Secrets of Obama family unlocked

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The race is on to define the gifted but little-known senator for Illinois and The Sunday Times can reveal that his heritage is far more diverse and astonishing than anything American voters have heard so far.

Obama, 45, has two half- sisters, one living in Britain, and five surviving half-brothers, the eldest of whom converted to Islam, and whose stories span the globe.

Nobody was more surprised to hear that Obama had reportedly been educated in a madrasah than Julia Suryakusuma, a close friend of his mother until her death from ovarian cancer in 1995.

Suryakusuma, 53, one of Indonesia’s most outspoken feminist writers, has fearlessly taken on extremist Muslim clerics in print. Last week she described Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, “as a liberal and a humanist”, who learnt to speak fluent Indonesian and adored the culture.

“She was interested in religions but didn’t follow one. She was a free-thinker,” Suryakusuma said. “She was a pioneer and when she came to Indonesia she was ensnared and enchanted.”

[...]

Dunham was from Wichita, Kansas, but her parents moved to Hawaii in search of a better life. According to Obama, a distant ancestor was a “full-blooded Cherokee”.

Dunham’s first marriage was to a Kenyan student, also called Barack Obama, but he left the family to study at Harvard and returned to Africa.

She went on to marry Lolo Soetoro, another foreign student, and moved to his native Indonesia with six-year-old Barack in 1967, after the new dictator Suharto summoned the country’s citizens home.

Soetoro became a government relations consultant with a big US oil company. “He changed when he came back to Indonesia,” Suryakusuma recalled. “Men can be a certain way when they are in the West and when they come back they are sucked into their own culture.”

[...]

At 10, Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his grandparents and attended an elite private school. His mother went back to Indonesia with Obama’s half-sister Maya, now a professor at the University of Hawaii, and became an expert on the “feminine crafts”, such as weaving and basket-making, practised by the women of Java.

Suryakusuma recalled that Dunham called her son “Berry” — Barry with an Indonesian lilt. “We were both mothers and we talked about how difficult it was for a mother to separate herself and send her child away, but she was really concerned about Barry’s education.”

[...]

Obama’s multi-hued heritage has put a distance between him and the African-American community, which has been reluctant to claim him as a “brother”.

America’s white community, in contrast, has embraced Obama as a hopeful affirmation that the fabled melting pot can transcend race.

[...]

The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet was the first to spot in 2004, when Obama burst on the national stage at the Democratic party convention, that his memoir, Dreams from My Father, contained “composite” characters and changed names.

“Except for public figures and his family, it is impossible to know who is real and who is not,” she pointed out.

Obama admitted as much in his introduction, saying he had altered characters “for the sake of their privacy”. As with the revelation that he took cocaine in his youth, he appears to have been candid about potential areas of controversy.

Obama’s African family is particularly complicated. By his own account, his father never really left Kezia, his first wife, in Kenya. She bore Obama Sr two children, Roy and Auma, who now works in social services in Berkshire.

They were separated, Obama’s mother claimed, but “it was a village wedding and there was no document that could suggest a divorce”.

His own father and mother’s wedding in Hawaii may not have been properly documented either. “How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore,” Obama writes in his memoir.

After his father left Ann and two-year-old Barack to study at Harvard, he went to Africa with another American woman, Ruth, who became his third wife. She bore him two sons in Kenya, one of whom died in a motorcycle accident, but Obama Sr continued to see Kezia.

“Traditionally, she was still his wife,” a relative explained. Kezia went on to bear two more sons, Abo and Bernard. Although their paternity is disputed by some relatives, Obama Sr regarded them as his own. Later in life, he fathered another son, George, by a young Kenyan woman.

After his parents split up, Obama saw his father only once before learning that he had died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982.

Obama’s eldest brother Roy moved to America and went on to convert to Islam.

Obama, in contrast, became a committed Christian while he was working as a community activist in Chicago.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20...69704_2,00.html