Early Life of Barack Obama

Dr. Keshab Chandra Mandal

E-Mail: mandalkeshab2013@gmail.com

The forty fourth President of world’s most powerful country, the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now called Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Mr. Barack Obama Senior was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province of Kenya. He was born near Lake Victoria in a village called Alego. He was a member of such an ethnic group many of whom had played a key role in the country's struggle for independence in the 1950s. Barack Obama Sr. as a young man tended his father’s goats and attended the local mission school that was set up by the British. He was very meritorious in his studies during school days. “While his father was in a dentntion camp, Barack Sr. was away at school, some 50 miles south of his father’s home. He has taken a district exam and was admitted to a mission school that admitted only a small number of the brightest Africans. The teachers of the school, impressed by his intelligence, overlooked some of his pranks” (Source: Joann F. Price, Barack Obama- A Biography, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, London, p. 11).  Barrack Obama Sr. was determined to pursue higher studies. With the help of two American women who were teaching in Nairobi, he undertook a correspondence course and sat for examination at the American embassy. 

He worked diligently and earned a certificate. Obama Sr. then received a scholarship from the University of Hawaii. In 1959 Obama Sr. at the age of 23 left Nairobi for attending in the University. He became the first African student at the University of Hawaii where he studied econometrics. While studying in the university he was attending Russian language class.  

Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was originally from Kansas, where some of her ancestors had been anti-slavery activists in the 1800s. She was born and brought up in Wichita, Kansas and was of English and Irish descent. Ann was always cheerful and easy-tempered. She was good at her studies and often had her head in a book and sometimes she would wander off on a walk. When Madelyn came home from work, she often found Ann alone in the front yard, lying in the grass or on the swing, off in some world of her (Source: Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2004, p. 19). Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham's father, Stanley, enlisted in the army and marched across Europe in Patton's army. After the war, the family of Stanley lived in California, Kansas, and Texas before relocating to Seattle where Ann became a graduate from high school. However, she always dreamed of studying at the University of Chicago, but her father was afraid of her as she was too young to live alone. Hence, ultimately in 1959 Ann along with her family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii where they bought a house through the Federal Housing Program and Ann enrolled at the University of Hawaii. Her father Stanley took up a job at a furniture store and her mother, Madelyn, began working at a local bank. 

While studying at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, Sr. Obama met fellow student, Ann Dunham, his would-be mistress in 1960 in a Russian language class. They became close and made friendship. Obama Sr. was attracted by Dunham’s beauty and talent. On the other hand, Dunham was charmed at his merit and wisdom. Their friendship went a step further and a time came when they understood that it would be impossible to leave one another. They decided to tie the knot. Hence, the couple married on February 2, 1961. Barack was born just six months later on 4 August, the same year. He was named after his father and grandfather and was fondly called Barry. 

Unfortunately, the marriage between Obama's parents was a short-lived one, however. In the early 1960s, interracial relationships were not much accepted and praised and the couple had to face much difficulty and social ostracism because it was still quite rare in many parts of America, and even technically illegal in some states. The Dunhams with liberal mind were accepting of Barack Sr., but Sr. Obama’s family in Kenya had a harder time with the idea of his marrying a white American woman. They did not approve the marriage and rather was against the relationship. 

It seemed that God also did not want their relationship to continue. The young couple with a little son had to be separated two years later when Obama Sr. went to Harvard University in 1963 to earn a Ph.D. in Economics on scholarship. Though the scholarship money was sufficient to manage his life, but it was not sufficient to support Ann and his son. Hence, the separation was inevitable and this separation was unbearable to the young Dunham and the other familial situation was not favorable to sustain the holy relationship of husband and wife, and ultimately they were divorced in 1964. Obama Sr. remarried after returning to Kenya in 1965. Child Obama got little love and care from his scholar father. Even he did not have his father’s company and affection. However, the two Baracks met when Sr. Barack came to pay a short visit to Hawaii in 1971 after their divorce, when Obama was only ten, though they did write occasionally. He died in an automobile accident in 1982. Barack was raised with the help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank. 

After her divorce Dunham felt lonely. When Barry was four, his mother met Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesin student at the University of Hawaii. They dated for two years before got married. During the courtship years Lolo used to visit Ann’s house frequently and he was accepted by the Dunhams. Ann even told her young son that they are going to be weded and might move to Jakarta, of which little Barry remained indifferent due to his infancy. Lolo Soetoro was an East–West Center student from Indonesia. When Suharto, the military leader in Soetoro's home country, came to power in 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were recalled, and the family moved to the Menteng neighborhood of Jakarta. In Indonesia Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro Ng was born. When Obama was six they moved there with his mother and Lolo to Indonesia. They lived in Jakarta where Lolo started working as a geologist and Barack’s mother Ann took up a job of a teacher of Enlgish to the Indonesian businessmen at the American embassy as part of the U.S. foreign aid package to developing countries. Later Lolo obtained a job in a government relations office of an American oil company with the help of his well-connected brother-in-law. From ages six to ten, Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, including Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School. In less than two years Obama learnt the language, customs and legends of Indonesia. Though he lived there for quite a few years in his childhood, he has still many friends there. Because of his childhood background, still today Obama is quite popular in Indonesia. Several incidents in Indonesia left Dunham afraid for her son's safety and education. So, Barack was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. His mother and sister later joined them. 

Barack Obama’s mother was very much conscious of her son’s education. She realized that the Indonesian education will not help her son much. Above all, she did not have enough money to send him to the International school, where most of the foreign children were educated. With a view to supplementing his Indonesian education Ann provided him with lessons from a correspondence course. It was very tough for young Obama. It was five days week starting from four o’clock in the morning. Ann would make Barack his breakfast and give him English lessons for three hours before he left for school and she left for work. During this special session, the mother taught her little son about his heritage and culture. She even brought him books on civil rights movements, recordings of Mahali Jackson, and the speeches of Martin Luther King.

But the life in Indonesia started to become worse due to political situation. His mother was anxious about his future. The life there was difficult and full of problems. So Ann decided to send her dear Barry to her parents. In 1971, at the age of ten, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn (Obama called him ‘Gramps’) and Stanley Armour Dunham (Obama  called his grandfather as ‘Toots’), and attended the prestigious Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from the fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979. In the school Barack was one of just a handful of black students. Obama still recalls how conflicted he felt there. "In no other country on earth is my story even possible," he once commented. Rik Smith, a black student two years senior to Barack, described it for the Chicago Tribune in March, 2012, “Punahou was an amazing school. But it could be a lonely place. Those of us who were black did feel isolated – there’s no question about that.” (Source: Kristen Scharnberg and Kim Barker, “The Not-So-Simple Story of Barack Obama’s Youth,” Chicago Online Tribune Online Edition, March 25, 2007, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-070323obama-youth-story.1.4006113.story).

  However, Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, remaining there until 1977 when she went back to Indonesia to work as an anthropological field worker. She finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one year, before dying of ovarian cancer. Obama has a mixed heritage and he faced peculiar difficulties in his teen years. Outside the house, he was considered African American, but the only family he knew was his white one at home. For a time, he loafed and let his grades slip; instead of studying, he spent hours on the basketball court with his friends, and has admited that there was a time when he experimented with drugs, namely marijuana and cocaine. "I was affected by the problems that I think a lot of young African American teens have," he reflected in an interview with Kenneth Meeks for Black Enterprise. "They feel that they need to rebel against society as a way of proving their blackness. And often, this results in self-destructive behavior." He confesses that he used to take drugs during his teenage years to push questions of who he was out of his mind. At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama identified his high-school drug use as a great moral failure.

His experience at home and outside was not rosy always rather he was a prey of familial and societal degoragory outlook towards the black. He was prey to apartheid which was much prevalent in South Africa. He had to face, like millions of blacks, racial barriers and whispering and taunting from his white counterparts. But he inherited an open and liberal attitude from his family particularly from his mother and grandparents. Of his early childhood, Obama recalls, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind." He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. Reflecting later on his formative years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."