Michela Wrong

Lucky miss

In Dreams From My Father, his exploration of race and roots, Barack Obama recalled the tales heard in childhood about the man who gave him his name.

In Dreams From My Father, his exploration of race and roots, Barack Obama recalled the tales heard in childhood about the man who gave him his name. His father, they said, was a brilliant economist who grew up herding goats in western Kenya, then won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he fell in love with a white woman. ‘There was only one problem: my father was missing. Nothing my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact.’

My boy, I thought on finishing this book, you have no idea how lucky you were. Sociologists may worry about the impact absent fathers are having on a generation of young black men robbed of male role models. But there are worse things in life than being abandoned by your father. Having him stick around, for example, when he is the kind of man depicted in these pages.

Barack Obama Sr was certainly charming, dashing, clever and sexy. He was also, according to Sally Jacobs, a bar-room bore, a man with a huge chip on his shoulder, an enthusiastic wife-beater, an official ready to pocket the odd bribe, and a man whose goatish interest in the opposite sex was only matched by his addiction to Johnnie Walker: he was nicknamed ‘Double-Double’ in tribute to the way he ordered scotch. The US president met Dad only once — at the age of ten — and one shudders to think how he might have turned out had the paternal hand rested any heavier on the boy’s shoulders.

He was a Luo, a member of the Nilotic ethnic group that skirts Lake Victoria. The son of a curmudgeonly colonial cook, he was spoilt at home and proved a brilliant but rebellious pupil.

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