The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
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Soetoro, born in the city of Bandung, had grown up in a landscape of violence and upheaval--Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, revolution---and his family had not escaped the worst. His father and eldest brother were killed during Indonesia's revolt in the late nineteen-forties against the Dutch, who were vainly trying to repossess the country. The Dutch burned the Soetoros' house to the ground and the family fled to the countryside to wait out the conflict. To survive, Lolo's mother sold off her jewelry, one piece at a time, until the war finally ended. Eventually the family resettled near their old home and Soetoro got his undergraduate degree in geology at Gadjah Mada University, a prestigious school in Yogyakarta in central Java.
In Hawaii, Soetoro pursued his master's degree--and Ann Dunham--at a time when his country was enduring a horrific civil war. After Lolo and Ann married, in 1965, the Indonesian government called on all students studying abroad, Soetoro included, to return home to prove their loyalty and help "repair the country."
In 1967, Ann and Barry, who was now six years old and ready for first grade, flew to Japan, where they stayed for a few days to see the sights in Tokyo and Kamakura, and then went on to Jakarta to live with Lolo, who had taken a job as an army geologist, surveying roads and tunnels. Arriving in Indonesia in 1967 was like arriving on a battlefield where the ground was still strewn with the detritus of war and with fresh graves. For two decades, from 1945 to 1967, Sukarno was Indonesia's post-colonial ruler, its Father of the Nation, the great dalang, the puppet-master, manipulating factions and challengers, crushing or co-opting enemies, shifting from nationalism to "guided democracy" to autocratic rule as he deemed necessary. He had been master of the most complex of nations: seventeen thousand five hundred islands; three hundred languages; a culture shaped by Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Dutch, and the British. He managed by forging a delicate alliance drawn from the military, Communists, nationalists, and Islamists.
On the night of September 30, 1965, a group of Sukarno's generals were murdered by rival officers, a faction called the 30 September Movement. Within days, Major General Suharto forced Sukarno to yield effective power. The conflict came in a period of economic crisis--hyperinflation and, in many regions, famine. Suharto claimed that the violence had been initiated by leftists and he went about crushing the Indonesian Communist Party, the P.K.I., giving rise to a prolonged period of political imprisonments, purges, and suppression of the political left. In the months that followed, hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
For decades after the bloody events of the mid-sixties, Indonesians debated who was to blame for the violence. The growth of the P.K.I. under the Sukarno government had infuriated the military and the United States. Sukarno had also angered Western investors by nationalizing major industries, including oil. Most historians agree that one of Suharto's essential allies in the overthrow of Sukarno was the C.I.A.
The Soetoros lived in a crowded middle-class neighborhood, in a stucco house on Haji Ramli Street, a dirt lane that turned to mud in the rainy season. Ann's and Barry's early impressions of Jakarta were of heat and glare, poverty in the streets, beggars, the smell of diesel fuel, the din of traffic and hawkers. Thanks to his stepfather's playful munificence, Barry had a backyard menagerie: chickens and roosters pecking around a coop, crocodiles, birds of paradise, a cockatoo, and an ape from New Guinea named Tata. One day, Lolo mentioned that one of the crocodiles had escaped, crawled into a neighboring rice field and eaten the owner's ducks. Just as Ann was Barry's teacher in high-minded matters--liberal, humanist values; the need to remember that they, and not the Indonesians, were the "foreigners"; the beauty of Mahalia Jackson's singing and Martin Luther King's preaching--Lolo was his instructor in the rude and practical skills of middle-class Indonesian life. Lolo taught him how farm animals were killed for eating; how to box and defend himself, just in case; how to treat servants; how to ignore street beggars and keep enough for yourself; how the weak perish and the strong survive.
Before they left for Indonesia, Madelyn Dunham had called the State Department, asking about the perils of Jakarta--the political struggles, the strange foods. She could do nothing about the politics, but she did pack a couple of trunks of American packaged foods. "You never know what these people will eat," she said. She was right; soon, Barry sampled dog, snake, and roasted grasshopper. He took part in competitive battles with Indonesian kites, chased crickets, gaped at the poor in the streets--some of them missing a limb, an eye, a nose--and befriended all kinds of kids in the neighborhood: the children of government bureaucrats, the children of workers and farmers.
At home, Soetoro, who had always been cheerful back in Hawaii, wrestling and playing with Barry, was moodier, harder to talk to. In Hawaii, he had seemed liberated; in Jakarta, Obama recalled him "wandering through the house with a bottle of imported whiskey, nursing his secrets."
Ann also sensed the hauntedness of Jakarta. On one of her expeditions near the city, she came across a field of unmarked graves. She tentatively asked Lolo what had happened with the coup and the counter-coup, the scouring of the countryside for suspected Communists and the innumerable killings, the mass arrests, but most Indonesians, Lolo included, were extremely reluctant to talk about the horrors of the mid-sixties.
In 1970, Ann gave birth to a daughter named Maya. Maya developed a keen sense of her mother's attachment to the country. "There is a phrase in Indonesian, diam dalam seribu bahasa, that means 'to be silent in a thousand languages.' It's a very fitting phrase for the country," Maya said. "There are so many ways to be silent. Sometimes it's in the constant cheerfulness or the space between words. Indonesia became more interesting to her. And it was a challenge. I'm sure this girl from Kansas, having to navigate through this complex culture that was so remote from what she grew up with, accepted it gracefully and with great strength and affability. She didn't ever feel afraid or alone. She simply made friends with those she encountered and worked to understand their lives as best she could."
One friend, Julia Suryakusuma, a well-known feminist and journalist, recalled that when Ann arrived in Indonesia she was "ensnared and enchanted" by the culture. "You know, Ann was really, really white," she said, "even though she told me she had some Cherokee blood in her. I think she just loved people of a different skin color, brown people."
Barry was doing his best to fit in at school. As an African-American, of course, he stood out. "At first, everybody felt it was weird to have him here," said one of his teachers at St. Francis, Israella Dharmawan. "But also they were curious about him, so wherever he went, the kids were following him." Kids at school often called him "Negro," which they didn't consider a slur, though it certainly upset Barry.
Obama was the one foreign child in his immediate neighborhood, and the only one enrolled in St. Francis. Most of the children in the area were Betawis, tribal Jakaratans, and traditional Muslims. Cecilia Sugini Hananto, who taught Obama in second grade, told the Chicago Tribune that some of the Betawi kids threw rocks at the open windows of the Catholic classrooms. Barry learned a lot of Indonesian quickly. He was never fluent, but he more than managed to navigate school. He'd yell "Curang! Curang!"--Cheater! Cheater!--when he was teased. Zulfan Adi, one of those who teased him, recalled a time when Barack followed his gang to a swamp: "They held his hands and feet and said, 'One, two, three,' and threw him in the swamp. Luckily, he could swim. They only did it to Barry." Obama, though, was husky and not easy to intimidate. "He was built like a bull, so we'd get three kids together to fight him," a former classmate, Yunaldi Askiar, said. "But it was only playing."
After Maya was born, the Soetoros moved three miles west, into a better neighborhood, where the old Dutch elite lived. Lolo now worked as a liaison with the government for Union Oil. With the new job came new acquaintances and colleagues; some were the sort of foreigners who complained about the "locals" and the servants. The Soetoros were surrounded by diplomats and Indonesian businessmen who lived in gated houses. Barry's new school, Model Primary Sch
ool Menteng I, was, like almost all schools in Indonesia, mainly Muslim. Israella Dharmawan inadvertently helped feed a campaign sensation--mainly on the Internet and cable news--when she told the Los Angeles Times, in March, 2007, that "Barry was a Muslim.... He was registered as a Muslim because his father, Lolo Soetoro, was Muslim." A third-grade teacher named Effendi and the vice-principal, Tine Hahiyari, also told the Times that Barry was registered as a Muslim. No matter what the registry said, this was untrue. Ann remained a religious skeptic and did not consider herself or her son a Muslim. Lolo was not a practicing Muslim. "My father saw Islam as a way to connect with the community," Maya said. "He never went to prayer services except for big communal events."
Obama doesn't remember taking the religious component of either school in Indonesia very seriously. "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies," he writes. "My mother wasn't overly concerned. 'Be respectful,' she'd said. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words."
Ann and Lolo had a comfortable life in Jakarta: because of the cheap price of labor, they had someone to market and cook, someone to tend the house. But Ann still couldn't afford to send Barry to the international school. Although she spent a full day teaching English at the American Embassy, she woke Barry at 4 A.M. every weekday in order to deepen his knowledge of English, history, and other subjects. It was something he resented--what young boy wouldn't?--but she was preparing him for the moment when he would go back to America to continue his education.
Ann was thriving, immersing herself in the local arts and handicrafts, learning the language, acquainting herself with the way people lived, traveling to Bali and villages in central Java. At the same time, Lolo was becoming more like his oilmen friends at the office. He played golf at Union Oil's club, and, what was worse as far as Ann was concerned, he talked about golf. He seemed so eager to assimilate into the world of his employers. "Step by step, Lolo became an American oilman and Ann was--O.K., to an extent--becoming a Javanese villager," Ann's close friend Alice Dewey said. "He was playing golf and tennis with the oil people and Ann was riding on the back of motorcycles in villages, learning."
Maya Soetoro (now Soetoro-Ng) had been born when Barry was nine. Ann surrounded her with dolls of all ethnicities: black, Inuit, Dutch. "It was like the United Nations," she says. Not long after Maya's birth Ann and Lolo could feel the marriage really begin to unravel. "She started feeling competent, perhaps," Maya Soetoro-Ng says. "She acquired numerous languages after that. Not just Indonesian but her professional language and her feminist language. And I think she really got a voice. So it's perfectly natural that she started to demand more of those who were near her, including my father. And suddenly his sweetness wasn't enough to satisfy her needs."
Barack Obama, Sr., wrote occasional letters to Ann and Barry, but for the most part he was out of sight. The disappointments of his life were barely known to them. The story of his return to Africa was one of bitter decline. When he arrived in Nairobi from Harvard in 1965 with his master's degree in economics, Obama split his personal life between his third wife and his first, between Ruth Nidesand and Kezia Obama. He would have two more children with Kezia (for a total of four) and two with Ruth, before she ended the marriage.
"Like many men of his generation who had the chance to go abroad for an education, Obama suffered the schizophrenia of one who is both a Luo man and a Western man," his friend Olara Otunnu said. "He absorbed the mindset and framework both of his home and of the West and he was always wrestling with trying to reconcile them. So when he marries several women and tries to keep them separate and fails miserably to do so, this is a symptom of the schizophrenia."
Obama's "schizophrenia"--the schizophrenia of the "been-to" generation of African elites who studied in the West in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and then returned home--is described by the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah in his novel Why Are We So Blest? Armah, who was sent abroad to study at Groton and Harvard, depicts the disillusion and downfall of a young man named Modin Dofu, who has left Harvard and winds up back in Africa, a destroyed man.
Obama, Jr., has called his father a "womanizer." The reality was grimmer. Obama, Sr., not only married four times and had many affairs; he didn't seem to care with any consistency about any of his wives or children. Philip Ochieng, a prominent Luo journalist and a friend of Obama, Sr.,'s, wrote a lighthearted article in the Daily Nation saying that the Luo "shared with the ancient Hellenes the habit of waylaying foreign women and literally pulling them into bed as wives":
So for Senior to grab wives from as far away as Hawaii and Massachusetts--and Caucasian ones to boot--was no big deal. Given time, he might even have grabbed an Afghan, a Cherokee, an Eskimo, a Fijian, an Iraqi, a Lithuanian, a Mongolian, a Pole, a Shona, a Vietnamese, a Wolof, a Yoruba, and a Zaramo--not to mention hundreds from Luoland, apart from Kezia. The Luo would have noted his "he-man-ship" with complete approval.
"Where Obama comes from, a man can have many wives," Ochieng said. "If you have only one wife, like I do, you are not yet a man! The deeper question was how he treated the family."
For the affected family members, Obama's wandering and his indifference were painful. When Barack, Jr., visited Nairobi as a U.S. senator, he said of his father that "he related to women as his father had, expecting them to obey him no matter what he did." But there was more to it than cultural differences. Obama had been a miserable husband. Mark Ndesandjo, Obama's son by Ruth Nidesand, says that Obama beat him and his mother. "You just don't do that," he said. "I shut those thoughts in the back of my mind for many years.... I remember times in my house when I would hear the screams, and I would hear my mother's pain. I was a child ... I could not protect her." Ndesandjo dropped his father's name and, since 2001, he has lived in Shenzhen, China, and has worked in the export trade. "At a certain point, I made the decision not to think about who my real father was," he said. "He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife and children. That was enough."
Obama, Sr.,'s political mentor, Tom Mboya, made sure that he had decent jobs--as an economist for BP/Shell and then for both the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development and the Ministry of Tourism. From the moment of his return from America, Obama, Sr., was dissatisfied with the direction the government was taking. Little more than a year after independence, in July, 1965, he published an article in the East Africa Journal entitled "Problems Facing Our Socialism." The article was a critique of the government's working development plan known as "Sessional Paper No. 10," which had been issued in April, 1965.
The lead author of Sessional Paper No. 10 was Tom Mboya, who had been called on by the Kenyatta government to answer the Soviet-oriented development plans conceived at the Lumumba Institute by leading leftist politicians like Oginga Odinga. As an ideologist of Kenyan independence, Mboya was a moderate; he considered himself a "Socialist at heart and a believer in democracy." "The Kenya Question: An African Answer," a pamphlet he wrote in 1956, before independence, when he was just twenty-six, was an important document in the anti-colonial movement--so important in its call for representative democracy and the development of strong trade unions that the white Nairobi government banned it from certain Kenyan bookstores. Indeed, Mboya's paper was instrumental in spreading his reputation in the United States among politicians and labor leaders; as a result it helped win support for the airlift. Sessional Paper No. 10 is a far different sort of document, a more technical and prescriptive plan for Kenyan economic development. Unlike the Lumumba Institute plan, it was extremely wary of the nationalization of industries.
Even though Obama himself had likely had a hand in the conception of the paper and was an ally of Mboya, he did not hesitate to criticize it under his own name. Obama's article cautions against a national
policy that ignores poverty and inequality and is based on outsized expectations of rapid economic growth. It poses a central question of a country exiting a colonial system and entering independence: "How are we going to remove the disparities in our country, such as the concentration of economic power in Asian and European hands, while not destroying what has already been achieved?" Post-colonial Kenya, Obama argued, must not re-create yet another economic scheme that produces a small, super-wealthy ruling class and a mass of poor--in other words, a repetition of the old system, without a white ruling and bureaucratic class. Obama supported the redistribution of land to both individuals and tribes. One Kenya scholar, David William Cohen, of the University of Michigan, calls it an "improbable yet extraordinary rehearsal" of the best critiques of "unregulated capital" that came only a quarter of a century later. It navigates the differences among the leading figures in Kenyan politics--Kenyatta, who was pro-Western, and his left-wing vice-president, a Luo, Oginga Odinga, and Mboya, who was also a Luo but ideologically closer to Kenyatta. "It was very much like Obama to feel free to critique aspects of a paper he'd been part of," Olara Otunnu said. "He was a rarity in Kenya. Most people in the political class were respectful, to a fault, of the leadership. Not Obama. He felt free to speak his mind, and loudly." In his article, Obama made a case for progressive taxation and the regulation of private investment. The article warns against the dangers of continued foreign ownership and excessive privatization of commonly held resources and goods. Obama wrote:
One need not be a Kenyan to note that nearly all commercial enterprises from small shops in River Road to big shops in Government Road and industries in the Industrial Areas of Nairobi are mostly owned by Asians and Europeans.... For whom do we want to grow? Is it the African who owns this country? ... It is mainly in this country that one finds almost everything owned by the non-indigenous populace.