The woman who raised Obama to greatness

President-elect Barack Obama will hire his mother-in-law to serve as Granny in Chief, the Washington Post wrote this week.

It immediately struck me that America’s next president would be outmatched in the White House. He would be the only male resident among four women: Michelle; Michelle’s mother, Marian; and daughters Malia and Sasha.

It is a safe bet, however, that the president will not notice he is outnumbered. He was raised by a single mother, who planted indelible footprints in his life.

The credit

People often say that the president-elect is a man who is utterly comfortable in his skin, literally and metaphorically. It doesn’t appear to bother him that he is a black man in white-dominated politics.

And close observers say that whatever room he enters, he quickly makes himself totally at ease. The credit goes to Ann Dunham, his mother.

Dunham was a white woman born in the whitest part of the United States, Kansas. In his book, Dreams from my Father, Obama describes his mother’s home state as “a landlocked centre of the country where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.”

To this day, black people are a rarity in Kansas. Yet Dunham found herself captivated by a black man. At university in Hawaii where she met Barack Obama Sr, writes the Boston Globe, she would go with him everywhere, a shy girl content to sit quietly by her man as he out-argued peers at the boys’ hangouts.

Eons before this was tolerated, Dunham didn’t shudder to introduce the black man to her parents. She was beyond race. And the liberating colour-blind lessons she would teach her son stemmed from such early enlightenment.

Long after she had divorced Obama Sr, married an Indonesian man and moved to Jakarta, a random incident sparked a lasting lesson from mother to son.

One day young Obama saw photos in a magazine of a person like him, dark, but whose skin had acquired “uneven, ghostly hue.” The boy freaked out, not knowing that the man in the picture had undergone a chemical treatment that went awry.

Was there something wrong with him, something to be ashamed of? His mother sat him down. “To be black is to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny,” she patiently told her son.

Then she told the boy about his father who came from the Luo people of Kenya, a man she never once criticised in public, even after he left to pursue his academic dreams at Harvard, never to return as husband.

During the writing of his first book, says Obama, “she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterisation of her, but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character.”

It is the picture of a bighearted woman who never stopped loving the father of her firstborn child. In a sense, it is Obama’s mother who pushed him to go in search of his roots in Kogelo, the birthplace of his father.

44th president

America’s 44th president may have taken the baritone voice and overconfidence of his father. But his trademark infectious smile, it is said, comes from his mother. More importantly, Dunham gave her son an invaluable gift: a fierce, almost superhuman habit of discipline, says Time.

While still at the tender ages of 6 to 10, Dunham would wake up her son at 4 in the morning to personally tutor him.

Then she taught him something else that stayed with him: empathy. He says a tribute documentary, “The only time I ever saw my mother really angry was when she saw cruelty; when she saw somebody being bullied or somebody being treated differently because of who they were. And if she saw me doing that she’d be furious.

She’d say to me, ‘imagine being in that person’s shoes, how would that make you feel?’ ”

Ann Dunham did a great job raising America’s 44th president.

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My detailed plans to attend Obama’s January 20 inauguration in Washington were near complete. Then I found out that to get a ticket to the event would be about as easy as securing a seat on a space ship. So here’s what I’d suggest to more sensible Kenyans.

Focus on a parallel inauguration at Kogelo. Firm instructions should go out that for anyone driving from Nairobi, parking begins at Kericho. People should leave now, if they don’t want to park in Nakuru.

The writer is a communication consultant for Unicef in New York. These are his opinions, not of the UN.