Book title: The Dreams of my Father

Author: Barack Obama

Reviewed by:  Musabi Muteshi

Many of us read this book before Obama became President. He was a Senator, but the question remains, was there anything in this autobiography that showed he would become the most powerful leader in the world?

The story begins with a death of an old, unknown neighbour. It is the precursor, a few pages later, to the middle-of-the-night phone call announcing the death of his own, unknown father in a car accident in Kenya. Barack paints a loving picture of his white, grandparents who raised him throughout most of his childhood in Hawaii. He chronicles his connection to family in Kenya. Finally, he ends with a wedding.

The book explores a real Kenya, the author’s ancestral home from where his father left to study in the USA. From this sojourn, a US president is born, but essentially abandoned at two years old. It is from this sense of abandonment by a key figure in a child’s life that drives the author. The story revolves around solitude, strength of character, being black, hope, confidence and understanding. He says, "I saw how fates were beginning to play themselves out, the difference that color and money made after all, in who survived, how soft or hard the landing when you finally fell.”

This recognition may have driven an ambition to excel be it at Columbia University, or as Harvard Law School’s first, black, Law Society President, or in honing his love for public speaking, or seeking out radical leaders like Malcolm X. Obama is driven to organising economically poor communities, perhaps in a bid to give the people a chance at a soft landing too.

It is a deeply insightful look at the lives of others; be they Kenyan relatives’ village lives or his then neighbours: financially poor Americans mostly from minority groups. Obama manages to capture the essence of the people he meets and the places he visits with humanity, curiosity and intelligence. As a Kenyan, I was surprised to find that he more than "gets it”. For someone for whom Africa was a complete unknown.

Maybe his mind learned to be open and observing given the 6 months it took him to learn Indonesian as a 6-year-old in the land of his mother’s new husband. One observation of his mother in Indonesia captures this astuteness and willingness to look squarely at difficult realisations. "She was a foreigner, middle-class and white and protected by her heredity whether she wanted protection or not. She could always leave if things got too messy.”

A 10-year-old Barack, then back for school in Hawaii, only sees his father once over a period of a month. He holds on to the memory of the time they dance together in his grandparents living room. Of his mother he says, "She saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him; she had tried to help the child who never knew him see him in the same way. And it was the look on her face that day that I would remember when a few months later I called to tell her that my father had died and heard her cry out over the distance.

 Perhaps that sentence is what later drives him to go in search of his father’s home and people. A well written story, full of the everyday mundane but also tales of extraordinary lives.