HUSSEIN ONYANGO OBAMA
Excerpt:
Having adapted to British ways from a stint serving the British Army in Burma, Hussein Obama held everyone to a high standard of excellence — in school and in life.
Seeing the advantages of modern life before many others did in his home area near Lake Victoria, he had his children attending school, wearing Western clothes and provided his home with Western furnishings including a table where the family would sit and eat with cutlery. Second, as a Muslim, he wore a fez as well as a kanzu and vest.
Also unusual for the times, he had learned to read and write.
Gloria remembers Hussein reading his Koran and other books at night by the light of an oil lamp, as well as her shock and frustration that the landlord had refused to provide electricity to the staff houses.
Many of these points have been corroborated in Barack Obama’s journey of discovery of his Kenyan roots Dreams From My Father.
Through having known Hussein Onyango Obama and his son Barack Obama Sr., Gloria has felt that same immediacy and connection that so many Kenyans feel for America’s new leaders.
The threads that run through Gloria Hagberg’s life of hard work, open-mindedness and friendship have been woven together with the lives of many others who strive to leave the world a better place than they found it.
http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/magazine/-/434746/525930/-/view/printVersion/-/i13vxrz/-/index.html
http://www.airlifttoamerica.org/airlift_to_america_news.html
IN A LETTER IN THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, CORA WEISS TALKS ABOUT THE ROLE OF AIRLIFT IN BARACK OBAMA SR.’S ACADEMIC CAREER. In the April 29, 2010 issue of the New York Times Book Review, Cora Weiss, executive director of the African American Students Foundation, added to the account of the airlift of African students mentioned by Barack Obama in his speech at Selma in 2007 and described in Garry Wills’s review of David Remnick’s biography of President Obama, “The Bridge”. She wrote “Barack Obama Sr., who greatly admired Mboya, did not come on the first flight, but he was a member of the airlift generation, arriving here in 1959 with the support of two American women teachers. While he was a student at the University of Hawaii, the A.A.S.F. gave him three grants.”