Obama, 45, has two half- sisters, one living in Britain, and five surviving half-brothers, the eldest of whom converted to Islam, and whose stories span the globe.
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Suryakusuma, 53, one of Indonesia’s most outspoken feminist writers, has fearlessly taken on extremist Muslim clerics in print. Last week she described Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother, “as a liberal and a humanist”, who learnt to speak fluent Indonesian and adored the culture.
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Dunham was from Wichita, Kansas, but her parents moved to Hawaii in search of a better life. According to Obama, a distant ancestor was a “full-blooded Cherokee”.
Dunham’s first marriage was to a Kenyan student, also called Barack Obama, but he left the family to study at Harvard and returned to Africa.
She went on to marry Lolo Soetoro, another foreign student, and moved to his native Indonesia with six-year-old Barack in 1967, after the new dictator Suharto summoned the country’s citizens home.
Soetoro became a government relations consultant with a big US oil company. “He changed when he came back to Indonesia,” Suryakusuma recalled. “Men can be a certain way when they are in the West and when they come back they are sucked into their own culture.”
In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, first published in 1995, Obama does not conceal the estrangement between his mother and stepfather as Soetoro made compromises with Indonesia’s power elite. They divorced and he died decades later of a liver complaint.
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Yet there are details in Obama’s life that have yet to be subjected to full scrutiny. It may not be the information itself that matters, according to Galston, but “how Obama talks about the facts as they emerge and handles questions and controversies”.
The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet was the first to spot in 2004, when Obama burst on the national stage at the Democratic party convention, that his memoir, Dreams from My Father, contained “composite” characters and changed names.
“Except for public figures and his family, it is impossible to know who is real and who is not,” she pointed out.
Obama admitted as much in his introduction, saying he had altered characters “for the sake of their privacy”. As with the revelation that he took cocaine in his youth, he appears to have been candid about potential areas of controversy.
Obama’s African family is particularly complicated. By his own account, his father never really left Kezia, his first wife, in Kenya. She bore Obama Sr two children, Roy and Auma, who now works in social services in Berkshire.
They were separated, Obama’s mother claimed, but “it was a village wedding and there was no document that could suggest a divorce”.
His own father and mother’s wedding in Hawaii may not have been properly documented either. “How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore,” Obama writes in his memoir.
After his father left Ann and two-year-old Barack to study at Harvard, he went to Africa with another American woman, Ruth, who became his third wife. She bore him two sons in Kenya, one of whom died in a motorcycle accident, but Obama Sr continued to see Kezia.
“Traditionally, she was still his wife,” a relative explained. Kezia went on to bear two more sons, Abo and Bernard. Although their paternity is disputed by some relatives, Obama Sr regarded them as his own. Later in life, he fathered another son, George, by a young Kenyan woman.
After his parents split up, Obama saw his father only once before learning that he had died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982.
Obama’s eldest brother Roy moved to America and went on to convert to Islam.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2569704,00.html
Topic: Secrets of Obama Family Unlocked (Read 3119 times)