama Sr.'s life fell into drinking and poverty, from which he never recovered. His friend, Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng, has described Obama Sr.'s difficult personality and drinking problems in the Kenya newspaper The Daily Nation . Obama Sr. later lost both legs in another automobile collision, and subsequently lost his job. He died in 1982, at the age of 46, in a third car crash in Nairobi.
Barack Obama Sr. is buried in at the village of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya. His funeral was attended by ministers Robert Ouko, Oloo Aringo and other prominent political figures.
See also
- Family of Barack Obama
References
- ^ a b c d The Standard, November 14, 2008: Obama’s dad and his many loves
- ^ Sanders, Edmund (2008-07-17). "Obama not quite his Kenyan father's son". Los Angeles Times : p. A1. Archived from the original on 2008-07-17 . http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-obamadad17-2008jul17,0,6341121,full.story . Retrieved 2009-02-24 .
- ^ a b c Kimberly Powell (2008). "Ancestry of Barack Obama". About.com . http://genealogy.about.com/od/aframertrees/p/barack_obama.htm . Retrieved 2008-09-26 .
- ^ At least until December 11, 1963.
- ^ From December 12, 1963 (Kenyan independence; cf. The Constitution of Kenya , VI.87.1).
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