[AGL] Obama by Sheridan

[Igor Loving]

Secrets of Obama family unlocked
Michael Sheridan, Jakarta and Sarah Baxter, Washington

WHEN Barack Obama, America’s newest presidential hopeful, was hit by 
allegations that he had attended a radical Islamic madrasah school as a boy 
in Indonesia, the claims spread like a virus through the media and internet.
It was a lie — the school was barely more religious than British church 
schools — but it was also a sign that Obama’s chances of winning the 
presidency depend to an unusual degree on his life story and character.

The race is on to define the gifted but little-known senator for Illinois 
and The Sunday Times can reveal that his heritage is far more diverse and 
astonishing than anything American voters have heard so far.

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.

Nobody was more surprised to hear that Obama had reportedly been educated in 
a madrasah than Julia Suryakusuma, a close friend of his mother until her 
death from ovarian cancer in 1995.

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.

“She was interested in religions but didn’t follow one. She was a 
free-thinker,” Suryakusuma said. “She was a pioneer and when she came to 
Indonesia she was ensnared and enchanted.”

On the coffee table in her cool modern house in Jakarta, full of the 
beautiful Indonesian fabrics and carvings which captivated her friend, lies 
an album of photographs which record the happy times.

There is Dunham, pale-skinned, jolly and frizzy-haired, celebrating with her 
friends at an art gallery opening or a drinks party, wearing the baggy, 
free-flowing clothes often favoured by bohemian western women in Asia. She 
always seemed to be laughing.

“You know Ann was really, really white,” smiled Suryakusuma, looking through 
the album, “even though she told me she had some Cherokee blood in her. I 
think she just loved people of a different skin colour, brown people.”

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.

At 10, Obama returned to Hawaii, where he lived with his grandparents and 
attended an elite private school. His mother went back to Indonesia with 
Obama’s half-sister Maya, now a professor at the University of Hawaii, and 
became an expert on the “feminine crafts”, such as weaving and 
basket-making, practised by the women of Java.

Suryakusuma recalled that Dunham called her son “Berry” — Barry with an 
Indonesian lilt. “We were both mothers and we talked about how difficult it 
was for a mother to separate herself and send her child away, but she was 
really concerned about Barry’s education.”

She first met Obama when he came to visit his mother as a young adult. “She 
was so proud of him. I remember she was glowing with pride when he became 
the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

“You know, having a white mother and a black father and coming to 
Indonesia,” Suryakusuma reflected, “I could see he had the same kind of 
empathy with people that his mother had.”

Obama’s multi-hued heritage has put a distance between him and the 
African-American community, which has been reluctant to claim him as a 
“brother”.


Charlie Loving