A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  If Ann had a plan, it did not involve sitting still.

  She was an unusual figure on campus. Jeanette Chikamoto Takamura was a sophomore when she met Ann during the 1966 academic year. Ann was working part-time as a student secretary in the office of the student government organization; Takamura, active in student government, hung out in the office between classes. Ann struck Takamura as a “natural intellectual,” with an outlook and orientation that was unusually global. She dressed in dashikis, kept African artifacts on her desk, and gravitated in conversation toward international topics. There was something enigmatic about her, Takamura found. She left an impression of detachment, perhaps because she seemed always to be thinking, as though her mind were operating on multiple planes. Takamura met Ann’s small, curly-haired son, Barry, whose father, Ann told her, had returned to Africa. The marriage, Ann said simply, had not worked out. On one occasion, Ann stunned Takamura by confiding to her that she wanted to send Barry to Punahou Academy, seen by many as the top prep school in Hawaii. “I’m thinking, ‘How in the world is she going to afford this?’” Takamura told me. “I remember thinking, ‘Do not say anything discouraging.’ So I said, ‘You know, Ann? I think you’ll find a way.’”

  Several years earlier, late in 1963 or early 1964, Ann had shown up at “Indonesian Night” at the East-West Center in a borrowed sarong and kebaya, the long-sleeved, often cotton or silk blouse worn by Indonesian women. At her side was a twenty-seven-year-old Javanese graduate student named Lolo Soetoro, who had arrived at the university in 1962 in the second wave of Indonesian students on East-West Center grants. Ann and Lolo may have met at the tennis courts on campus; at least, that is how the story goes. “He was quite a tennis player,” Maya said. “She used to comment that she liked the way he looked in his white tennis shorts.” He was good-looking, amiable, easygoing, patient, and funny. He liked sports and he liked a good laugh. Benji Bennington, who was in Lolo’s year at the university and went to work at the East-West Center the month he arrived, said, “He wanted to meet people all the time. He wasn’t shy about using his English. He had a good sense of humor, and he loved to party. Yeah, he loved to party.”

  Another Indonesian student, Sylvia Engelen, and a German student she later married, Gerald Krausse, brought a camera to “Indonesian Night” that year. In the fall of 2008, the Krausses opened a well-worn photo album on a coffee table in a living room in Rhode Island, where they had settled. The album was filled with fading snapshots taken in Hawaii and at the university in the early 1960s. There was Sylvia, in a green Balinese costume, and Lolo Soetoro, in a batik shirt and gray trousers. Beside him stood Ann, in her borrowed outfit, her head tilted uncharacteristically and rather demurely downward. “We met her through Lolo,” Sylvia Krausse said, sounding amazed even then by the memory. “When he brought her to ‘Indonesian Night.’”

  With Lolo and Sylvia Engelen, “Indonesian Night” at the East-West Center

  Like some Javanese, Lolo had been given one name, Soetoro, at birth. Like the names of his nine siblings—Soegijo, Soegito, Soemitro, Soewarti, Soewardinah, and so on—his began with the soe-prefix, meaning “good” or “fortunate,” or some combination of both. Born in Bandung in 1936 and raised in Yogyakarta, he was the youngest of the ten. “Everybody loved him, maybe because he was the youngest boy,” one of his nieces, Kismardhani S-Roni, told me. His childhood nickname, Lolo, came from the Javanese word mlolo, a verb meaning “to gaze wide-eyed.” All the boys and several of the girls in the family went to college, according to Lolo’s nephew, Wisaksono “Sonny” Trisulo. From there, they moved into jobs in fields such as the law, the oil industry, and higher education. Lolo studied geography at Gadjah Mada University, the most respected university in Yogyakarta. He became a lieutenant in the Indonesian army, according to Bill Collier, who knew him at the University of Hawai‘i and later in Indonesia. With the support of the Indonesian government, he became the first member of his family to study outside of the country. In the fall of 1962, he was sent to the University of Hawai‘i on a two-year East-West Center grant to get a master’s degree in geography. In return for which, Sonny Trisulo said, Lolo was expected to devote four years to government service on his return.

  Lolo and Stanley, Hawaii

  Lolo was in many ways the opposite of Barack Obama Sr. He lacked Obama’s intimidating intensity, his ambitions, the force of his intellect. He was kind and considerate. By temperament, and by culture, he was not inclined to argue. He was calm. All of that was part of his appeal to Ann, whose gale-force encounter with Obama had shaken her up. “It was kind of a reaction to her first husband, who was exciting, but he wasn’t exactly a family man,” said Kay Ikranagara, who would become a close friend of Ann’s in Jakarta in the 1970s. “Lolo was stable, would work, support the family. She thought that was really appealing.” If Lolo had a tendency to open the newspaper straight to the sports pages and stop there, Ann did not mind that, for a time. He was from a part of the world that was increasingly interesting to her. He was hoping to return to Indonesia, which had emerged from three hundred fifty years of Dutch domination, to teach at the university and become a part of his country’s future. “That was part of what had drawn her to Lolo after Barack had left,” the younger Obama would write, “the promise of something new and important, helping her husband rebuild a country in a charged and challenging place beyond her parents’ reach.”

  Whether Ann was looking forward to a lifetime in Indonesia or simply reaching for an escape hatch is difficult to know.

  Intermarriage was not unusual among East-West Center students. Gerald Krausse, who had been working as a busboy in Waikiki, had got tired of food service and enrolled as an undergraduate at the university. “I was mesmerized by all these foreign students,” he told me. “I wanted to be part of it.” He got a job as a grill cook in the East-West Center cafeteria and as a guard in the center’s men’s dorm, where students would descend from their rooms in pajamas at two a.m. during the Muslim fasting period and start cooking in order to finish eating by dawn. Krausse became interested in Asia. Soon he met Sylvia Engelen, an Indonesian from Manado who had arrived in February 1961 on an East-West Center grant and was studying German and French. When they married in Hawaii in 1966, sixty students turned out for their wedding. There was just one family member—Sylvia’s sister, also on an East-West Center grant. The cake, created by Gerald, a trained pastry chef, captured the Hawaii and East-West Center zeitgeist. It was crowned with a globe made of royal icing with two butterflies on top.

  From time to time, the East-West Center made an effort to keep track of the marriage patterns of single students on East-West grants. Impulse, a magazine published by and for center students, reported in 1975 that students who married after coming to the center had at least a thirty-three percent chance of marrying across national or ethnic lines. “When you put young people in their twenties and thirties together, guess what?” as Sylvia Krausse put it. Were those marriages strong? No, she answered, without hesitation. For years, she and her husband encountered East-West Center alumni at Asian-studies conferences. In some cases, she said, one member of a couple would have had to make his or her career secondary to that of the other—or give it up. In addition, she said, Asian men who had felt free to be “very flamboyant and open” in the United States returned home to cultural expectations, family obligations, and the influence of parents and relatives. “I think the girls didn’t understand, when they went back,” she said. “Especially the American girls.”

  On the night of September 30, 1965, six Indonesian army generals and one lieutenant were kidnapped and killed in Jakarta in what the army quickly characterized as an attempted coup planned by the Communist Party. Though immediately quashed, the incident unleashed a bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and suspected sympathizers were slaughtered in the following months, often by civilian vigilantes with the support of the army. As Adam Schwarz described the events in A Nation in Waiting, people were k
illed by knife and bayonet, their bodies often “maimed and decapitated and dumped in rivers. At one point officials in Surabaya in East Java complained to Army officials that the rivers running into Surabaya were choked with bodies.” The Central Intelligence Agency described the massacres as “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.”

  On the serene campus of the University of Hawai‘i, Indonesian students were summoned to be questioned by people whom Sylvia Krausse remembered as visiting representatives of the Indonesian government. A fellow student warned her to show up “or something will happen to your parents.” There were written questions followed by questioning in person. “We were there all day,” she said. “They were looking for Chinese and communist connections.”

  Like many students studying outside the country in that period, Lolo was called back to Indonesia. He and Ann had married on March 5, 1964, shortly after she divorced Obama. Lolo had received his master’s degree in geography three months later, but Ann, an anthropology major, would not receive her undergraduate degree until 1967. Andrew P. Vayda, a professor of anthropology and ecology who was visiting the University of Hawai‘i in that period, remembered meeting Lolo for the first time at the university in the spring of 1966, then visiting him on a trip to Jakarta late that summer. The two of them traveled together to Bandung, once a Dutch colonial garrison in the northern foothills of the Bandung Plateau, surrounded by volcanic peaks, hot springs, and tea plantations. The inflation rate was seven hundred percent, and the country felt on edge. On one leg of the trip, they encountered tanks rumbling down the main road. “He and all the Indonesians, you could see the fear on their faces—that something was going to happen,” Vayda remembered. Throughout the trip, Lolo made a point of trying the spiciest and most exotic foods and the most decrepit toilets. “How do you think Ann would react to that?” Lolo would ask.

  “That was the first I had heard of Ann,” Vayda remembered. “He said he was going to bring her there.”

  Four

  Initiation in Java

  The luncheon invitation was delivered by bicycle one morning in early 1971. Elizabeth Bryant, an American in her early thirties, was living in a converted rice storage facility in the city of Yogyakarta in Central Java. Her husband, Nevin, was doing research in Indonesia on an East-West Center grant. Like pretty much everyone in Indonesia in those years, they had no running water, no plumbing, no telephone service. To brush their teeth, they pumped water from a well, boiled it on a single kerosene burner, and spat it off the front porch. Their three servants, living in what had been the guardhouse, had fenced a five-foot pit in the yard for use as their toilet. Bushes served as a clothesline for the Bryant baby’s diapers. Life may not have been easy, but it was good. The Bryants’ house was next to the kraton, the walled compound surrounding the palace of the sultans of Yogyakarta, the lively center of traditional Javanese arts and culture. In the evening, the aqueous sounds of the gamelan practice drifted out of the compound; neighbors dropped by to lure the Bryants out to an all-night shadow-puppet performance based on tales derived from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. On this particular morning, the invitation to Elizabeth Bryant came by messenger from an older American woman in Yogyakarta whose husband was working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Jakarta office had asked her to extend her hospitality to a young American and her nine-year-old son, visiting from their home in Jakarta. Could Mrs. Bryant join them for lunch? the older woman wanted to know. The guest of honor was showing her son around Java before sending him back to Hawaii for school. He was half Kenyan and born in Hawaii, Bryant recalled her hostess telling her in advance. Bryant knew enough about Hawaii to know that a half-African child would have been a rarity. Are you sure? she asked.

  It was a memorable lunch—one that Bryant was able to describe in detail when I reached her in Southern California thirty-eight years later. Ann Soetoro arrived at the house with the young Barack Obama. She was dressed in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric—not the sort of sundress that Mrs. Bryant had noticed that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor. She instructed Barry to shake hands, then to sit on the sofa and turn his attention to an English-language workbook she had brought along. She was sending him back to Hawaii for an English-language education, Bryant remembered her saying. She was also deciding whether to go back herself. “She said, ‘What would you do?’” Bryant told me. “I said, ‘I could live here as long as two years, then would go back to Hawaii.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said it was hard living, it took a toll on your body, there were no doctors, it was not healthy. She didn’t agree with me.” Ann had left her infant daughter, Maya, in Jakarta with a servant—a choice that startled Bryant, unaccustomed as she was to Indonesian child-rearing. She wondered, too, why Ann, with an Indonesian husband, would consider moving to the United States. Over lunch, Barry sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant’s son, who was thirteen months old. After lunch, the group took a walk near Gadjah Mada University, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction, ducking behind a wall and shouting racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodgeball “with unseen players,” Bryant remembered. Ann did not seem visibly to react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s okay,” she remembered Ann saying. “He’s used to it.”

  “I’ll tell you what both of us felt,” Bryant told me. “We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks. It was unusually bad. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, they’re more racist than the U.S., by far.’” At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way—for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways.

  “I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the president, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “It’s because of his Indonesian background. I think he’s a mixture of cultures, and that makes him more worldly. He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans—being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you’re not a good listener in Indonesia, you’d better leave.”

  Indonesia was still in a state of shock when Ann arrived in 1967 for the first of three extended periods of residence that would eventually add up to the majority of her adult life. After centuries of domination by the Dutch, followed by Japanese occupation and a four-year revolution, the 17, 500 islands that make up what is now Indonesia had become an independent nation in 1949. By the early 1960s, inflation was soaring, foreign investment had stagnated, and poverty was widespread. People waited in long lines to buy basics, such as kerosene and rice. The Communist Party had grown into the third largest in the world. In 1963, Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, suspended elections. The following year, he declared “the year of vivere pericoloso,” borrowing the Italian phrase for “living dangerously” from a speech by Mussolini. The details of the September 30, 1965, coup and counter-coup remain in dispute, as do the particulars of the slaughter that followed. There is disagreement over who planned the attack on the generals and for what purpose; and estimates of the number of communists, suspected communists, and others killed in the ensuing bloodbath range from 100,000 to more than a million. But it is known that neighbors turned on neighbors. According to Adrian Vickers, the author of A History of Modern Indonesia, militias went door-to-door in villages in Bali, abducting suspects, raping women, even targeting childre
n. “The best way to prove you were not a Communist was to join in the killings,” Vickers writes. The army became the dominant institution in the country. Soldiers were ubiquitous, armed with machine guns on buses and trains and in public buildings. Major-General Suharto, who took power when Sukarno was sidelined, exercised tight control over internal security and community life. Trials and imprisonments dragged on for years. Many Indonesians chose never to speak about what had happened. Bill Collier, who arrived in Indonesia in 1968 and spent fifteen years doing social and economic surveys in villages, told me that researchers would be told by people living near brackish waterways that they had been unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water. He recalled how a well-dressed stranger knocked on the door to his house in Bandung in 1968, at a time when many educated people even remotely suspected of communist ties had lost their jobs. The man’s children were hungry, and he had no food in the house. Could Collier spare some rice? he wanted to know. Four decades later, slumped in a chair in the extravagantly appointed lobby of a hotel in Jakarta where we met, Collier recalled saying no—an act of such stupidity, he said, that the memory haunted him to that day. “I have wished a thousand times that I had given him all the rice in the house,” he said.