The Footsteps of Barack Obama in A Changing America

The Footsteps of Barack Obama

In A Changing America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements:

Preface:

Chapter1:Goat herder’s Son

Chapter2:Enter Illinois Politics

Chapter3:The Race to the Top

Chapter4:Democracy in Action

Chapter5:Faces of the Governed

Chapter6:Access to Land of Opportunity

Chapter7:The Power of Markets

Chapter8:America to Neighbor’s  Aid

Epilogue:

Glossary:

About Author

Other Titles by Author

The Footsteps of Barack Obama

In A Changing America

Copyright @ Safari E. Ohumay.  All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievable system or transmittal in any way by any means without the prior permission of the author except as provided by the USA copyright law.

Acknowledgements

First, I would like to thank America itself for giving me the inspiration for this book.  I was first welcomed to its shores in the fall of 1975 as a graduate student of Business Management on a scholarship at the Hult International school of Business in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I returned to my native country of Tanzania, and three years later, returned to America for what would be my final residency move.  I received a G-4  US visa, which is issued to personnel of international organizations domiciled in the U.S. such as the World Bank and the IMF.  I have traveled the world extensively and have only come to appreciate America’s values and esteemed institutions all the more. So I became a US citizen. The purpose of this book is to share the story of America from the unique perspective of a Tanzanian native, and to provide a backdrop to explain Barack Obama’s amazing rise to the Presidency.

I would like to thank Johannes Masare, an enduring friend who allowed me to bounce chapter topics to share our mutual experiences. 

I would like to thank Amy Nash, a dedicated student of the Swahili language, whose love for English and Swahili translations, powered her great enthusiasm for the careful editing of this book, and for endorsing its relevance for avid readers like her.  She gave me the audacity to believe I should start authoring books.  

I would like to thank my daughter, Sibie, for sharing her creative effort and talent, in spite of her demanding coursework of the final year of her Masters in Architecture, to design several book covers, of which the final one gracing this book is hers.

I must thank my dear wife, Maria, whose motivational skills pushed me to plow through vast amounts of research which was required to improve every aspect of this book.  I cannot say how much I appreciate her intellect and companionship.

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Preface

Barack Hussein Obama is today the 44th president of the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth. He is  a man of many firsts:  The first American president born in the state of Hawaii; first African- American ever to become  the president of the Harvard Law Review  Journal; the first African- American to become the keynote speaker at a major political party convention in the US; the first African-American nominee for president by  a US major political party;  the first American president whose parent is non-American; and the first US President to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize even as he was settling in his first term of office. In the African- American community Obama also was one of the only nine  African Americans who had the privilege of serving in the US senate. He was the second African- American US senator to be elected from his adopted state of Illinois.

By any measure of achievement and irrespective of how he would perform in his presidency Barack Obama’s dreams thus far have earned him an enviable global recognition. More than half a century ago the name Obama would have been known for a cook in the kitchen premises of a British colonial territory of Kenya in East Africa, not to mention being in the United States.  That British cook, whose country at the time was a colonial territory,had a vision, not only for the freedom of his country, but a better life for his son by sending him to the few schools available in the country. In his life Barack Obama, the grandson of that cook has been chasing the dreams from his father to liberate himself through education and apply that knowledge to liberate others who have been neglected as exemplified by his widely treasured service to the   communities in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago.

The essence of what makes up the story of Obama can in some way be traced to his unusual family background which offers an exotic island paradise for a birth place, childhood years in a foreign country quite unlike his birth place, the changing faces of America and the academic and career pursuits he had chosen for himself.  Under circumstances far beyond his control Obama found himself at age six  in the company of his mother and a stepfather in another exotic island country of Indonesia, thousands of ocean miles away from his birthplace.   He would spend four years of his boyhood there among very ordinary mates.

Perhaps more than any other place where he lived Indonesia had a profound impact in shaping his view of the world and life in a poor country so different from the one he left behind in Hawaii.  The Indonesian nation was still a nascent country struggling to establish unity among its more than 14 thousand islands strewn on both sides of the equator south of the Philippines, west of Australia and east of the Indian Ocean.  Indonesia was in political and social turmoil, which resulted in the killings and persecutions of thousands of its people, the situation that his family was not aware of until they arrived in the country. But to Barack Obama who was then known as Barry Soetoro the turmoil was not of immediate concern; but rather the experience of going to school with local children instead of going to a school where children of the US embassy staff and other foreign residents went caught his attention allowing him to view it as a sign that his family was not rich, but still compared to families of his mates his family was far better.  He had a thorough exposure to conditions of life with hardship due to commonplace poverty in a third world country.

After four years of residence in Indonesia, Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.  His mother and his one-year-old sister Maya would join him a year later. His years in Hawaii were marked by internal search of his identity- son of an African father from Kenya, an American white mother from Kansas living with white grandparents and a half sister fathered by an Indonesian.  The name Barry Soetoro would take a particular self critique, and by the time he was a college student at Occidental where he met friends from international backgrounds, Obama seemed to have found his true identity and once for all would change his name from Barry Soetoro to Barack Hussein Obama.

Early in his college years Obama began to sharpen his talents in oratory skills when he captured the attention of a campus audience by taking a center stage uninvited to speak against the Apartheid racist Regime of the Republic of South Africa (RSA), which by then had imprisoned Nelson Mandela since 1962 for life, for supporting armed confrontation of the black South Africans against the racist regime.  At that time international pressure on the racist government was picking up steam to release Mandela and dismantle the Apartheid system of racial discrimination and economic strangulation of the black majority.  All of these circumstances woven together with his oratorical skills have gravitated many like minded people not only towards his celebrity personality but also towards the value and belief systems he advocates.  Over time in his life Obama became aware that he had a growing following and made calculated choices of where he would settle for a home in this huge country and what he would do for a career.

For someone who is an African American with political aspirations the choice of Chicago as a place to launch a political career is quite logical even though Obama was born and raised in Hawaii. The city of Chicago, a home to over 50 percent of the 2 million African Americans in the state has been a breeding  ground for the widely known cultural influences of the African Americans in America and beyond.  Chicago’s population of nearly three million residents today is divided fairly equally among Blacks, Whites, Hispanics in that order but typically the majority of the black population and to some extent the Hispanics constitute the bulk of the underserved communities in the city.

In his key note speech to the Democratic Party National Convention in Boston in the July of 2004 Obama opened his speech by confessing that he was the most improbable person to take that honor in these words; tonight is a particular honor for me because let us face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely.  But wait, why did he say his presence in a dais set up for a keynote speaker at a convention of a major political party in the United States was unlikely?  First, never before had an African American ever been elevated to the task of a keynote speaker in such a high profile political event.  But that is not all, as Obama would explain: My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya.  He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin roof shack.  His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.  But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son.  Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place. Not only was Obama an improbable African American, he is a second-generation son of an African who happened to have briefly married an American citizen.  Given America’s history of racial discrimination and preferences, these are just some of the improbable circumstances of the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States in ten  short years of his political career.

Obama referred to a magical place for education. By now we know that the magical place Obama referred to is the United States, specifically the State of Hawaii where Obama’s father went to study and a birth place for Barack Obama, the American citizen. Even with the racial challenges the nation was facing, during that particular time there was an international campaign headed by citizens of the United States to pressure the European colonial powers to relinquish their grip on the African continent and other parts of the world to allow the citizens of those territories to have their freedom and self rule.

In the effort to prepare the colonies for the self-rule scholarships were being offered to students from those countries, which were on their way to freedom.  The country of Kenya was one of the main beneficiaries of that program and Obama’s father was one of the first students to come to the United States.  In the United States itself there were heightened tempos of social and civil right movements whose overarching goal was freedom and justice for all at that time. Even though  president Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, during  the civil war instilled renewed hope for justice and equality for all citizens the enforcement of the laws lacked political will and the Southern states openly defied the constitution by passing new laws that disenfranchised African Americans by creating barriers to voter registration; voting rolls were dramatically reduced as blacks were forced out of electoral politics, and many other social restrictions.

While progress was made in some areas, the racial discrimination prevailed in most southern states until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – these acts enabled the Federal Government to enforce both the constitutional civil rights and the voting rights of African Americans.  For many years, blacks in the South were not able to elect anyone to represent their interests in Congress or local government. Since they could not vote, they could not serve on local juries. When Obama’s father arrived in Hawaii in August 1959 he came to the full knowledge of the striking similarities between the colonial oppression in his home country of Kenya still under British rule and the struggles of black people in the United States  almost two

In those days the civil rights movement was using students to protest segregation through sit-ins in various parts of the country where segregation was intense.  It was not until the landmark Supreme Court decision of May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education, a decision which was unanimously supported by all the nine judges of the Supreme Court that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal and therefore violated the Equal protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, that school integration began to be earnestly applied in the United States. Eleven years later, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. So with all the social inconsistencies and struggles going on at that time,  for Obama, America did not seem like a land of opportunity for any black person much less a foreigner like him. Obama had a stronger incentive to return home especially when fresh opportunities were created in the newly independent Kenya back in Africa to replace the British administration cadre with educated locals.  Nonetheless for America, though ever so gradually, changes did take place and was becoming a more perfect society where even African Americans could not only vote, but also fully participate in the democratic processes of governing under the constitution.

In a speech Barack Obama gave in Germany while he was only a presidential candidate he reminded his audience of the difference between him and other such Americans who had been there before; he said:  I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before.  Although I speak to you tonight not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen, a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world, I know I don’t look like the Americans who had previously spoken. It was an obvious fact to the audience because they could tell they were not looking at a white person; yet he figured out it was important for him to speak it out. Obama was intimately aware that America has been a nation of change throughout its short history, but no black man before him had addressed a German audience with a keen ear the same way they did for him, and continued to set himself apart from other Americans in a subtle way reciting words of his unusual ancestral origin, when he said, The journey which led me here is improbable.  My mother was born in the heartland of America.  My father grew up herding goats in Kenya… he went on to say, At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten world that his journey, his dream, required freedom and opportunity promised by the West.

For his chosen career Obama has reached the pinnacle of his ambition, the American politics.  But by setting himself apart from previous American leaders he is in reality making a tacit statement that America has been on a long road in overcoming its racial prejudices and that time was at hand for the world to know the American society today makes it possible for all its citizens to pursue their dreams without regard to racial preferences and on a level playing field of opportunities, including the dream of seeking the highest political office in the nation.

Obama’s political success here is seen in the context of a nation that, though still suffers the social-economic scars of slavery and racial preferences in the treatment of its diverse people, has been steadily changing in many ways for the better, enough to allow the election of its president from a race that was once doomed to slavery and human indignities.  Thus the story of Obama has to be told in two symbiotically bound aspects of his personal political achievements and the character of the nation he had so hoped to lead.

The eight chapters of this book are divided into two parts:  part one consists of the first chapters from 1 through 3 and is about the story of the person- his parents and circumstances of their improbable relations, his life in a foreign country so different from his birth place. In view of the strong influence Indonesia inculcated in the mind of young Barry, the circumstances of its political turmoil following its independence from a succession of changing colonizing powers, and the fact that Obama’s mother was completely unaware of those conditions is presented here in a more engaging exposition of the story of the country and its slippery relationship of that time with the United States.  The remainder of part one traces Obama’s search for his personal identity in his boyhood years, experiences through his academic pursuit at three highly reputable institutions of higher learning in the nation, and his ultimate choice of a career of service to inner city communities in Chicago as a community organizer.  How his experience as a community organizer became a template for his political aspirations points to his early notion that politics is intertwined with the service of those who are marginalized in their societies. Becoming a democrat was the easiest decision he had to make in launching his political life for his upbringing had steeped him in the knowledge of what life is like for those people in unfortunate circumstances.

Part two which covers chapters 4 through 8 is the story of the nation that put Obama at the helm of its leadership and one, which he hoped to lead. From the time of its founding America was declared a constitutional democracy even though the true attainment of freedom and justice remained a work- in- progress for many years.  The issue of racial preferences while placing national reliance on flows of immigrants into the country was in direct conflict with its aspirations of assimilation and harmonious diversity of its population.

In spite of its racial preferences and unequal treatment of its people immigrants from all over the world spurred by a combination of opportunities in America and unbearable hardships in the countries of their origin continued to come to the shores of the United States ever so deepening the social diversity.  Furthermore, in view of America’s immigrant connection to the rest of the world it realized that international aid assistance to foreign countries would be at the center of its foreign policy, either for exerting its sphere of influence or establishing new markets for American goods and services abroad.  Yet there is no denying America itself is the greatest market of the world. There is a world wide perception, whether false or not, that America is a nation of unlimited opportunities for achieving personal goals in life and in response America offers a number of policy mechanisms including promotion of diversity, attracting talent and family needs, which offer people from around the world an opportunity to immigrate and find those opportunities for themselves.  Such mechanisms imbedded in the immigration policy and the need to maintain a leadership posture in the world  have been at the center of American foreign policy. Part two chapters discuss these issues from the angle of their influence on changes that are taking place in America and in the parts of the world  from where immigrants came, and  how and where these changes might lead the American society in the future.

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Chapter 1

Goat Herder’s Son

 No story has been more captivating to the world in this century than the meteoric rise of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.  He charted an improbable political path that, in ten short years, led him from a four-term Illinois State Senator, to a first-term U.S. Senator, and ultimately, placed him at the pinnacle of one’s political career, the Presidency, becoming the United States’ first African American President.

Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii’s capital city of Honolulu on August 4, 1961—the same year the country of Tanganyika (now Tanzania) attained its independence from the British and just two years after the island state of Hawaii had joined the United States as the 50th state in 1959.  Two years after Barack Hussein Obama’s birth, Tanzania’s neighboring country of Kenya, of which Barack Obama’s father was a citizen, won its independence from British colonial hold after an entrenched bloody war, during which Barack Obama’s father had come to the University of Hawaii at Manoa, outside of Honolulu, as a student on scholarship.  There at the university, he met fellow student Ann Dunham, and they married shortly thereafter in February of 1961.

Obama Sr. did not have adequate time with his newborn son for fatherly bonding, for it was not long after the birth of Obama Jr. when an opportunity came for Obama Sr. to pursue a graduate program in Economics, far away on the east coast at Harvard University in the State of  Massachusetts.  His wife, Ann Dunham, left alone with a new baby boy, was compelled to abandon her studies  in anthropology for a time to provide the needed care for her newborn.  Thereafter, there would be little interaction between the parents, in part because Obama Sr. was destined to return to Kenya in 1964 in the hope of lucrative opportunities for helping his new nation with his economics degree, leaving behind his young son and  mother in the care of her parents. No one can fully understand what exactly led to the couple’s divorce, but undoubtedly, insurmountable differences in their customs and cultural backgrounds likely contributed to the resultant state of affairs.

Back in Kenya, the period of the early 1960s was a very exciting one, not only for the Kenyan people, but for the entire African continent, and especially for those fortunate enough to have received higher education. Upon Obama Sr.’s return to Kenya in 1964, it had barely been one year since the new nation celebrated its independence from the British on December 12, 1963, on the heels of its neighbors, Tanzania and Uganda, which had also attained independence recently in 1961 and 1962, respectively.  In  the backdrop of the celebratory Day of Independence, Kenya had been marred by a ruthless, prolonged independence struggle which pitted the might of the British Empire against local tribal insurgents grouped under the umbrella organization called Mau Mau.  The protracted fighting convinced the British of the inevitability of  defeat and settled for the local people’s demand for independence.  With Kenya’s newly achieved independence, and endless opportunities for expert people like Obama Sr., remaining in the United States was not an option. 

Unfortunately, upon return to his native country, Obama Sr. cycled aimlessly through a number of jobs, including one at the Kenyan central bank.  Mr. D. N. Ndegwa, the first governor of the Kenyan central bank who was a close associate of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the father of the new nation, recalled that Mr. Obama Sr. was one of the bank’s economists at one time, and had experienced problems on the job, but Mr. Ndegwa was not aware of the details of the situation.

Back in the U.S., Ann Durham, Obama Jr.’s mother, was preparing to return to college and continue her studies at the University of Hawaii.   It was at this same university, in 1965, that Ann met Lolo Soetoro, a student from Indonesia.  Shortly thereafter, Ann and Soetoro married.  When Soetoro returned to Indonesia in 1966, left behind his new wife and stepson Barack Obama, Jr. so she could complete her studies.  Ann graduated the following year and, in 1967, set out for Indonesia with her now six-year-old son, to join her husband, Lolo Soetoro.

Indonesia:

Indonesia, in which mother and son arrived for the first time, was a nation encompassing a myriad of islands—well over 14,000 in total, strewn across both sides of the Equator, extending into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and cradled between Australia and the South China Sea—boasting rich ethnic and ecological diversity.  During this period, Indonesia was undergoing major socio-political transformations that would soon impinge profoundly on the lives of its two newest residents from the United States.

The majority of Indonesians is comprised of the Malay ethnic group, and most live on the larger islands of Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Bali.  The Java Island alone, where the capital city of Jakarta is located, is home to over 70 percent of the entire population of the nation.  On the islands in the far eastern zone of the country, such as Ambon Island, and the Indonesian portion of the Papua Island, known in Indonesia as Iriyan Jaya, the people of Melanese ethnic origin have settled in various degrees.  The tropical climate is similar to conditions in Hawaii, and rainy seasons exceeding 200 days a year are not uncommon in many parts of the Indonesian archipelago.

The city of Jakarta, the new home of the Obama family, is lined with a number of rivers, which often flood during the seasons of heavy rains.  The nation’s rain