The Roots of Obama's Rage (11 page)
Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
This, however, was the aim of many socialists, and quite possibly it would have been supported by the senior Barack Obama. Obama Sr. and Kenyatta were from different tribes. Kenyatta was Kikuyu, whereas Obama Sr. was from the Luo tribe. Obama Sr.’s mentor was a fellow tribesman—the labor leader Tom Mboya. Mboya had helped to organize Obama Sr.’s trip to America, and when Obama Sr. returned, Mboya secured for him a series of government jobs, culminating in a position at the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. Mboya was a socialist, but here again we have to be careful. There were two types of socialists in Kenya at the time: the pro-Soviet socialists and the African socialists. The leader of the pro-Soviet group was Oginga Odinga, and the leader of the African group was Tom Mboya. The former group wanted to follow the Soviet party line and promote international revolution; the latter wanted to develop an independent and distinctly African form of socialism.
All the socialists, of course, rejected Kenyatta’s free market approach. Still, they could not agree with each other about what type of socialism would work best in Kenya. Odinga was associated with the Lumumba Institute which took its instructions from Moscow. Mboya was the author of a paper called Sessional Paper No. 10 promoting for Kenya a distinctive type of African socialism as an alternative both to Kenyatta’s free-market capitalism and to Odinga’s Soviet-style socialism. Basically Mboya was trying to find a method to promote redistribution in a way that would not jeopardize economic growth. “Our task,” he said, “remains to try to achieve these two goals without doing harm to the economy itself and within the declared aims of our society.”
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In July 1965, Obama Sr. published an article in the
East Africa Journal
examining the premises of Mboya’s paper. The article was titled “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” and it is signed “Barak H. Obama.” From the article we get a rare direct look at the senior Obama’s economic solutions in the aftermath of colonialism. Obama Sr. begins by asking some skeptical questions. What do we mean by socialism? Are we talking about Kenyan socialism or African socialism? If socialism means government ownership of the means of production—in other words, no private property—then why does Sessional Paper No. 10 make several references to private land and private industry? Clearly Obama Sr. is warming up, and we see his intelligence sparkle through the prose.
East Africa Journal
examining the premises of Mboya’s paper. The article was titled “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” and it is signed “Barak H. Obama.” From the article we get a rare direct look at the senior Obama’s economic solutions in the aftermath of colonialism. Obama Sr. begins by asking some skeptical questions. What do we mean by socialism? Are we talking about Kenyan socialism or African socialism? If socialism means government ownership of the means of production—in other words, no private property—then why does Sessional Paper No. 10 make several references to private land and private industry? Clearly Obama Sr. is warming up, and we see his intelligence sparkle through the prose.
Then he gets to his main point: “The question is how are we going to remove the disparities in our country, such as the concentration of economic power in Asian and European hands, while not destroying what has already been achieved and at the same time assimilating these groups to build one country?” For starters, Kenya must “break our dependence on other countries politically and economically.” In addition, through taxation and regulation the government must bring down the foreigners who still dominate the Kenyan economy. “One need not be a Kenyan to note that nearly all commercial enterprises . . . and industries are mostly owned by Asians and Europeans. One need not be a Kenyan to note that when one goes to a good restaurant he mostly finds Asians and Europeans, nor has he to be a Kenyan to see that the majority of cars running in Kenya are run by Asians and Europeans.”
Despite his references to Asians and Europeans, for Obama Sr. this is not an issue of race; rather, it is an issue of power. To put it bluntly, certain groups have the power concentrated in their hands, and therefore the power has to be taken from them by force. “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” The senior Obama proposes that the state seize private land and turn it into “clan cooperatives” for growing food and manufacturing goods. He also proposes that taxes be raised, and no level of taxation is too high as long as “the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation.” In order to italicize the point, Obama Sr. insists that “theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.” Obama Sr. contends that these solutions are justified by the circumstances in which Africans find themselves. “We have to give the African his place in his country and we have to give him this economic power if he is going to develop.” The article ends on a resounding note. “Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?”
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Barack Obama Jr. has never mentioned this article, either in his books or in any of his public statements, but given his exhaustive research into his father’s history, it is hard to believe that he is not closely familiar with it. Living today in Obama’s America, we can recognize several themes that the son seems to have derived from his father. First there is the idea that the ordinary African is deprived because the rich people at the top—people who are not like us—control most of the wealth and use it to exploit society. A second theme is that the country belongs to everyone, not just to the upper crust; therefore, the state must intervene to take from the undeserving haves in order to give to the deserving have-nots. There is no level of taxation—not even 100 percent—that is unacceptable as long as it serves the purpose of taming the plutocrats and yields revenues that are justified in terms of the benefit to society.
One of the most interesting features of Obama Sr.’s paper is that it shows how socialism emerges within the framework of anti-colonialism. Socialism is hardly a necessary outgrowth of anti-colonialism. This is shown by Kenyatta’s approach, which was manifestly anti-colonial but also pro-capitalist. Obama Sr., however, rejected the Kenyatta way. He wasn’t a pro-Soviet socialist, but he was an African socialist. As an African socialist he was to the left of Mboya: while Mboya sought to preserve private property and still claim the socialist label, the senior Obama wanted more state confiscation, more economic redistribution. All of this may help us understand why President Obama is so often accused of being a socialist. He does have socialist leanings or tendencies, but those have grown out of his commitment to his father’s broader anti-colonial ideology.
There is a bitter postscript to the senior Obama’s story. His fortunes plunged as he came into increasing conflict with Kenyatta and also with Kenyatta’s future successor, Daniel arap Moi. Obama Sr. lost his government job and could not find another one. Even Mboya could do little to protect him, and with Mboya’s assassination in 1969—allegedly by a man with ties to the government—Obama Sr.’s career was finished. Ultimately he fell into desperate poverty. No doubt these reversals exacerbated his drinking problem, which in turn led to his liver disease and several car crashes. In one accident Obama was so badly injured that both his legs had to be amputated and replaced with iron limbs. Still, he continued to drink and drive. In his final journey he staggered out of a Nairobi bar, drove his car off the road into the stump of a gum tree, and died instantly. This was on November 24, 1982. But—as we will see—his memory as well as the central tenets of his anti-colonial ideology are alive and well three decades later in the White House.
What about Barack Obama Jr.’s mother? She too was a strange one, and her strangeness derives, in part, from her own parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham. One indication of the eccentricity of her parents is that they hoped for a son and so when they got a daughter they named her “Stanley.” Yes, Stanley was Obama’s mother’s first name. The poor thing continued to be called Stanley until she got to college, where she switched to her middle name, Ann. Stanley—or perhaps I should call her Ann—grew up in Kansas where, like Dorothy, she developed a fascination with the great big world out there. Years later, when the family moved to Hawaii, she found her own Wizard of Oz in the form of Barack Obama Sr. She never lost her devotion to him. Even though Obama Sr. lied to her about his African marriage and abandoned her when he went to Harvard, she cultivated in her son Barack Jr. an almost mystical reverence for his absentee father. Obama writes that whenever he raised an issue about his dad, or expressed frustration or hostility toward him, Ann would defend Obama Sr. She would explain and justify his actions and inform her son that his father was a great man, a true son of Africa. “You have me to thank for your eyebrows,” she once told Obama. “But your brains, your character, you got from him.” Obama writes that “the stories I heard about my father painted him as larger than life, which also meant that I felt I had something to live up to.”
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She, as much as he, was responsible for Obama’s lifelong fascination with his father.
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She, as much as he, was responsible for Obama’s lifelong fascination with his father.
Ann had an evident romantic attraction to everything that was dark and strange and unlike her white-bread upbringing in the Midwest. One of her friends, Julia Suryakusuma, later remarked that “Ann was really, really white. I think she just loved people of a different skin color.” Obama recalls that whenever a black man or woman came up in conversation, no matter what the context, she praised that person extravagantly. “Every black man was Thurgood Marshall or Sidney Poitier; every black woman Fannie Lou Hamer or Lena Horne.”
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This undiscriminating judgment is part of the reason, but only part of the reason, that Ann fell so gullibly for Obama’s father. Once he left her, she soon took up with an Indonesian student named Lolo Soetoro. They married in 1966, and a year or so later they took young Barry to Jakarta. There Ann had a child with Soetoro, whom they named Maya, and she also developed an anthropological interest in peasant blacksmithing.
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This undiscriminating judgment is part of the reason, but only part of the reason, that Ann fell so gullibly for Obama’s father. Once he left her, she soon took up with an Indonesian student named Lolo Soetoro. They married in 1966, and a year or so later they took young Barry to Jakarta. There Ann had a child with Soetoro, whom they named Maya, and she also developed an anthropological interest in peasant blacksmithing.
Obama Jr. spent around four years in Indonesia with his mother. Then, in a surprise move, she dispatched him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents. Although Obama likes to describe himself as raised by a single parent, in fact he grew up without either his father or his mother for several years. When her marriage with Soetoro dissolved in 1972, Ann stayed in Indonesia to do field work. She also took extensive trips to Thailand, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and China. Remarkably, she never returned to the United States to live with her son. Eventually she contracted ovarian cancer and came to America for medical treatment. But Obama Jr. did not visit her, nor was he present when she died in Hawaii in 1995. Recently Duke University Press published her dissertation on “village industry in Indonesia.” Scholars say it is a useful contribution to a little-known subject.
Lolo Soetoro’s influence on Obama has been largely ignored, even though Obama himself says he learned a lot from his Indonesian stepfather. Part of the reason for the neglect is that many of Obama’s critics have focused on Soetoro’s Muslim background and on whether Obama converted to Islam during his high school years. All of this gets both Soetoro and Obama completely wrong. Neither of them was in any serious way religious. Soetoro’s life was far more defined by growing up in the harsh circumstances of colonial Indonesia and then in the equally grim aftermath of Dutch withdrawal from that country.
Soetoro was born in Bandung, Indonesia. Today Bandung is mostly remembered as the site of the famous Bandung Conference. That took place in 1955, when Lolo was twenty years old. There, in Lolo’s hometown, the heads of state and senior officials of twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African countries met to consider their future. President Sukarno of Indonesia was the host, and in attendance were Jawaharlal Nehru from India, Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana, and Jomo Kenyatta. The main thrust of Bandung was a joint declaration that these countries did not want to align with either the West or the Soviet Union; they wanted to go their own way, sometimes called the “third way.” Bandung gave rise a few years later to the so-called Non-Aligned Movement.
Soetoro would surely have sympathized with the objectives of the Bandung Conference. As a child he grew up under colonialism, and his parents endured the hardship and humiliation of an especially severe form of forced labor imposed by the Dutch. The historian K. M. Panikkar writes in
Asia and Western Dominance
, “The Dutch alone of the European nations in the East carried out a policy which systematically reduced a whole population to the status of plantation labor, without recognizing any moral or legal obligation to them.”
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His father and oldest brother were killed during the revolutionary struggle, when the native Indonesians fought for freedom from the Netherlands, and the Dutch army burned Soetoro’s family home.
Asia and Western Dominance
, “The Dutch alone of the European nations in the East carried out a policy which systematically reduced a whole population to the status of plantation labor, without recognizing any moral or legal obligation to them.”
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His father and oldest brother were killed during the revolutionary struggle, when the native Indonesians fought for freedom from the Netherlands, and the Dutch army burned Soetoro’s family home.
Eventually the war ended, and the Soetoros returned to rebuild their home. Like Barack Obama Sr., Lolo Soetoro got a basic education in his homeland and then came to Hawaii to study; the two ended up at the same university and married the same woman. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1966 when the Sukarno government decided it needed the services of its citizens living and studying abroad. A year later Soetoro’s new wife, Ann, joined him in Jakarta with her son.
Soetoro became a kind of surrogate father to Obama, who writes affectionately about him. “With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner... and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat . . . snake meat... and roasted grasshopper.... Lolo explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate. One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”
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This was Obama’s Indonesia, exotic, unpredictable, a feast for the senses. The family lived in a Jakarta neighborhood that was more like a village than today’s sprawling metropolis. While the Soetoro family lived in a brick house with a tiled roof, many of the houses were bamboo huts, and electricity had just arrived a few years earlier.
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This was Obama’s Indonesia, exotic, unpredictable, a feast for the senses. The family lived in a Jakarta neighborhood that was more like a village than today’s sprawling metropolis. While the Soetoro family lived in a brick house with a tiled roof, many of the houses were bamboo huts, and electricity had just arrived a few years earlier.
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