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

by Janny Scott

  Using her dissertation field notes as a guide, Ann took Raintree on an orientation tour, giving him the deepest and most insightful anthropological perspective on rural industry he told me he had ever encountered. With Semarang as their base, they would drive up to four hours out of the city to villages all over Central Java. They paid countless courtesy calls on provincial officials, district heads, and village headmen—formal meetings in which Ann would introduce Raintree and their project. The government official would preside from a chair on a dais, looking down on his visitors, seated below. Raintree, who had done fieldwork in the Philippines and was used to villages of tribal people with their own traditions, was unaccustomed to the rigid, hierarchical nature of Java. To do anything at any level, one needed permission from all the levels of government and administration above. It helped that Ann knew what she was talking about and spoke the language. “But she couldn’t have gotten anywhere with that if she didn’t also know how to be politically correct and formal, and at the same time charming,” Raintree told me. “These were all kingdoms before they became bureaucracies within a national state. She knew how to be courtly.”

  Ann worried about corruption among government officials, who, Raintree said, sometimes seemed to her not to care much about ordinary people. She also noticed that the class background of government planners and administrators, who were mostly men, tended to work against poor women sharing in the benefits of development projects. The Indonesian men she worked with, mainly from the planning office and the Department of Industry, “simply did not believe that the lives of poor village women were significantly different from the lives of women of their own class,” Ann would write to a colleague in July 1981. “In other words, they believed that poor village women spent most of their time at home, caring for children and doing housework, fully supported by their husbands except for a little ‘pin money’ they might earn doing handicrafts or selling something in the market from time to time. Given these preconceptions about the importance (or unimportance) of women’s work, it is not surprising that women were seldom selected as participants in projects which could increase their income-generating abilities.”

  But Ann was pragmatic. She was good at recognizing a felicitous convergence of interests. She believed that improvements could be made even if they were not the top priority of the people she had to convince. The game was to enable her Indonesian counterparts to see why it was in their own enlightened self-interest to help the poor. She was an organizer, always with goals of her own. If a colleague had his own view about how things ought to be organized, Raintree said, he had to devote some energy to seeing that they were not done her way instead. In fact, he told me, “I could understand why a young man would need to go off to school in Hawaii.”

  On one occasion, Raintree recalled, he challenged a policy of Ann’s—and went so far as to discuss the matter with the team leader. “She gave me a stern lecture about how friends don’t do that,” he remembered. She did not mince words. He saw her angry, too, when she believed others had been treated unfairly. For example, she had a driver in Semarang who doubled as a field assistant. As Raintree put it, “Her driver was much more than a driver.” Occasionally, people unfamiliar with the arrangement had a tendency to treat the man as they might a mere driver. Ann would stand up for him, Raintree recalled, with fire in her eyes and steel in her voice. If the cultural context was such that she could express her views, she did. “Sometimes it would involve a sharp anger but not something lingering or smoldering,” he said. “She spoke her mind, and that was it.”

  For village people, one of the biggest barriers to expanding a business, and moving out of poverty, was the lack of affordable credit—the problem Ann had stumbled on while doing the research for her dissertation. The most common source of credit was moneylenders—that is, loan sharks, as Carl Dutto described them. A trader might borrow money at four a.m., walk to the central market, buy whatever she intended to sell, take a becak to the suburbs, sell her product by the side of the road, pay back the moneylender at some exorbitant rate of interest, and keep whatever was left. The lenders made a killing, and their customers barely scraped by. Nearly everyone in the villages seemed to be in debt to moneylenders. Foreign development groups and Indonesian organizations such as the one for which Clare Blenkinsop worked were exploring other ways of offering small amounts of credit. By the time Blenkinsop arrived in Semarang in 1979, there were already eight to ten thousand savers in the program run by her organization, which enabled women to become eligible for a loan by demonstrating that they could save.

  The Indonesian government, too, was interested in rural credit. To help diversify the economy, redistribute wealth, and promote rural development, the government had mobilized the banking system. In 1970, the governor of Central Java had used a provincial government loan to launch a system of rural and locally run financial institutions to make small, short-term loans to rural families. The system, known as the Badan Kredit Kecamatan, or the subdistrict credit agency, grew rapidly in Central Java. But when the units were pressed to repay their government loans and support themselves, many suffered high losses. There was also corruption and mismanagement. By the late 1970s, one-third of the 486 units in Central Java were languishing or had closed.

  To help tackle the problem of credit, the U.S. Agency for International Development enlisted the help of Richard Patten, a brainy, irascible development veteran from Norman, Oklahoma, who had worked in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and in Ghana in the 1960s before moving on to Indonesia. In East Pakistan, Patten told me, he had worked with Akhtar Hameed Khan, an Indian-born, Cambridge-educated social scientist and development activist now recognized as a pioneer in what is now known as microcredit—the making of very small, or micro, loans to impoverished entrepreneurs. Khan, who had founded the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development, had been working on ways of lending money for small enterprises, including small shops. “We followed what he had pioneered when we did a public-works program in East Pakistan,” Patten said. “He was doing group credit through the cooperatives but then using a local bank to support it.” The Agency for International Development was interested in trying similar things in Central Java. At first, Dutto said, the agency did not know what might work. They tried lending chicks, ducklings, and goats—to be paid back in other chicks, ducklings, and goats. They also began working with the floundering rural-banking system.

  Ann, the credit adviser hired by Development Alternatives Inc., worked with Patten, the credit adviser to the Agency for International Development. From her dissertation fieldwork, Ann had found that rural industries were frequently held back by shortages of raw materials—which they often lacked because they did not have the working capital to keep them in stock. Women had an especially hard time getting even government-sponsored loans. In 1979, Ann evaluated a small credit project being carried out in ten villages in industries such as production of roof tiles, cassava chips, and rattan. In most of the villages, women as well as men worked in those industries—but not one of the one hundred twenty-nine loans had gone to a woman. The provincial development project, for which Ann was working, began providing not only capital but training in management and bookkeeping to sixty-five Badan Kredit Kecamatan banking units in Central Java. Those offices became a proving ground for new initiatives. The best of those initiatives eventually spread beyond Central Java. The system became a permanent government-run program in 1981, and the Indonesian Ministry of Finance made a large loan to the provincial government to strengthen and expand it. Looking back on the provincial development project as a whole, Silverman said it resulted in the setting up of planning bodies throughout Indonesia, which took on an important role in the allocation of government resources at the provincial level. But, he said, “the one major success we had was the small-scale credit and institutionalizing it. It was the one thing that got institutionalized in ways that are close to what was intended.”

  Ann’s days were long and full. She worked o
n her dissertation before dawn, managed her household staff, saw to the schooling of her daughter. Every day, she wrote at least a couple of paragraphs to Barry, Kadi Warner remembered: “It was part of her ritual.” Ann attended meetings, went into the field, spent time in the office, escorted visitors. At night, she presided over lively dinners at home. She liked running her own household, being immersed in her work, being accountable largely to herself. In her element, she was developing a big and unmistakable presence. “She was the grand lady when she was in the village, or in her house, or talking with the bupati,” Raintree said, using the Indonesian word for a district head. “She was enormously bright; she was fluent in Indonesian; she always had a sort of twinkle in her eye. I always thought she had just swallowed a canary.” Even in a difficult negotiation, she seemed to be enjoying herself. Decades later, Raintree remembered a certain look on Ann’s face, a trace of which he had begun to notice in her son during the presidential campaign. After making a point, Ann would look down the bridge of her nose, her chin slightly elevated at its usual angle. In Obama, some people had interpreted that look as aloofness, Raintree said, “but when she did it, she had this puckish smile.” In her work, she set goals, met deadlines, was a team player, did not bend rules, Silverman said. “This notion that she was this hippie wanderer floating through foreign things and having an adventure is not the Ann I know,” he said. “In a sense, she was as type A as anybody on the team.”

  Ann kept much of her private life private, even with close friends. Glen Williams, who dined with her a number of times during the year they overlapped in Semarang, said he did not know at the time whether or not Ann was married. He knew that Maya’s father “was the Indonesian guy,” as he put it, but the subject of Lolo never came up in conversation. Ann told Silverman that she and Lolo had separated. Their marriage reminded Nancy Peluso of some other Indonesian marriages she knew of, in which husband and wife seemed to go in their own directions. “It wasn’t like a real marriage,” she told me. “It was just kind of a marriage in name.”

  Sometime in 1979, Ann and Lolo agreed to divorce. According to Maya, Ann received a phone call in Semarang from Lolo, and by the end of the call, it had been decided. I heard several different accounts of the reason the marriage ended, some or all of which could conceivably be true. According to one explanation, offered by Peluso, Ann no longer believed that she and Lolo had anything in common. She was tired of trying to arrange for them to spend time together. According to Alice Dewey, Ann knew from Lolo’s doctors in Los Angeles that he had few years left to live. She knew from Lolo that he wanted more children, which she did not. So, according to Dewey, she did the practical and humane thing: She let him go. A third explanation came from Rens Heringa, who became a close friend of Ann’s around the time of her divorce and who later divorced her own part-Indonesian husband. Heringa told me bluntly, “She left him—on the pretext that she had to work, which was an acceptable pretext. The real reason was that it was hopeless. He couldn’t accept the way she was, and she couldn’t accept the kinds of things he expected.”

  The divorce became final in August 1980, according to a passport application of Ann’s. Lolo married the woman Maya remembered encountering in her father’s home the day she and Ann had returned to Jakarta. He went on to father two more children, a son and a daughter, before dying of liver disease in 1987 at the age of fifty-two.

  Ann’s relationship with Maya, who turned ten in 1980, was close and affectionate. Delightful and dimply, Maya was on her way to becoming extraordinarily beautiful. In many ways, Ann treated her like an adult. She took her everywhere, in a way that some people told me was common in Indonesia. “Many hours of my childhood were spent in the homes of blacksmiths or by their furnaces,” Maya has written. “When we visited the blacksmith known as Pak Marto, I would look for the reliably present feral dogs chasing chickens outside his home. . . . Mom took me to see potters, weavers, and tile makers, too.” In the house in Semarang, Ann had converted a room into a schoolroom, with desks for Maya and several other children from expatriate families. Lesson manuals, textbooks, workbooks, and school supplies arrived in boxes from the home instruction department of the Calvert Day School in Baltimore. A rotating roster of parents served as teachers, meeting in various households. Kadi Warner, whom Ann enlisted to teach world and United States history, told me that the Calvert system was the oldest formal homeschooling curriculum and was highly respected. “It was the standard internationally then,” she said. “If you went through that, you were prepared.” But Ann was not satisfied with the arrangement for Maya, Richard Holloway recalled. “That was a source of sadness and disappointment to her,” he said. “That she was failing as a mother by not giving her a better education than that.”

  The dilemma was not uncommon. Some expatriate families were reluctant to enroll their children in international schools for fear that they would know only expatriate children. They wanted their children to appreciate the country in which they were living and to have local friends. So they sent them to local schools. But at a certain age, a child in a local school would not receive the preparation necessary to get into a university of the sort their parents attended. “So there is a real problem,” said Clare Blenkinsop, who faced the same issue later with her son. “I think that was the problem for Ann with Maya. She didn’t want Maya to be cut off in some sort of international school. On the other hand, the level of education gained in anything going in Semarang was probably well below the level that was needed.”

  The quandary was especially difficult because Maya was half Indonesian.

  In the spring of 1980, officials at the Ford Foundation in New York and Jakarta had begun talking about creating a new position in the Jakarta office. The job would entail encouraging research, at the village level, on rural employment and the role of women. Women, it seemed, were playing a critical role in keeping poor households afloat. But Indonesian government policies and programs would not reflect that reality until there were more data to prove it. Officials at Ford wanted to encourage more village-level studies. Research, they hoped, would not only help explain the causes of rural poverty, it might also suggest how to enable poor households to take advantage of opportunities the government or other agencies offered. In March, Sidney Jones, a Ford program officer in Jakarta, wrote an interoffice memo listing six people who should be sent the description of the job in case they might want to apply. Jones knew Ann through Nancy Peluso. All three of them, along with other scholars, had begun to collaborate on a possible book of articles on women’s economic activities in Java, which Ann intended to edit. The six names on Jones’s list had come from Peter Goethals, an American anthropologist who was a Harvard classmate of Alice Dewey’s and a former denizen of the house in Mānoa. Goethals had been working on the same Agency for International Development project as Ann, but in another part of Indonesia. All six candidates were anthropologists, fluent in Indonesian, who had done fieldwork in the country. But Ann was described at the greatest length. After listing Ann’s scholarly credentials, Jones concluded, “She’s a specialist in small scale industries/non-farm employment and would be superb.”

  Eight

  The Foundation

  Four Americans lingered at the entrance to a teeming street market in an out-of-the-way neighborhood in Yogyakarta. It was the fall of 1981, and their little landing party must have made an unusual sight—a stout white woman, a six-foot-four-inch-tall black man, and two white male colleagues, all towering above the eddying crowd. The place was a used-book market, Tom Kessinger, the head of the Jakarta office of the Ford Foundation at the time, remembered years later. But a Westerner might have mistaken it for a paper-recycling operation. Sellers trudged in, humping inventory in fabric bundles on their backs. The market was chaotic, densely packed, and dominated by men. One year into her job at Ford, Ann was increasingly immersed in the world of street vendors, scavengers, and others who eked out a living in the informal economy, where as many as nine out of every
ten Indonesians made at least part of their living. On that day, the used-book market was being forced to close, under pressure from merchants or the police. Ann was accompanied by Kessinger, who had lived for years in India, and Franklin Thomas, who had overseen the restoration of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn before becoming the president and chief executive officer of Ford. “We waded into the market in a way that nobody outside the country would have,” Kessinger remembered. “If you weren’t someone as big as Frank is, you might even feel physically threatened. It was so dense and out of control.” Ann strode into the chaos, leading the way. Thirty years later, Kessinger would remember the ease with which she unlocked the obscure logic of the place, the relationships and patterns of organization. He said, “I could see, and she communicated it nonverbally, just how comfortable and easy it was going to be.”

  When he had hired Ann, Kessinger had been looking for someone capable of working “close to the ground,” as he put it later. The Ford Foundation, one of the leading philanthropic organizations in the United States, defined its mission as strengthening democratic values, reducing poverty and injustice, promoting international cooperation, and advancing human achievement. After going from a local to an international foundation in 1950, it had operated initially by hiring expatriates with specialized knowledge, and making them available to emerging countries trying to build democratic forms of government. By the early 1980s, countries such as Indonesia had experts and institutions of their own, so Ford was becoming a source of funding more than a supplier of outside expertise. Thomas, after ten years in community-based development in New York, believed in local talent. The Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, which he had headed, had enlisted neighborhood people in the work of urban redevelopment. At Ford, he wanted local people engaged in every aspect of the foundation’s international work. “There was an evolving sense that you probably had more knowledge in the experience of people in almost any setting than you could bring in from the outside, no matter how diligently the outsiders worked or studied,” Thomas told me. Tom Kessinger, arriving in Jakarta in August 1979 to head the Ford office, had set about making contact with Indonesia’s small but growing universe of civil-society organizations, in which an emerging generation of leaders was working for social and economic change. He wanted to know how those organizations could be nurtured. It was easy to find the bigger ones; they tended to be based in Jakarta and had English-speaking staffs who knew how to write reports. Harder to reach were the smaller, more numerous, less sophisticated, so-called nongovernmental organizations scattered all over the archipelago. “What Ann represented to me was getting out into the NGO circuit beyond what I could do because of my obligations and my poor Indonesian,” Kessinger told me. She arrived at Ford, Thomas said, “at a time when the institutional focus had shifted from the elite to the grassroots. She personified someone all of whose ties were at a non-elite level.”