Now who said AFRICAN? The origin of the name comes from 'Dreams' - evidently you don't know that - although I have printed out that chapter from the book uncounted times. The author uses 'Dreams' as a device to show how Stanley Ann Dunham was called Ann by her father, Stanley Ann by her mother and Anna by the kenyan student, all in the one brief, one-page conversation, in which Madelyn is called Toot.
The next time we hear of Anna is in an article out of Kenya itself, in which a member of the clan tells the interviewer that the kenyan had gone to the US and married a woman named ANNA TOOT.
I'll leave it to you to decide which might have come first. The letters he wrote home to his father, in one of which he told the only man who could read - Onyango - that he was married, and named the woman, in another in which he wrote to say he had a son, or if you think the villager read the book before the interview in 2004.
And btw, that term of endearment to which you refer is TUTU...not TOOT. However, in the letter the kenyan may have witten Tutu and the name has come down through the telling, in an oral society as Toot.
Changes nothing. I'll keep asking, who was ANNA? Who was Anna Obama who showed up in Seattle and according to Mary, it was in January 1961, and in April she discussed with the Salvation Army having the child adopted. The name in that memo from the INS isn't truncated for no reason. If that name was Miss Dunham we would have been allowed to see it.
I lived in HI more than 13 years and would hear and read in the newspapers etc the word “tutu” referring to grandmothers, aunties and elderly family or neighbor women.
I never heard just “tut” or “toot”.