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Barack Hussein Obama (1936–1982) was a Kenyan senior governmental economist, and father of former Illinois Senator and United States President-elect Barack Obama. He is a central subject in his son's memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Biography

Early years

Obama Sr. was born on the shores of Lake Victoria just outside Kendu Bay, Kenya and raised in Alego. He was the son of Hussein Onyango Obama (c. 1895-1979, buried at Alego) by his second wife, Akumu Habiba. His family are members of the Luo ethnic group. Obama Sr. was raised as a Muslim, but later became an atheist. Obama Sr. was born to Onyango (buried at Kendu Bay, Kenya) and his wife Nyaoke in one of their Luo villages. Before working as a cook for missionaries in Nairobi, Onyango had travelled widely, enlisting with the name Onyango Obama in the British colonial forces during World War I and visiting Europe, India, and Zanzibar, where he converted from Christianity to Islam. Onyango had at least three wives; Barack Obama Sr. was the son of Akuma/Akumu, the second wife. However, he was raised by Onyango's third wife, Sarah, after Akuma/Akumu left her family and separated from her husband in 1945. Obama Sr. grew up in Nyang’oma Kogelo, and was married at the age of eighteen in a tribal ceremony to Kezia, with whom he had four children.

Education

From 1950 to 1953, Obama Sr. studied at Maseno National School, an exclusive Christian boarding school that is run by the Anglican Church of Kenya. The head teacher, B.L. Bowers, described Obama Sr. in his records as "very keen, steady, trustworthy and friendly. Concentrates, reliable and out-going."

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-elect 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 already turned away from Islam and become an atheist by the time he moved to the United States. Barack Obama Sr.'s daughter Auma has commented that her father "was never a Muslim although he was born into a Muslim family with a Muslim name."

On 21 February 1961, Obama Sr. married fellow student Ann Dunham in Maui, Hawaii. Obama Sr.'s and Dunham's son, Barack Obama II, was born on August 4, 1961. Dunham left school to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962, 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 the 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. He visited his son only once, in 1971, when Barack was 10 years old. "I consider myself a serial polygamist," Obama Sr. once told a friend. "That is, one wife at a time." By most accounts Senior had eight children with four women.

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 two children with him before they divorced.

Return to Kenya

On his return to Kenya, Obama Sr. was hired by an oil company and then served as an economist in the Ministry of Transport, and later became senior economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance. In 1965 Obama Sr. wrote a paper titled "Problems Facing Our Socialism," published 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. As President-elect Barack Obama describes in his memoir, his father's conflict with President Kenyatta destroyed his career.

Obama Sr.'s life then took a tailspin 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 Nation. Obama Sr. lost both legs in an automobile collision, and subsequently lost his job. He died in 1982, at the age of 46, in a car crash in Nairobi.

Obama Sr. is buried in Alego, at the village of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya.

Bibliography

Otieno jarieko. By Barack H Obama; Kenya. Education Dept. Adult Literacy Section.; Kampala : East African Literature Bureau, 1959-

For more information regarding western-educated Kenyans, see: Western-Educated Elites in Kenya, 1900-1963: The African American Factor by Jim C. Harper

See also

• Family of Barack Obama

References

1. Ombuor, Joe (2008-11-04). "Obama's father and the origin of Muslim name". The Standard. Retrieved 2008-11-13. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
2. ^ Ancestry of Barack Obama Cite error: The named reference "genealogy" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
3. Scott Fornek (9 September 2007). "The Obama Family Tree". The Chicago Sun Times. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |~url= ignored (help)
4. Rob Crilly (22 August 2008). "Life is Good in My Nairobi Slum, Says Barack Obama's Younger Brother". The Times. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
5. Mike Pflanz (21 August 2008). "Barack Obama is My Inspiration, Says Lost Brother". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
6. Michael Sheridan (27 July 2008). "Barack Obama's Brother Pushes Chinese Imports on US". The Times Online. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
7. Ombuor, Joe (2008-11-04). "Obama's father and the origin of Muslim name". The Standard. Retrieved 2008-11-13. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
8. ^ Obama, Barack. "My Spiritual Journey". TIME. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
9. http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html
10. Oywa, John (2008-11-04). "Tracing Obama Snr's steps as a student at Maseno School". The Standard. Retrieved 2008-11-08. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= and |date= (help)
11. ^ Michael Dobbs (30 March 2008). "Obama Overstated Kennedy's Role in Helping His Father". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
12. ^ Rice, Xan (6 June 2008). "'Barack's Voice was Just Like His Father's — I Thought He had Come Back from the Dead'". The Guardian. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
13. ^ Ripley, Amanda (2008-04-09). "The Story of Barack Obama's Mother". Time. Retrieved 2007-04-09. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
14. ^ Maraniss, David (2008-08-22). "Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2008-10-27. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
15. ^ Martin, Jonathan. Obama's mother known here as "uncommon", Seattle Times (2008-04-08).
16. Montgomery, Rick. “Barack Obama’s mother more than just a Kansas girl”, The Lawrence Journal-World (2008-06-01).
17. On His Own, Newsweek, 23 August, 2008
18. Harvard University (1986). Harvard University 350th Anniversary Alumni Directory. Vol. vol. I (seventeenth edition ed.). Cambridge, MA: President and Fellows of Harvard College. p. p. 904. OCLC 17963336. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); |page= has extra text (help); |volume= has extra text (help)
19. Ochieng, Philip (1 November 2004). "From Home Squared to the US Senate". The East African. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
20. Scott Fornek (9 September 2007). "Barack Obama Sr.: Wrestling with . . . a Ghost". The Chicago Sun Times. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
21. Obama, Barak H. (1965). "Problems Facing Our Socialism" (.PDF). East Africa Journal: pp. 26-33. Retrieved 2008-09-26. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

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• Living people
• 1982 deaths
• Former Muslims
• People from Nairobi
• Harvard University alumni
• Kenyan atheists
• Kenyan economists
• Kenyan expatriates in the United States
• Luo Kenyans
• Muslim atheists
• Obama family
• Road accident deaths in Kenya
• University of Hawaii alumni