Obama Sr was married in 1954 at the age of eighteen, in a tribal ceremony to Kezia Aoko.
He had one child, a son, and Kezia was pregnant when Obama Sr left Kenya. Obama Sr was born in 1936. Left the school in 1953 at the age of 17, Married in 1954 at the age of 18. Arrived in Hawaii in 1959, aged approx 23...where was he during the intervening four or five years? I wonder... "
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Barack Obama Sr. & ProLiteracy
ProLiteracy's association with Barack Obama Sr. dates back to the late 1950's under the auspices of Laubach Literacy International, a global literacy nonprofit founded by literacy pioneer Dr. Frank Laubach. (In 2002, Laubach Literacy International merged with Literacy Volunteers of America to form the nonprofit ProLiteracy, the world's largest nonprofit adult literacy organization. More information is available here.)
In 1957, Elizabeth Mooney1, an American literacy specialist with a deep history working with Laubach Literacy International, traveled halfway across the globe to Kenya on behalf of the U.S. Department of State. Mooney's job was to conduct a literacy campaign, the Kenyan Government Literacy Project 2, which included training teachers, conducting literacy classes and developing educational materials for the betterment of the country's men and women.
During her time in Kenya working on the Project, Mooney met a young student named Barack H. Obama who was the recipient of an economic scholarship received through a student program organized by Kenyan government leaders. The program offered Western educational opportunities to outstanding Kenyan students such as the young Obama.
The Government Literacy Project focused on providing the people of Kenya with the basic literacy and education skills they needed to both learn to read and learn the skills necessary to better their lives and the lives of their families. Obama, with oversight from Mooney, assisted with administrative duties in the Project office and provided insights into the literacy needs of his fellow Kenyans. Ultimately, Obama helped author adult literacy booklets in his native Luo language: one on health, another on agriculture and a final piece on citizenship3.
In 1958, Obama was ready to advance his education with the goal of mastering Western technology and bringing it back to help forge a new, modern Africa4. Obama worked with Mooney to write to universities in the United States regarding their application process and scholarship opportunities. With a letter of recommendation provided by Mooney and initial financial support from Laubach Literacy International 5, Obama's application to study economics at the University of Hawaii was accepted. He was admitted on a scholarship and started his studies in the fall of 1959.
During his time in Hawaii and in need of support as a full time student, Obama reached out to Laubach Literacy International for additional financial assistance. In the spirit of the organizational belief that it could help "build tomorrow's teams in centers and abroad" the organization awarded Obama a Fund Scholarship to support to his United States studies. The record of this funding was noted in the organization's 1961 Annual Report: "Barack Obama, from Kenya, is in an undergraduate program at the University of Hawaii. An honor student, Barack may come later to Syracuse for literacy journalism." 6 Because of her deep belief in his skills and abilities, Mooney also provided personal financial assistance to Obama to support his tenure at the University of Hawaii.
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In 1956, at the age of 20 he moved to Nairobi, Kenya where he began working as a clerk. At this time while he was on vacation in Kundy Bay, Kenya he met a 16-year-old girl named Kezia at a dance. Kezia was so struck by him that she followed him back to Nairobi. Her father and brothers soon followed to try and force her to come back to Kundy Bay, but she refused. The two married in a tribal ceremony January, 1957. His family sent Kezias father 14 cows for her dowry. The following year the couple had their first son, Abongo.
thanks, that clears that up; he did work in Kenya, married in 1957 and left for Hawaii in 1959 by which time Kezia had one child and was pregnant again.
Much appreciated.
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
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.”
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 Mboyas 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 Kenyas 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 Okongo, another of the airlift students, succinctly summed up the airlifts impact on Kenya in an e-mail to Mboyas 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 Hawaiis just becoming a state in 1959. He was an otherwise-attractive, well- recommended candidate who would be Hawaiis 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 Hawaiis first- ever African student, Obama Sr. received more than the usual freshmans 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 couples 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 hasnt 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. "
Keziah Obama: My life with Obama Senior Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 2:59:50 PM by Red Steel LINK
Obama Senior left for the United States in 1959 for further studies during the famous airlifts organised by the late Planning Minister Tom Mboya.
I remember escorting him to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi, then known as Embakasi airport, she says.
He asked me to take care of our only child then, Malik Abongo, who was six years old. I was pregnant with our second child Rita Auma.
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How's your math? NOTHING adds up!