AMERICA: Ann Dunham cultivated in her son Barack a pragmatism and self- belief that inspired him
WHEN PRESIDENT Barack Obama released his long-form birth certificate last month, one detail in the lower left portion of the form stood out. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was only 18 years old when she gave birth.
By chance, a biography of Dunham, by the New York Timesjournalist Janny Scott, was published this week, as Obama navigated the choppy aftermath of the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden. A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, helps to explain how Obama became the calm, caring but above all pragmatic president he is.
Stanley Ann’s adolescence in Washington state was comprised of “slumber parties, sock hops, ski trips, little drinking, no drugs, little dating, less sex,” Scott writes. She disliked her name, and dropped “Stanley” for most of her adult life.
After Dunham and her parents move to Hawaii, her friends in Seattle were shocked when she visited to show off her black baby. “People said she went to Africa and married a black king,” one of Dunham’s friends told Scott, who interviewed more than 200 people for the biography.
The book does not say how Dunham reacted when she learned, after her marriage to Barack Hussein Obama, a university student seven years her senior, that he already had a wife and child in Kenya. Dunham told a friend the turning point in the marriage occurred when she set a plate of food in front of the older Obama. “You expect me to eat this?” he shouted, then hurled the plate against the wall.
Barack Obama snr left 10 months after his son’s birth. He saw Ann and young Barack only once more, visiting Hawaii for Christmas when the future president was 10 years old. In the meantime, Dunham married another University of Hawaii student, an easy-going, fun-loving Indonesian who was the opposite of her intellectually intense first husband.
Little Barack lived with his mother and stepfather in Jakarta from age six to 10. In Dreams From My Father,Obama described how his mother would wake him at 4am, force-feed him breakfast, then make him study English for hours to prepare for re-entry into the US educational system. "This is no picnic for me either, buster," she told him.
One of Dunham’s friends in Indonesia describes how “Barry” accompanied his mother to a lunch, while his infant half-sister Maya stayed home. Dunham was a stickler for manners, ordering the boy to shake hands, telling him to ask permission from his hostess when he wanted to be excused. When children threw rocks and shouted racial epithets at Obama, the hostess was alarmed. “He’s okay,” Dunham told her. “He’s used to it.”
Dunham divorced her second husband, who wanted her to be a traditional Indonesian wife. She earned a doctorate in anthropology and, two decades before Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank won a Nobel Prize for similar work, helped pioneer the use of microcredit to improve the lives of the poor.
After meeting Michelle Robinson, Dunham wrote to a friend that the future first lady was “intelligent, very tall (6ft 1in), not beautiful but quite attractive”. She was “a little provincial and not as international as Barry . . . nice, though.”
Ann Dunham died of uterine cancer a year before her son was first elected to state office in Illinois. She was incredibly proud of him since childhood, boasting to friends, “my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.”
When Dunham later told a younger Indonesian journalist with whom she had a long romance that her son was graduating from Harvard Law School, he said, “okay, so he wants to be president”. To his surprise, she burst into tears.
In 2004, Obama told a Chicago newspaper that his greatest regret in life was not having reached his mother’s bedside in Honolulu before she died. In the last months of her life, she battled the Cigna insurance company, which refused to pay her bills on the grounds her cancer was a “pre-existing condition”. Dunham was turning the case over to “my son and attorney, Barack Obama,” she finally wrote to Cigna.
His mother’s greatest gift to him, the president told Scott in an interview in the Oval Office, was “a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me entirely.”
Obama's mother died a few months after he published Dreams from My Fatherin 1995. Had he known she would not survive, he wrote in the preface to the 2004 edition, he "might have written a different book – less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life."
As a young man, Obama travelled to Kenya to learn more about his dead father. When he visits Moneygall on May 23rd, he’ll be seeking a connection with a long-forgotten part of his mother’s heritage.
