Dreams from My Father
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama, who was elected as U.S. President in 2008. The memoir explores the events of Obama's early years in Honolulu and Chicago up until his entry into law school in 1988. Obama published the memoir in July 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for Illinois Senate. He had been elected as the first African-American president of the "Harvard Law Review" in 1990. According to "The New York Times", Obama modeled "Dreams from My Father" on Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man".
Family of Barack Obama
Paternal grandfather to Barack Obama, he was born Onyango Obama. (One source gives 1870–1975 as his dates of birth and death, possibly based on his tombstone in his home village. Barack Obama relates finding in 1988 a British document, based on a 1928 ordinance, recording his grandfather as 35 years old. The date of the document was estimated to be about 1930, which would mean that his grandfather had been born around 1895.) The Luo are given names related to the circumstances of their birth, and "Onyango" means "born in the early morning."Onyango was the fifth son of his mother, Nyaoke, who was the first of the five wives of his father, Obama. Barack Obama relates how his step-grandmother Granny Sarah (Sarah Onyango Obama) describes his grandfather: "Even from the time that he was a boy, your grandfather Onyango was strange. It is said of him that he had ants up his anus, because he could not sit still." As a young man, Onyango learned to speak, read and write in English, the language of British colonial administration in Kenya. Onyango worked as a mission cook and as a local herbalist. He joined the King's African Rifles during World War I. In 1949, Onyango spent at least six months in Kamiti Prison. He was probably tried in a magistrates' court on charges of sedition or being a member of a banned organization. Records do not survive; all such documentation was routinely destroyed after six years by the British colonial administration. He was tortured to extract information about the growing insurgency seeking the independence of Kenya. In his memoir, Obama recounted family descriptions of his grandfather's shocking physical state when released from prison:
"When he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice." For some time, he was too traumatized to speak about his experiences. His wife told his grandson Obama: "From that day on, I saw that he was now an old man." Onyango was permanently scarred, suffering pain and requiring assistance in moving until his death. Although previously he had worked closely with British colonists, Onyango became bitterly anti-British after his abuse. According to his third wife, Sarah, Onyango had converted from tribal religion to Catholicism early in life. When Seventh-day Adventist missionaries visited the Kendu Bay area many people were baptized into the church, including Onyango. When he later converted to Islam, he took the first name "Hussein." She said that he passed on the name of Hussein to his children, but not the religion. Onyango is sometimes referred to as Mzee Hussein Onyango Obama. The word "mzee" (meaning "elder") is a Kenyan honorific. And to this day the Obama family in Kenya is divided between Seventh-day Adventists and Muslims.