There’s a big mystery at the heart of (President-elect) Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
What was Barack Obama doing seeking out Marxist professors in college? Why did Obama choose a Communist Party USA member as his socio-political counselor in high school? Why was he spending his timestudying neocolonialism and the writings of Frantz Fanon, thepro-violence author of “the Communist Manifesto of neocolonialsm”, incollege? Why did he take time out from his studies at Columbia toattend socialist conferences at Cooper Union?
And there is moremystery in the book. Why does Obama consider working in a consultinghouse for international business like being “a spy behind enemylines?” Why does he repeatedly find it so hard to explain hispolitical views to others? Why was he driven to become aleft-aligned political organizer? It’s a question Obama again andagain can’t seem to answer to the satisfaction of the interlocutors inhis own memoir.
If there is a mystery at the heart of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father,one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organizedhis life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. Obama tellsus, “All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I.. tried to take as my own.” (p. 220) And what was that image? Itwas “the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full ofhigh-blown ideals ..” (p. 278) What is more, Obama tells us that, “Itwas into my father’s image .. that I’d packed all the attributes Isought in myself.” And also that, “I did feel that there was somethingto prove .. to my father” in his efforts at political organizing. (p.230)
Sowe know that his father’s ideals were a driving force in his life, butthe one thing that Obama does not give us are the contents of thoseideals. The closest he comes is when he tells us that his father losthis position in the government when he came into conflict with JomoKenyatte, the President of Kenya sometime in the mid 1960s; when hetells us that his father was imprisoned for his political views by thegovernment just prior to the end of colonial rule; and when he tells usthat the attributes of W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King,and Nelson Mandela were the ones he associated with his father and alsothe ones that he sought to instill in himself. (p. 220) This lastgroup is a hodge podge, perhaps concealing as much as it reveals, inthat it contains a socialist black nationalist, a Muslim blacknationalist, a civil rights leader, and (at the time indicated in thememoir) an imprisoned armed revolutionary.
A bit of research atthe library reveals the answers about Barack Obama’s father and hisfather’s convictions which Obama withholds from his readers. A firsthint comes from authors E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and David William Cohenin their book The Risks of Knowledge(Ohio U. Press, 2004). On page 182 of their book they describe howBarack Obama’s father, a Harvard trained economist, attacked theeconomic proposals of pro-Western ‘third way” leader Tom Mboya from thesocialist left, siding with communist-allied leader Oginga Odinga, in apaper Barack Obama’s father wrote for the East Africa Journal. As Odhiambo and Cohen write, “Thedebates [over economic policy] pitted .. Mboya against.. Oginga Odinga and radical economistsDharam Ghai and Barrack Obama, who critiqued the document for beingneither African norsocialist enough.”
Ihave a copy of Barack Obama’s paper here in my hand, obtained from thestacks at UCLA (see the picture above). The paper is as describe byOdhiambo and Cohen, a cutting attack from the left on Tom Mboya’s historically important policy paper“African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya.” Theauthor is given as “Barak H. Obama” and his paper is titled “ProblemsFacing Our Socialism”, published July, 1965 in the East African Journal, pp. 26-33. [UPDATE: I sent Politico a copy, and they’ve posted a PDF file of the paper here.]