A black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas

A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother by Janny Scott 

The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family by Peter Firstbrook 

Reviewed by Dinesh Sharma 

Barack Obama's life history has generated a lot of interest. Many books have been written about the first African American president of the United States, given the historic nature of his election victory and the enthusiasm he has generated around the

world, yet we have only scratched the surface. 


Though Obama's own two books openly discuss his biological, cultural and historical roots, we are just beginning to learn in-depth about the two guiding images of his life: his anthropologist mother and economist father. Two new biographies have recently been published about Obama's parents. Thus, we know a lot more about "a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya" who gave birth to the 44th US president in Hawaii.

We may now be able to answer the question, "What is it about his genealogy, parenting and childhood that predisposed him to achieve the goal that has eluded so many before him?"

First, we know that his mother was a strong-headed woman, a "globalist" before there was such a thing as globalization or buzz-words like e-commerce, dot-com and technology hubs. Driven by her own needs and personality, she was the girl who "ran away from home", living the life of an expat on the archipelago of Indonesia. The island of Java became her intellectual, professional and spiritual home.Janny Scott's biography, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, describes the life of Ann Dunham with special attention to her career in Indonesia. She was not simply the caricature of the white woman from Kansas; she was much more than that.

While Scott is not focused on figuring out how Ann as a mother shaped Obama's character, she does present an extensive amount of interview data that helps to confirm the developmental and psychological hypothesis that the "naively idealistic" views of his mother may have formed the core of Obama's early self and emerging mind.

"It was a sense that beneath our surface differences, we're all the same and that there's more good than bad in each of us. And that you know, we can reach across the void and touch each other and believe in each other and work together ... That's precisely the naivete and idealism that was part of her, and that's I suppose the naive idealism in me," Obama told Scott candidly.

We can now say with greater certainty that the world view inherited from his mother is indeed the source of Obama's soaring rhetoric and progressive values. The Dunham ohana, Hawaiian for extended family, gave Obama the access to the progressive soul of America and the optimism that runs through the American heartland; the same Midwestern values may have also served as a homing device that led Obama to find his political footing in Chicago.

As I wrote more than a year ago while reviewing Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia:

After reviewing Dunham's book and speaking with her circle of friends and colleagues, it dawned on me that the role of the peacemaker, with a heightened ability to deploy soft power as a political tool, is not just an abstract idea or a strategy for President Obama. It seems to be neither a clever gimmick nor a hopefully naive, idealistic and doomed-to-fail policy designed by White House analysts.

This runs deeper; it is in his DNA. Part and parcel of an inheritance that harkens back to his mother's early socialization, the role of the peacemaker is a product of a transmuted, intergenerational dream of changing the world one village at a time. His mother's unfinished dreams, albeit tenuously, still bind the elements of Obama's foreign and domestic policies with his political identity. She had a dream Asia Times Online, January 16, 2010.)

However, a gifted politician like Obama is not simply the sum of his early education and socialization. Contradictions abound, anti-war candidates rarely become anti-war presidents. Obama is the Noble Peace Prize winner who scaled up the war in Afghanistan, hunted al-Qaeda with a calculated precision, and ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Obama's idealistic theories of the world have been tested and modified with an evidence-based approach; he has learned the hard way that the idealism of a candidate has to be tempered with the cold facts of governing from the center.

In a way, Obama has lived with contradictions all his life as he disclosed in his book, Dreams from My Father. His own father was a bundle of contradictions, who abandoned him at the young age of two years; a gifted and driven individual Obama Sr could not navigate the political environment in Kenya and was made to pay for it dearly; he had larger than life dreams but could not look after his children. Thus, the son lived with an idealized image of his father till he discovered the truth about him after the father's tragic death.Now, there is a new biography,The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family, which traces the Obama roots back to 1250 when the Luo tribe of mostly of nomadic hunters and gatherers left Sudan; "Over the centuries they migrated across 1,000 km of desert, swamp and jungle before eventually settling around the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya."

Barack Obama's life history reflects two important migratory journeys: one from the Midwest to West and the Pacific in the expansion of the US; and the other lesser known African migration from the "Luo cradleland" in Sudan to Kisumu and Kendo Bay, Kenya. From his mother's side, Obama is a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh and Swiss lineage, from his father's side he is a product of his African lineage, not a descendant of African-American slaves.

In Luoland, wat en wat or "kinship is kinship", and Obama is treated like a demigod by his tribesmen, reveals Peter Firstbrook, the biographer who has traveled throughout Africa as a documentary filmmaker.

The Kikuyu, the Luhya and the Luo, the largest tribes in Kenya, respectively, inherited the institutions of political power after independence in 1963. The election of Raila Odinga, a Luo politician, to the post of prime minister in February 2008 gave the tribe much to celebrate about heading into the November 2008 election of Barack Obama.

The Luo felt somewhat vindicated by the weight of history as their party came into power after much political violence with the Kikuyu over electoral corruption. Firstbrook claims that the parallel elections of Odinga and Obama seemed to uplift the Luoland to another stratosphere altogether.

Historically, the Luo have had very strict "rites of passages" that separate the boys from girls and the boys from men. All boys and girls must go through these rituals to enter adulthood, including circumcision and the smashing of the six lower teeth among boys. Due to survival pressures, dating back thousands of years, boys were forced and expected to survive on their own in the wilderness, while girls attended to domestic functions.

While some of these rituals are now a thing of the past due to modernization and urbanization, their ontogenetic legacy on the human life cycle still persists. For instance, the separation of boys and girls continues to be comparatively harsh, where in many tribal regions female genital mutilation and even witch-burning is still practiced.

As it is often the case in Africa, geography, climate and population pressures drive the history of migration. So it was with the Luo migration from Sudan to Uganda and Lake Victoria in Kenya. It is not clear what precisely drove these tribes to leave the Bahr-al-Ghazal in southern Sudan, but it took six to eight hundred years, more than 12 generations to survive the hostile and unknown territories to arrive at their final destination.

While chronicling the oral history, anthropological and archeological evidence on the Luo migration, Firstbrook states, "It was a journey which started with a local chief living in a mud hut overlooking the White Nile, and ended seven centuries later with the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, living in the White House."

Along the way, Firstbrook introduces the reader to several generations of the Obama patrilineage, the great-grandfather Opiyo Obama, the grandfather Hussien Onyango, and the father Barack Obama Sr, whom the author refers to as "Mr Double-Double" for his love of imported whisky.

The story moves from a genealogical study to a family history when Obama Sr enters the scene. While Firstbrook highlights Hussein Onyango's encounters with the British, the story picks up pace when Obama Sr's insatiable drive to go to America is fully explored. Firstbrook clarifies that Obama Sr was not part of the "Airlift to America" organized by Tom Mboya, even though some of his moral and financial support may have come from the same African-American donors as the well-known airlift.

Obama Sr was driven to complete his education and return to his native country. Thus, his influence on the raising of the president becomes distant and remote; the father and son communicated through long letters albeit rarely, a correspondence Firstbrook does not fully explore. We know that the absence of a father-figure in Obama's life was compensated by his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, his stepfather Lolo Soetoro, and other African-American role models that Obama sought.

The polygamous marriage and kinship patterns among the Luo also permitted Obama Sr to remain somewhat disengaged from the lives of his other children; as a result, the Obama children may have raised themselves by their bootstraps. Whether Barack Obama would have benefited from a live-in biological father is an issue at the heart of Obama's narrative; certainly as a fatherless boy Obama felt inspired to do great things to make up for his profound loss.

We know that Obama began to raise himself as "a black man in Hawaii" in part because of his father's idealized image passed onto him by his mother. "It's in the blood," his father had told him. "You have me to thank for your eyebrows ... But your brains, your character, you got from him," his mother often told him.

Thus, Obama was almost mystically driven to connect with the soul of Africa and with the land of his ancestors. Firstbrook writes perceptively, "Barack junior is a very different man from either his father or his grandfather, but certain family characteristics seem to flow from his African bloodline; intelligence, resourcefulness, motivation, and ambition can all be traced back several generations."

As Nobel laureate V S Naipaul has said, "In our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings." We may not fully understand it, but we all go back to our origins.

Despite the tremendous cultural variation in his biography, never before seen in the White House, Obama represents the American archetype of presidents who have endured early set-backs, loss and abandonment but managed to overcome all the odds.

Fatherless boys like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton (not to mention George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and others) in their aspirations to become the fathers of the nation give full proof to William Wordsworth's developmental dictum that "the child is indeed father of the man".

A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother by Janny Scott. Riverhead hardcover first edition (May 3, 2011). ISBN-10:1594487979. Price US$26.95, 384 pages.The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family by Peter Firstbrook. Crown (February 8, 2011). ISBN-10: 9780307591401. Price US$26.00, 352 pages. 

Dinesh Sharma is a regular contributor to Asia Times Online and author of Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President" (ABC-CLIO / Praeger, 2011).

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