The Journey Begins
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1 The Journey Begins arack Obama is like the country he is president of—a B diverse4 mix of races, cultures and religious influences5. The United States of America has not always found it easy to understand and live with its diverse culture. The same is true of Barack Obama. His journey to the White House was the journey of a young man trying to discover who he was, what his talents6 were and what he should do with his life. Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961. Although he was born on the island of Hawaii, his background links him to lands very far from the Pacific and very different from each other. His mother was from Kansas, a state in the U.S.A., and his father was from Kenya, a country in Africa. His mother’s name was Stanley Ann Dunham. Stanley is a strange name for a girl. Stanley’s father wanted a boy so when a baby girl was born, he gave her the name he had planned for the son he was expecting. Ann, as she liked to be called, was the only child of a couple from Wichita, Kansas—Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Lee Payne. Stanley and Madelyn had liberal7 ideas and a love of adventure. After they were married in 1940, they dreamed of traveling the world, but World War II had just begun and had made traveling difficult. Stanley joined the army, and the couple moved to an army base in Kansas called Fort Leavenworth, where Stanley trained to be a soldier before going to fight in Europe. Ann was born at Fort Leavenworth in November 1942. When the war ended in 1945, Stanley returned from Europe to his wife and daughter, but he was not sure where he wanted to live. Stanley moved his family first to California, then back to Kansas and then to 6 The Journey Begins Texas. In Texas, Stanley and Madelyn saw the racism8 that was normal in America at the time. Stanley now worked in a furniture store. The store only served African-American and Mexican customers after it was closed. The other employees told Stanley that white customers would not shop in the store if blacks and Mexicans were there. That worried Stanley, but there was nothing he could do to change the situation. Madelyn was also upset by the racism that she saw. At her job in a bank, Madelyn was criticized9 for being “too polite” to the bank’s black janitor10. Stanley and Madelyn believed that people’s characters were more important than the color of their skin, and they taught this belief to Ann. However, there was a very different way of thinking in Texas at the time. At the age of about eleven, this became clear to Ann when she invited a black friend to her home to play. This was fine with Ann’s parents, but not with other people in the neighborhood. When a group of children saw Ann playing with her black friend, they began to throw stones at the girls and call them bad names. Ann was afraid and went inside the house. Her black friend ran away. Ann’s father was shocked and angry. He complained to the parents of the children who had been throwing stones, and their reaction surprised him. Instead of saying sorry, they said that he should tell Ann that in Texas black and white children did not play together. Stanley, Madelyn and Ann were growing tired of Texas. They thought about going to a part of the country where people had more liberal ideas about race and religion. Not long after that, the family decided to move to Seattle, Washington. Stanley worked in another furniture store, Madelyn found a job in a bank and Ann began high school. Ann liked to learn. She loved to read about other cultures and to explore new ways of thinking. She would meet her friends in coffee shops where they would talk for hours about 7 The Journey Begins how to make the world better. Ann was a very good student and she was offered a place at the University of Chicago, one of the U.S.A.’s best universities, at the age of only sixteen. But her father felt that Ann was too young to live on her own, and he would not let her go. So in 1959, Ann moved with her parents to Hawaii, where Stanley’s company had just opened a new furniture store. They lived in Honolulu, the state’s largest city and the home of the University of Hawaii, where in 1960 Ann began to study anthropology11. Ann was in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii when she met Barack Hussein Obama, a student from Kenya. Barack Senior12 (as he was later called so he would not be confused with his son by the same name, Barack Hussein Obama Junior) had been born in 1936 in the poor village of Kanyadhiang, near Lake Victoria. At that time this region of Africa was still part of the British Empire. Barack Sr.’s father, Hussein Onyango Obama, had fought with the British army in Europe in World War I and had traveled to many different countries as a soldier. When he returned to Africa he became a Christian for a while, but then he changed to Islam and added “Hussein” to his name. Barack Sr. was a clever, ambitious13 boy. Traditional village life, which meant looking after goats and helping in the farm fields, didn’t interest him. He often got into trouble at school and argued with his father at home. At the age of eighteen he left his village to go to Kenya’s largest city, Nairobi. By his early twenties, he had a wife, two children, a job as a shop assistant and little money. The future did not look very good for Barack Sr., but then two American school teachers helped him to apply to several universities in the U.S.A. In 1959, at the age of twenty-three, he was offered a full scholarship14 to study economics at the University of Hawaii. And so he traveled alone to the U.S.A. and became the University of Hawaii’s first African student. 8 The Journey Begins Barack Hussein Obama Senior as a young man Like Ann, Barack Sr. was interested in new ways of thinking. “Although my father had been raised a Muslim,” his son would later write, “by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist15, thinking religion to be so much superstition16.” Ann and Barack Sr. began dating. At the time, this was a dangerous thing to do in much of the U.S.A. Many people thought it was wrong for black and white people to have romantic relationships with each other. In half of the states in the U.S.A., it was illegal. But Hawaii was a long way from the other U.S. states, both geographically and culturally. Nobody in Hawaii cared whether Ann and Barack Sr. were from the same or different races. 9 The Journey Begins Ann’s parents were impressed by Barack Sr.’s warm personality and intelligence. Stanley and Madelyn liked him, but they were not happy when, early in 1961, Ann and Barack Sr. got married. They were worried that the differences in culture and background would cause problems for the couple. Stanley and Madelyn were upset and Barack Sr.’s father was very angry. He reminded his son that he already had a wife and two children in Kenya. (Ann thought they had separated, but this was not true.) He did not think that Ann would be happy in Africa and he did not want Barack Sr. to stay in the U.S.A. after his graduation from university. He told his son to return to Kenya and use his education to help his people. But there was another reason for Hussein Onyango Obama’s unhappiness. He wrote an angry letter to Ann’s father saying that he “didn’t want the Obama blood sullied17 by a white woman.” Barack Sr. was very successful at the University of Hawaii, but Ann decided to leave. In August 1961, at the age of eighteen, she gave birth to a baby boy. The baby was named after his father—Barack Hussein Obama Jr. Barack means “blessed” in Swahili, one of the official languages of Kenya, and in Arabic. Hussein means “beautiful” in Arabic. In 1963, Barack Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii. He decided not to listen to his father and he did not return to Kenya. He wanted to stay in the U.S.A. to continue his studies and work toward a Ph.D. in economics. He applied to several American universities and was offered a full scholarship by Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. The scholarship would give Barack Sr. enough money to live and study in Boston. However, Ann and Barry, as Barack Jr. was often called as a child, would have to stay in Hawaii. Harvard is one of the best and most well-known universities in the world, and Barack Sr. felt that he could not say no to this offer. Barack Jr. was just two years old when his father left the family home in Hawaii and flew to Massachusetts. 10 The Journey Begins Barack Jr. with his mother, Ann Dunham, in the early 1960s Barack Sr. planned one day to return to Kenya with Ann and Barack Jr.