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Barack Obama, Sr.
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Barack Hussein Obama (1936 - 24 November 1982) was a Kenyan senior governmental economist, and father of US President Barack Obama. He is a central subject in his son's memoir, Dreams from My Father.
ck Obama Sr. 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, and raised in the village of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Nyanza Province.
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Barack Hussein Obama (1936 - 24 November 1982) was a Kenyan senior governmental economist, and father of US President Barack Obama. He is a central subject in his son's memoir, Dreams from My Father.
Biography
Early years
Barack Obama Sr. 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, and raised in the village of Nyang’oma Kogelo, Siaya District, Nyanza Province. His family are members of the Luo ethnic group. He was the son of Onyango Obama (c. 1895-1979) who had at least three wives; Barack Obama Sr. was the son of Akumu Habiba, the second wife. However, he was raised by Onyango's third wife, Sarah, 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 was an atheist before he came to the United States. Obama Sr. was married in 1954 at the age of eighteen, in a tribal ceremony to Kezia, with whom he had four children.
Education and fatherhood
While still living near Kendu Bay, Obama Sr. went to Gendia Primary School and shifted to Ng’iya Intermediate School once his family relocated 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. 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 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 [Sr.] 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 turned away from 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 left school 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 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.
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 his son describes in his memoir, Obama Sr.'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 Daily 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 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.
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
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