Biography of Obama’s mom a timely salute to caring mothers

A newly released biography of US President Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (1942-1995), is a tribute to mothers who expose their children to different cultures and offer them the best education possible. 

The book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother by Pulitzer-winning journalist Janny Scott, is an incredibly rich, thoroughly researched, and riveting account of Ann’s life and lineage.

It shows that Obama inherited more than his mother’s physical features: the long chin, toothy smile, and the distinctive tilt of the head.

Mother’s faith

She gave birth to Obama as a teenage girl in 1961, and had faith that as a primary school child he would rise to be the president of the United States.

Although she never lived to see him ascend to political stardom, her wishes as a mother are fulfilled. She died in 1995 at the age of 52, a few years before Obama plunged into politics.

In the biography, Obama’s mother comes across as a fiercely independent woman. 

The writer reminds us that Ann married the Kenyan student Barack H. Obama, Senior at a time interracial marriages were not common in America because miscegenation laws were still in place.

Ann was outgoing and cosmopolitan in her associations. “If Ann had a plan, it did not involve sitting still,” the author says.

The book cites acquaintances that remember her passion for Africa and conversations about international affairs.

Non-western cultures

She studied anthropology and got a PhD in the discipline in 1992.

But while the image of an American anthropologist is that of a covert racist who likes studying weird practices among “primitive tribes” such as witchcraft, Ann is portrayed as sensitive to non-Western cultures that she studied and interacted with.

In Indonesia, where young Obama had his early education, he was exposed to diverse cultures. This exposure is seen in his respect for peoples and practices from other societies.

The Indonesian cultures value self-control. Fellow children teased Barry and occasionally threw a rock at him because of the colour of his skin, a development that made him strong-willed and composed in the face of unfair criticism.

Ann and her second husband, the Javanese Lolo Soetoro, never allowed their children to be mean or arrogant.

The book mentions that the most powerful man in the world today was spanked once in a while if he didn’t toe the line.

Even when chances were slim that she would be able to take Barry to the best schools, Ann was planning to enrol him in an elite primary school in Honolulu.

Obama ended up studying in Columbia and Harvard, two of the best universities in the US. Ann spoke strongly against corruption in Indonesia, and she was critical of the capitalist system in the US.

One wonders if she would have been able to do so under Jomo Kenyatta’s regime had her marriage to Obama Senior brought her to Kenya with him.

If she was seen as meddling with the internal affairs by criticising Kenya’s post-independence rot, she would probably been deported without her son by a nationalist government that seemed not to overly like white spouses among its senior officials.

While some conservative critics of Obama’s identification with his black father in Dreams from My Father seem to suggest that he owes his success to the Caucasian side of his ancestry, A Singular Mother is not a project in recovering Obama’s whiteness with the aim of demeaning his black roots.

Rather, the author’s goal seems to be to bring to the surface the influence of Ann as mother on him.

Obama has himself expressed on several occasions his gratitude to his mother. In a revised preface to his Dreams from My Father, Obama credits his mother for “what is best in me.”

Full recognition

Janny Scott’s book suggests that this is a full recognition of his mother’s role that comes surprisingly late. Before her death, the biracial Obama seemed to identify more with his absentee black father’s heritage.

Some critics of the biography note that the significance of Ann Dunham lies not in what she achieves, but in her son’s unlikely journey to be the US presidency.

“Her own life took on a meaning, and a resonance, that it might not otherwise have had,” writes David L. Ulin in Los Angeles Times.
Perhaps the lesson we learn from Ulin’s comment and Obama’s earlier demotion of his devoted mother vis-à-vis his absent father is that we should appreciate our mothers much more while they are still alive and strive to make them significant by achieving the best in the world even when they die in obscurity.

I highly recommend this interesting and inspiring biography.