Posted on 06/24/2009 10:54:57 PM PDT by neverdem
Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama's skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.
Our History
ProLiteracy Worldwide, Inc. was created in August 2002, when the two leading adult literacy organizations merged. Laubach Literacy International grew from the work of missionary Dr. Frank Laubach in the Philippines; Ruth Johnson Colvin formed Literacy Volunteers of America. Click on the links below for more information about these pioneers in adult literacy:
http://www.proliteracy.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=264&srcid=689
Not to worry...that’s a reprint of the original article from Atlas Shrugs:
HOW COULD STANLEY ANN DUNHAM HAVE DELIVERED BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA JR. IN AUGUST OF 1961 IN HONOLULU, WHEN OFFICIAL UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON RECORDS SHOW HER 2680 MILES AWAY IN SEATTLE ATTENDING CLASSES THAT SAME MONTH
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/10/how-could-stanl.html
It is possible that Malcolm X met Obama, Sr. during a 1959 visit to the Secretary General of the Kenya Federation of Labour, prominent Kenyan politician Tom Mboya, because Mboya and Obama were close friends. [408]
This is Beckwith footnote to same Atlas Shrugs post.
Would like to find some more sources or additional info on that relationship. All reference I have seen point back to Atlas Shrugs, whether or not they credit.
These are the footnotes to this ProLiteracy.org article.
[NOTE footnote #3.: I have searched in vain for this BHO, Sr. resume]
1 Referenced as “Mooney” as she married Mr. Kirk in 1960 per Mooney-Kirk’s “My Adventures in Literacy Journalism” p 83.
2 Referenced as “Government Literacy Project” in Mooney-Kirk’s “My Adventures in Literacy Journalism” and “Kenya Adult Literacy Program” on Obama Sr. 1964 resume.
3 From Obama 1964 resume referenced as a special writer of 3 books. Copy of cover/acknowledgment “Wise Way of Farming” in materials available.
4 Finding the Laubach-Obama Connection. Description of his goal from Dreams from my Father.
5 Laubach archives. Reported by Val Gigliotti.
6 Also noted on Obama resume as “support from LLF 2/60 to 6/62.”
LOL; getting closer
cartel: a consortium of independent organizations formed to limit competition by controlling the production and distribution of a product or service
yes, it is possible. Obama Sr and Mboya were both Luo...but you will find the Kenya visit omitted from MalcolmX timelines. In fact, many Malcolm X timelines do NOT iclude his 1959 visit to Africa AT ALL.
June 1962. Obama Sr left Hawaii, went on a tour through mainland US and then attended Harvard. Must have come into money...
OMG!
Thanks for that.
Misc Notes from another thread re: BHO’s other family-— Ruth (Nidesand) and their two sons Mark and David
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I asked because I think there might be (unconfirmed) evidence that BHO, Sr married third wife Ruth in 1964 in Mass.
If so, it might explain the necessity for the divorce, which became final in Mar 1964 (assuming BHO, Sr & Stanley Ann were married).
BHO, Sr and Ruth’s son Mark was born in 1964.
Also, according to “Dreams,” Mark was the uncontested heir to BHO’s Sr’s estate because none of the other children could prove their legal claim to be his offspring. Mark had all the necessary documents.
Ruth says she was married about 7 yrs to BHO, Sr. They might have divorced in 1971. Wondered if that might have had anything to do with the law [polygamy] you are citing (rather than the abuse) & also BHO Sr’s trip to the US that year.
Much speculation here, and even if true, does it tie in anywhere to the subject of our focus.
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Ruth Ndesandjo [re-married name after divorce from Obama]
Personal and Family Information
Ruth Ndesandjo was born ABT 1945 in USA.
Ruth Ndesandjo had 2 marriages/partners. Her 1st husband was Barack Hussein Obama Sr.. They were married FROM 1964 TO 1965 in Massachusetts, USA. Their 2 known children were Mark Ndesandjo and David Ndesandjo.
Her 2nd husband was 2nd husband Nidesand. They were married ABT 1980. Their known child was Joseph Ndesandjo.
http://www.geditcom.com/samples/Obamas/INDIs/II87.html
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Both Ruth & her sons reveal as little as possible and are as vague as they can be.
By the time of BHO’s death, Ruth’s second son, David, was already deceased (died in a motorcycle accident, apparently while living with one of BHO’s half-brothers). Thus the assertion by BHO [in Dreams] that Auma said Mark had uncontested claim to BHO Sr’s estate because he was the only child with documents to prove his relationship to BHO, Sr..
Causes me to think that BHO had to have been contacted by attorneys concerning BHO Sr’s estate -— if he was BHO Sr’s son.
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Re the genealogical link: I do not think they were divorced in Mass (and definitely not in 1965). I think that may refer to when they departed US for Kenya. This source is a bit sloppy.
Ruth said she was married about 7 yrs — which if they were married in 1964, would be about 1971. Did the divorce occur in Kenya or US? do not know.
I have not checked Ruth’s whereabouts that year (1971), but BHO did come to USA, apparently near the end of that year — his only visit with BHO in the US.
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Ruth re-married & had her sons’ names changed (to their present name). She remarried, IIRC, in 1980, or thereabouts.
In Dreams, Ruth asks Barry why his mother did not have his name changed when she remarried. He did not answer her.
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FRED NERKS: well, that opens another possible can of worms doesn’t it? That means, as zero didn’t visit Kenya until several years after the death of Obama Sr, any papers, documents, manuscripts etc...from the Obama Sr ‘estate’ would now be in the possession of Mark Ndesandjo.
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Another thought worth considering:
Barack Jr’s mother, Ann Dunham visited Kenya when Obama Sr died. She met her co-wife, Kezia and they both became great friends.Since then, the Obamas have formed an extraordinary bond, despite their unstable family history and cultural and geographic differences.
http://www.postnewsline.com/2009/01/obamas-pedigree.html
that’s spectacular! nice find! or is this your website? Good website to bookmark?
http://americastandup.wordpress.com/
I just ran across it. Nothing compared to the work you do. keep it up! Much appreciated.
DE
Grandfather Onyango Obama was a Luo of considerable personal force and integrity. Born in 1898, he had fought in various parts of Africa in the Great War, then returned to Kogelo to clear land for a farm near Lake Victoria; but to earn money for his family he had also worked as a cook in Nairobi and on safari. An herbalist, he had fought against the confidence schemes of shamans and witch doctors. When a first wife was unable to bear children he took a second and later a third, who did.
Despite many obstacles, he learned to read and write some English, a rare thing among rural Africans then. Initially subjected to suspicion from the other villagers for this, he eventually earned their respect because he was one of the few who could speak with the Europeans in their own language. He was the first to adopt Western ways, such as putting food on plates and eating with utensils.
Converted to Protestantism when young, he later converted again to the Muslim religion, which accounts for the name that he gave to his eldest son, born in 1936. He also added “Hussein” to his own name. Later, Onyango drifted away from the Muslim religion, did not raise his children in that faith, and was not known by the Hussein name.
He served again with the British in Burma in World War II, and then returned home. According to his widow, Onyango was arrested in 1949, imprisoned, and tortured by the British for supposedly consorting with other former soldiers who were beginning the revolt that would become known as the Mau Mau uprising. Never convicted, upon his release he became bitterly anti-British.
Barack Obama, Sr., was brilliant, rebellious, charming from an early age, and always difficult to handle. He would take many days off from classes, then cram for exams and come out with the highest marks. Eventually, his antics got him expelled from high school. Onyango then sent his son to the port city of Mombasa to work as a clerk for an Asian friend.
Barack left that job and found another, at a lower salary. [with Mooney's organization, I presume?]
He drifted into the orbit of the Kenyatta- led political party at around the time that emergency regulations were promulgated in 1952 in reaction to the Mau Mau rebellion, and was briefly jailed. He married, fathered two children, and made a connection with Mboya, then a rising union official, and with another aspiring political Luo, Oginga Odinga, who was known as a committed socialist.
Obama also came to the attention of two American women working in Kenya, Mrs. Helen Roberts of Palo Alto and Miss Elizabeth Mooney of Maryland, a literacy specialist. They recognized his intellect and thirst for further education and helped him take correspondence courses, to which— for the first time— he applied his full efforts and skills.
(snip)
But Mboya thought differently about U.S. colleges [opposed the opinion that US education was "frivolous" or "fluffy"], especially for the purpose of educating Kenyans for in dependence from Great Britain, and had been working since 1956 with a white American industrialist, William X. Scheinman, and with a few other Americans, white and black, to send Kenyan students to the United States.
By privately transporting promising students who on their own or through Mboya’s intervention had won scholarships to American universities, the Scheinman-Mboya group was doing several radical things. They were circumventing the British colonial education system, which rewarded only a handful of Kenyans each year with scholarships to study in Great Britain; they were finessing the U.S. foreign- student establishment, which only accepted Africans from already- independent nations; and they were attempting to bring over large groups rather than a few “elite” students.
Scheinman had formed a nonprofit entity, the African American Students Foundation (AASF), for this purpose. The goal was to create a cadre of well-trained young people who would be available to staff the government and the educational system when Kenya gained its independence. Between 1959 and 1963, the AASF “airlifts” would bring to the United States nearly eight hundred East African students, mostly Kenyans but also some from Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Uganda, and Northern and Southern Rhodesia, to take up scholarships at dozens of colleges and some high schools. The “airlift generation” would achieve a remarkable record of accomplishment. Upon returning home, they would become the founding brothers and sisters of their countries.
For the next quarter century they would make up half of Kenya’s parliaments and account for many of its cabinet ministers and even more of its high- level civil servants, in addition to staffing the professorships and deanships of its nascent universities, starting medical clinics and schools, growing multimillion- dollar businesses, and leading international environmental programs. Among the airlift graduates would be Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.
Professor of medical physiology Dr. Owino Okong’o, another of the airlift students, succinctly summed up the airlift’s impact on Kenya in an e-mail to Mboya’s widow, Pamela: “The airlifts provided manpower at the time of independence, demonstrated the inadequate nature of the then Kenyan education system, changed perceptions which the British were spreading about the quality of American education . . . and transformed the elite culture of Kenyans from the British model to the American model in which performance is more important than where you went to school.”
In 1959, all of this lay in the future as a bright promise. Since 1956, the Mboya-Scheinman program had brought to the United States a handful of individuals at a time. But for the academic year that would begin in September 1959, the Kenyan community knew, Mboya and his associates in Nairobi were expanding the program to assist eighty- one individuals— the number of passengers that could fit on a single chartered plane.
This information electrified Obama Sr., and he applied to more than thirty U.S. colleges, many of which were historically black or were those in the San Francisco area that were recommended by Mrs. [Helen] Roberts. Most were unable to accept him. The reasons remain unclear, but it may have been because he did not complete his secondary education at a school, although he had taken correspondence courses, or because he did not yet have a Cambridge A-Level certificate, the British diploma that could only be obtained after passing a rigid national examination, although according to Otunnu he did have a lesser O-Level certificate, as did most of the other candidates for airlift seats in 1959. Obama appears not to have applied for any advanced schooling in the USSR or in the Communist satellite countries; Oginga Odinga, also a patron of his, was recruiting for such schools in 1959.
The University of Hawaii was willing to accept Obama Sr. for reasons that also remain unclear, but that were likely connected to Hawaii’s just becoming a state in 1959. He was an otherwise-attractive, well- recommended candidate who would be Hawaii’s first- ever African student, a circumstance that intrigued him. As far as can be determined from incomplete records, Mrs. Roberts and Miss Mooney paid his fare to Hawaii and provided a partial scholarship.
Mboya, while unable to transport the twenty-three-year-old, did put him on the AASF list to receive one of the handful of scholarships contributed by the former baseball star Jackie Robinson, which the Scheinman foundation was administering, and encouraged him to look to the AASF for further help if needed, which he later did.
As the University of Hawaii’s first- ever African student, Obama Sr. received more than the usual freshman’s share of attention from the campus press. He pursued courses in economics and world affairs, became the leader of the International Student Association, and graduated at the top of his class in three years. U.S.
(snip)
Early during Obama Sr.’s Hawaii years, he met, in a Russian class, the seventeen-year-old Ann Dunham, an anthropology student, daughter of a local family originally from Kansas. They married in 1961, and the couple’s only child, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., was born later that year.
Onyango threatened his son, by mail, with revocation of his student visa for marrying a white woman who, Onyango predicted, would not want to return to Kenya with Barack, but the threat was not carried out. Obama Sr. continued at the University of Hawaii, and the AASF continued to send him checks, in increments of $50 or $150 for expenses, $243 for tuition. He was mostly supported by Mooney, who in 1960 had married an expatriate American, Elmer Kirk, and shortly moved with her husband back to the United States. Mboya forwarded letters written by Obama Sr.’s Kenyan wife, which she had handed to Mboya in Nairobi, along with his own notes urging Obama to get back in touch with his Kenyan family.
As Obama Jr. would later write in Dreams from My Father, his father was a complicated man; the son gleaned a sense of that complexity from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin interview with his father published upon his graduation in 1962:
"He appears guarded and responsible, the model student, the ambassador for his continent. He mildly scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and forcing them to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding— a distraction, he says, from the practical training he seeks. Although he hasn’t experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation and overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups and expresses wry amusement at the fact that “Caucasians” in Hawaii are occasionally on the receiving end of prejudice. "
Early during Obama Sr.’s Hawaii years, he met, in a Russian class, the seventeen-year-old Ann Dunham, an anthropology student, daughter of a local family originally from Kansas. They married in 1961, and the couple’s only child, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., was born later that year.
Thanks. Not my site. Found it recently. It doesn’t appear to be updated frequently.
DE
This must be the article obama discovered with his birth certificate, where he writes that his name wasn't mentioned. That's 1962 - when obama was supposedly less than one year old, and Stanley Ann was where...?
Ms. Stanley Ann Dunham was enrolled at the University of Washington for: Autumn 1961 Winter 1962 Spring 1962
The records responsive to your request from the University of Washington are above as provided by the Public Disclosure Laws of Washington State. This concludes the University’s response to your Public Records request. Please feel free to contact our office if you have any questions or concerns.
Madolyne Lawson Office of Public Records
What the letter from the University neglects to say is the enrollment was for extension courses.
FWIW, I had the same thought.
Dreams-—I didn’t catch that, but I did question how deeply this book was researched, aside from Airlift source materials.
It introduces some new information (notice that link url is the excerpt itself & does not contain footnotes), but unless the original book provides footnotes, facts unknown to us will need to be verified. In just this excerpt, I noticed several obvious errors.
OTOH, I thought he was able to capture the relevance of the Airlift project in just a few paragraphs.
I find it odd that that article cannot be found & that it has not been reprinted by the paper. But also, see below: 1959!!
“Obama, who emphasized the first syllable of his first name, unlike his son who emphasizes the second, lived for a while at the YMCA. In a 1959 interview with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Obama, described the absence of racial prejudice in Hawaii as “unique.” No one, he marveled, “seems to be conscious of color.””
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/09/21/a_fathers_charm_absence?mode=PF
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Excerpt from Dreams:
There was only one problem: my father was missing. He had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact. Their stories didn’t tell me why he had left. They couldn’t describe what it might have been like had he stayed. Like the janitor, Mr. Reed, or the black girl who churned up dust as she raced down a Texas road, my father became a prop in someone else’s narrative. An attractive prop-the alien figure with the heart of gold, the mysterious stranger who saves the town and wins the girl-but a prop nonetheless.
I don’t really blame my mother or grandparents for this. My father may have preferred the image they created for him- indeed, he may have been complicit in its creation. In an article published in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin upon his graduation, he appears guarded and responsible, the model student, ambassador for his continent.
He mildly scolds the university for herding visiting students into dormitories and forcing them to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding-a distraction, he says, from the practical training he seeks. Although he hasn’t experienced any problems himself, he detects self-segregation and overt discrimination taking place between the various ethnic groups and expresses wry amusement at the fact that “Caucasians” in Hawaii are occasionally at the receiving end of prejudice. But if his assessment is relatively clear-eyed, he is careful to end on a happy note: One thing other nations can learn from Hawaii, he says, is the willingness of races to work together toward common development, something he has found whites elsewhere too often unwilling to do.
I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school. It’s a short piece, with a photograph of him. No mention is made of my mother or me, and I’m left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father’s part, in anticipation of his long departure. Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal questions, intimidated by my father’s imperious manner; or perhaps it was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were looking for. I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight between my parents.
Senator John F. Kennedy and the Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya speak to reporters after their meeting on July 26, 1960, in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Mboya had asked Kennedy to intercede with the State Department for funds to transport African students to the United States. Instead, Kennedy secured funds from a charity his family controlled. Photograph by Boston Herald American in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
Footnote:
[25] Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Jackie Robinson appeal letter, Aug. 24, 1959, box 3, Robinson Papers; Smith, “East African Airlifts of 1959, 1960, and 1961,” 25–43. Barack Obama wrote that his father “had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States,” but a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does not contain the name of the elder Obama. Tom Shachtman, working in the African-American Students Foundation (aasf) papers for a book on the airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from the aasf but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his way to the University of Hawaii. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, 1995), 9; “Eighty-One Kenya Airlift Students Arrived New York Sept. 9th 1959,” box 3, Robinson Papers; Tom Shachtman telephone interview by James H. Meriwether, Aug. 19, 2008, notes (confirmed via e-mail by Shachtman) (in James H. Meriwether’s possession).
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