The anomalous story of Obama senior

Some of us are so Asia-centric that freedom fighters of other continents present a tantalising package to us. So, when I saw a photograph of a group of grinning Kenyans under the headline of "Sons of freedom fighters of yesteryear "I was rather perplexed. Included was a photograph of Obama Senior, father of the most powerful man in the world today. The account of him (the father) enthralled me so much that I followed him all the way to Kenya. Sorry, that is a fabricated one springing from Asian Alankara or exaggerated rhetoric. And had I followed him I would end up in the Land of the Dead for his turbulent life ended before he was 50.

And that too in a motor car accident, the third in his life. To put it in jargon form, the man's life was one whirl of recklessness and adventure ill-planning, and impetuous action. Here is his biodata.

Born in 1936. Died in 1982. In the intervening years, married four times. Wives included a demure African girl, an Irish (?) woman and a Jewish American. Had he lived up to 70 or 80 he may have sampled, a good ratio of the international female circle! So fond was he of "Womanising" that he begot eight children two of whom discarded him. Reason, he had come home "Dead drunk" and abused their mother and the children.

Flirting

Was he just a rotten case who went around gallivanting and flirting first on African soil and then on Hawaiian and American soil? No. Today he is overshadowed by the image of his son with whom he spent only a month but wielded such a lasting influence on him that later the son wrote one whole book on him, Dreams From My Father. The father too wrote, between philandering. He began by publishing monographs criticising the Kenyan government's pseudo-socialist policy. The British colonial masters too came under his hammer.

Obama Senior

Finally, he was jailed for the intellectual effrontery yet ended up as a senior economist in the Kenyan Government. His life seems to seethe with anomalies. The antecedents of the Obama family too are rather puzzling.

Some attribute their connection with America to the slave trade that brought in Africans by the hundreds to America. In fact his grandfather or great grandfather had been a cook working for the Christian missionaries while earning fame as a native herbalist. Obama Senior himself had been domiciled in Kenya till he got an honourable entry to US by winning a scholarship. He ended up at Hawaii University as a brilliant academic.

Polygamous society

His religious affiliations too fluctuate. Raised in a Muslim family at some juncture in his fast moving life, his father himself was much married in the flux of Kenyan polygamous society. He converted to the Anglican faith while studying. Grown up, in the data seeking inquisitive forms, he wrote Aethist against religion and added, in a mood of repulsion towards his new faith, Religion-None. Probably the orthodox minded man he was, he considered religion a man-made contraption to imprison or discipline the lower social levels. As his publications indicate he was an intellectual to the core, questioning many an established institution and belief that Kenyans of his day revered as god-sent facets.

In his family life too he was very wayward. He got married four times. In fact he got married to Ann Dunham, the mother of the American President after telling a "Grand lie" that he was divorced from his first wife whom he had married at 18. When the scholarship to Hawaii University came his way he just left her in the Kenyan valley with two sons and forgot them very unscrupulously and unethically. After the divorce from Ann Dunham, his second wife who gave him the famous son, he tied the nuptial knot twice.

Philandering

Yet with all this philandering, he had a hankering after the Irish woman he met at Hawaii University and the boy begotten by him on whom he conferred his own name Hussein, as the middle name, a name made much of, against the son during the Presidential elections that followed the 9/11 debacle, tainting the Obamas as half-Moslem.

That he hankered after Ann Dunham and son, in the midst of all his political somersaults, politically spiced writings and fast life including motor car accidents is obvious.

He visited Hawaii when the boy Obama Junior, was 10 years old and spent a month with the family that gave the acutely intelligent boy to produce a whole book on him in his later life. It traces the positive and negative aspects of his father's life and explains his own determination to be a good and caring father to his two daughters.

If Barrack Obama Senior's children were the losers or near losers by the father's profligacy today those who gain by it are Barrack Obama Junior's children and wife.

No scandal has ever tainted him despite his robust appearance and he always tries to put the best image of his family for the benefit of the civic society. One month of caring and loving had taught him the value of a father. The US President reveals that in that one month his father had bought him a basketball and taken him to a jazz concert. These two, the game of basketball and jazz, were to remain his most fascinating hobbies for which he has to thank his father.

'Lessons Learnt'

Needless to say Michelle Obama, America's First Lady too much benefited from "Lessons Learnt" by her husband, from his father.

Did Obama Senior live a worthwhile life? Perhaps the more positive acts of his life were criticising Kenyan Socialism with relevant facts and figures and begetting a son, who got elevated into the shooting star of contemporary times. But people go their own way driven by whims and circumstances and the father lived a very reckless life savouring the adventures of the time, literary, political and even personal.

The two Obamas are a pair who owe their origins to an undeveloped East African state of which one name radiates throughout the world. Destiny, they say, is very strange. And men and women who make it or mar it come from all parts of the cosmos.