The Other Barack (26 page)

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Authors: Sally Jacobs

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The primer writing committee hard at work. While working for Mooney in the Kenya Adult Literacy Program, Obama wrote three primers in the Luo language for new literates on health, agriculture, and citizenship. The first book was called
Otieno Jarieko: The Wise Man.
Barack Obama in a photograph taken by Betty Mooney.
The Obama family on a picnic in Kenya with Betty Mooney in 1958. From the left: Kezia and baby Malik, Betty Mooney, Barack Obama, and George Wanyee, another worker in the literacy office.
Barack Obama studying at the YMCA in Honolulu. He was the first African student on the University of Hawaii campus, and his crisp attire stood out among the more casual clothing favored by other students.
During his years at the University of Hawaii, Barack Obama was hard to miss. He frequently spoke in public on topics related to Africa and debated other students on the subject of communism versus democracy.
Nearly a decade after he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UH, Obama returned to Honolulu in 1971 in a far more somber mood. During that visit, the only time that he saw his son, Barack Obama II, his third wife was in court back in Nairobi seeking a divorce.
Although Obama was an undergraduate at UH, he often spent his time with a diverse group of graduate students at the university's East-West Center. Here he attends a party of international students in Honolulu in 1961.
Obama attends a peace rally in Ala Moana Park in May of 1962. In brief remarks to the crowd, Obama called for a reduction in military spending. “Peace will release great resources,” he said.
Fellow UH student Pake Zane was a friend of Obama's on campus and later traveled to Kenya to visit him. Obama told Zane that he had received death threats as a result of his testimony in Tom Mboya's murder trial.
om Mboya, the popular Kenyan ationalist leader, in London for he 1960 Kenya Conference. boya, a fellow Luo, was a entor to Obama, and the two poke on a Nairobi street corner short time before Mboya was ssassinated in July of 1969.
Jomo Kenyatta, president and founding father of Kenya, attends a 1964 ceremony in Nairobi. Obama was openly critical of Kenyatta's economic policies and the tight-knit group of Kikuyu with which he surrounded himself.
Omar Okech Obama, Barack Obama's half brother, attended the Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1963 to 1965. Omar Obama, third from the left in the back row, played varsity soccer and was a member of the school's Debate Club and Newspaper Club.

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