• If you are having problems logging in please use the Contact Us in the lower right hand corner of the forum page for assistance.

Barack Sr.

Mike

Well-known member
bARACK2.jpg


Nice hats!
 

Mike

Well-known member
Cicago Sun-Times
BARACK OBAMA SR.
Wrestling with . . . a ghost'

September 9, 2007
BY SCOTT FORNEK Political Editor
To the son he barely knew, Barack Obama Sr. became an almost mythical, larger-than-life figure.
"All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own," Obama writes in Dreams From My Father. "The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader -- my father had been all those things."

But, as an adult, he learned there was a darker side to his Harvard-educated father.

"A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat?" Obama wrote. "To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!"

Barack Obama Sr. was born in Kenya in 1936. He met Obama's mother while both were college students in Hawaii. But the marriage broke up when the senior Obama went to study at Harvard.

"He and my mother divorced when I was only two years old, and for most of my life I knew him only through the letters he sent and the stories my mother and grandparents told," Obama said in speech he delivered this year just before Father's Day.

The senior Obama was also essentially a polygamist.

The way Obama describes it in his book, his father had two children by a woman in Kenya before meeting Obama's mother in Hawaii. Then, when the junior Obama's parents' marriage dissolved around 1963, the senior Obama returned to Kenya with another woman he met in the United States and had two children by her. But that didn't stop him from resuming his relationship with his first wife.

After Kenya achieved its independence, Barack Obama Sr. worked for a U.S. oil company and eventually went to work for the Kenyan government as a senior economist. But, through a mix of conflicts between the ruling tribes and his own outspoken nature and drinking, the senior Obama fell from power for a long period during the late 1960s and '70s.

He died in a car accident in 1982.

"My dad didn't suffer fools gladly, and you have to be diplomatic," his daughter, Auma Obama, told the Sunday Times of London last year. "Barack is different. He is able to relate to people. I'm more like my dad. I don't have Barack's patience."
 
Top