The untold story of Obama's mother

The untold story of Obama's mother

The President's formative years are well documented, but only now are his mother's exploits in Indonesia coming to light, reports Judith Kampfner

Wednesday, 16 September 2009

The shadow puppeteer flicks his wrist as he beats a stumpy stick against a wooden box and begins a dramatic introduction to a story about Kunti, a mother who fights for social justice. This is Pucung, a remote Indonesian village where skeletal leather puppets, some of Indonesia's best-known handicrafts, are made. The character has a mass of black hair. Ann Dunham, too, was famous for her shock of black hair, which she claimed came from a trace of Cherokee blood in her veins. Barack Obama's mother also did more for social justice in her adopted Indonesia than her son's accounts suggest.

"What is best in me, I owe to her," the 44th US President acknowledged in the second edition of his memoir Dreams From My Father. But Dunham has been little more than a footnote in his extraordinary story. In the preface, Mr Obama wrote: "She travelled the world, working in the distant villages, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world's economy."

But he chose to highlight a dreaminess in his mother. "She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon and foraged through local markets for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye." There is more than a hint of superficiality; a sense that his mother was a hippy chick.

What Mr Obama's narrative omits is any detail of how Ann Dunham was an economic anthropologist and that for 30 years she devoted herself to studying rural enterprise in Indonesia. She took on projects as a development officer with the Ford Foundation, the US Agency for International Development and the Asian Development Bank, pioneering micro-credit projects that extended small loans to the rural poor.

Dunham's legacy both as a scholar and a mother whose influences would shape her son will finally receive wider prominence later this year when her PhD treatise, which took 14 years to complete, is published by Duke University Press. A feature-length movie about her life, Stanley Ann Dunham: A Most Generous Spirit, goes into production next year.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/the-untold-story-of-obamas-mother-1787979.html

Thanks for sharing this.

:kick:

need a lesson about. Maybe this movie should be required viewing for our bankster before they are allowed to touch another penny of "our money".

and has built a business on the kind of tribal fair-trade goods that Ann Dunham had a part in making possible.

Surrounded by my Indonesian furnishings bought for me by her from the villagers and craftsmen, I feel connection.