Dateline: Saturday, December 12, 1964. At around 3 pm, just as Kenya turned into a republic, the newly sworn-in President Jomo Kenyatta’s convoy drove from State House, Nairobi to the flag-decked Thika Road to officially open what he described as "Kenya’s best kept secret" and Jamhuri Day’s "big surprise" – the so-called Lumumba Institute. He didn’t know it was a communist school of politics designed to topple him.
Forty years later, questions are still asked about how the new Vice President, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, managed to trick Kenyatta to approve a plot to topple him. It was a move that not only left top schemer Tom Mboya dazed but also confused Kenyatta’s inner circle — composed of Mr Mbiyu Koinange, Mr James Gichuru, and Dr Njoroge Mungai.
And when they realised what had happened they threw senior Chinese and Russian "spies" stationed at the institute out of the country. Others simply disappeared....
Branching Out - FAMILY BIOGRAPHIES A closer look at the people who make up Barack Obama ‘s rich history - good, bad and just plain weird
Chicago Sun-Times (IL) - September 9, 2007
Author: The Chicago Sun-Times
1&2. SAMUEL HINCKLEY AND SARAH SOOLE
(snip)
4. OWINY
‘A great warrior and leader’
Barack Obama has at least one great and revered leader on the African side of his ancestry.
His great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Owiny was said to be a powerful leader of the Luo tribe, which moved into Kenya about 400 years ago.
” ‘There were other tribes, who spoke Bantu, already living in Alego when the Luo came, and great wars were fought,’ “ Obama ‘s step-grandmother Sarah Obama tells him in his book Dreams From My Father.
” ‘Our ancestor Owiny was known as a great warrior and leader of his people.
” ‘He helped to defeat the Bantu armies, but the Bantu were allowed to stay on and marry Luo, and taught us many things about farming and the new land.’ “
In the book, Sarah Obama traces Obama ‘s male ancestral line in Africa back 12 generations, but admits “ ‘The women who bore them, their names are forgotten, for that was the way of our people.’ “
6. CHRISTIAN GUTKNECHT-GOODNIGHT
‘The dark and bloody ground’
If Obama ‘s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Christian Gutknecht had an adventurous life, it’s lost to history. But the fate of his brothers and their families could fill a TV mini-series.
Two brothers were slain by Native Americans, and a niece was kidnapped and made an American Indian bride.
Christian and his brothers, Hans Michael and George, all emigrated to the New World from Germany in the mid-1700s. Once here, they went by Goodnight.
Both Hans — also known as John Michael, or just Michael — and George were slaughtered by American Indians in separate late-18th century attacks in frontier Kentucky.
“They pioneered into the Kentucky wilderness among the earliest of those who went there; the blood of both brothers, spilled in Indian warfare, helped make it ‘the dark and bloody ground,’ “ wrote descendant S.H. Goodnight in The Good(k)night Family (Gutknecht) Family in America (1936).
George was killed in 1780 in a British-led raid by 500 Canadians and Native Americans on Ruddell’s Station in frontier Kentucky. Five of his children were captured by American Indians. His daughter Elizabeth had two sons by a Native American before she returned to her family.
“George was massacreed in the most barbrous manner while his children were scattered among the Indians,” according to a family letter written in 1883. “My father was taken to Detroit and sold to the French and taken to Canada. Elizabeth never got to her people until she was twenty two years old.”
Accounts vary on how Hans Michael met his fate. One version has him being killed by Indians while his family was in a wagon train heading from North Carolina toward what’s now Mercer County, Kentucky, in 1781. His son was wounded, and his pregnant wife escaped into the woods, where a search party found her days later “lying prostrate upon the ground in a semi-conscious state, her face covered with a blanket,” according to the unattributed family account published in a newspaper in 1973.
But a story passed down in old family letters has Indians attacking Hans Michael and his son while the two were traveling alone. In this version, they were returning to their Kentucky settlement after a trip to North Carolina to retrieve some possessions. Native Americans killed — and scalped — Hans Michael and wounded his son, who was able to escape.
“The Indians came upon them at their camp fire, killed the father,” a descendant wrote in 1883. “They shot the son, the arrow entered one side and came out at the other, and the surprising part is in that condition he made his way to the horses, stopped the bell, concealed himself and the next day went to the white settlements.”
7. GABRIEL DUVALL
Less famous cousin
Gabriel Duvall Sr. lived a short life. But he didn’t do too bad for himself.
Barack Obama ‘s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was born in Maryland in 1787, moved with his family to Kentucky as a child and became a prosperous farmer and cooper before he died in 1827.
But his accomplishments pale next to those of his second cousin, who shared his name. Before he died in 1844 at 91, the other Gabriel Duvall spent more than six decades in public life, including serving in Congress. He was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, and President James Madison tapped him to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1811. He stepped down from the high court because he had gone deaf.
He was also a major slave owner, owning as many as 37 at one point. His Maryland estate, Marietta, was thought to have been built by slave labor.
His second cousin — Obama ‘s direct descendant — most likely also owned slaves; his widow, Mary Grable Duvall, reported owning three in the 1850 census.
That Gabriel Duvall must not have minded being confused with his illustrious relative. He named one of his own sons Gabriel Duvall. Gabriel Duvall Jr. became a successful farmer in his own right and “served as magistrate and member of the court of claims of Nelson County,” Kentucky, according to Kentucky: A History of the State by W.H. Perrin, J.H. Battle and G.C. Kniffin, 4th edition, 1887.
8. NATHANIEL BUNCH
‘The best company in the world’
Regardless of whether Jefferson Davis is in his family background, Barack Obama does have ancestors with links to the Confederate cause.
Obama ‘s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents Nathaniel and Sarah Bunch had a son who served the Confederacy as a captain in the Arkansas Infantry during the Civil War.
“I am in very good spirits,” Larkin C. Bunch wrote in an 1862 letter home to his wife. “I think we will be very able to whip them on any part of the ground.”
An Arkansas farmer in 1860, Larkin Bunch was the youngest of 10 children of Nathaniel and Sarah Bunch.
His father, Nathaniel Bunch, fought in the War of 1812 under future president Andrew Jackson before moving his family by wagon from Tennessee to Arkansas in 1840, according to A Reminiscent History of the Ozark Region, published by the Goodspeed Brothers in 1898.
Research by the Newton County Historical Society, which supplied a copy of Larkin Bunch’s letter, suggests that Larkin Bunch might have been a Union man at heart forced into service by the Confederacy’s “Conscript Act.”
Larkin’s letter shows no signs of misgivings, though, vowing victory over “the enemy.” But he does paint a mixed picture of the men under him, writing that many were so sick they needed to be sent to “the hospitle,” and dozens of others had deserted. “We are getting along very well,” he assured his wife. “I have had 27 men absent with out leave which took all the trash out of my company. I have the best company in the world.”
Bunch also had his children in his thoughts as he wrote from Camp Hindman on Nov. 13, 1862. “Tell the children I am mighty glad to hear that they are so smart. be good and obedient children and when I get home I will fetch them something.”
Bunch was killed Sept. 24, 1864, in the battle of Pilot Knob, a failed rebel assault on the Union’s Fort Davidson in the mountains of southern Missouri. He was 36.
(snip)
11. HUSSEIN ONYANGO OBAMA
‘Wow, that guy was mean!’
He was “a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers.”
And he liked to dance.
But he was such a strict disciplinarian that his grandchildren called him “the Terror.”
That’s how Barack Obama describes his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama , in his best-selling memoir Dreams From My Father.
” ‘Wow, that guy was mean!’” Obama quotes his half-brother, Abongo (Roy) Obama , as saying. “ ‘He would make you sit at the table for dinner, and served the food on china, like an Englishman. If you said one wrong thing, or used the wrong fork — pow! He would hit you with his stick. Sometimes when he hit you, you wouldn’t even know why until the next day.’ “
Grandfather Obama was an herbalist who knew how to use plants to heal the sick or wounded — not “ ‘a shaman — what the white man calls a witch doctor,’ “ Obama ‘s step-grandmother is quoted as saying.
Hussein Onyango Obama worked for the white oppressors during the period of colonial rule in Kenya, first supervising rode crews and later working in a white man’s home, after a two-week walk to Nairobi.
” ‘Later he would tell us the adventures he had during this journey,’ “ Sarah Obama is quoted as saying. “ ‘Many times he chased away leopards with his panga. Once he was chased into a tree by an angry buffalo and had to sleep in the tree for two days. Once he found a drum lying in the middle of the forest path and when he opened it, a snake appeared and slid between his feet into the bush.’ “
Obama ‘s grandfather also served as cook for a British officer during World War II.
After hearing his step-grandmother’s account, Obama writes that he was shattered, wondering whether his dead grandfather was an “Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House n - - - - -.”
His step-grandmother tells Obama that her husband respected the white man’s power, technology and self improvement, but he would never tolerate abuse and had once even beaten a white employer who tried to cane him.
” ‘If the white man he worked for was abusive, he would tell the man to go to hell and leave to find other work,’ “ she said.
He didn’t smoke or drink, but he did like to dance.
” ‘His only pleasure was going to the dance halls in Nairobi once a month, for he liked to dance,’ “ Obama ‘s step-grandmother says in the book. “ ‘But he also was not such a good dancer — he was rough, and would bump into people and step on their feet.’ “
12. SARAH OBAMA
‘Sparkling, laughing eyes’
She’s really his step-grandmother, but Barack Obama calls her “Granny.”
Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama ‘s face was “smooth and big-boned, with sparkling, laughing eyes,” Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father of his first visit with her. “She hugged Auma and Roy as if she were going to wrestle them to the ground, then turned to me and grabbed my hand in a hearty handshake.”
Sarah Obama was the third wife of Obama ‘s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama .
But Barack Obama ‘s own father treated Sarah Obama as his natural mother after his biological mother, Akumu, left when his father moved her and his other wives to another part of Kenya.
Sarah Obama was just 16 when she married Obama ‘s grandfather, an older man who was her father’s friend. Arranged marriages and obedience to husbands — enforced by beatings, if necessary — were the plight of Kenyan women of her generation, she explained in Obama ‘s book.
” ‘Our women have carried a heavy load,’ “ she says in the book. “ ‘If one is a fish, one does not try to fly — one swims with other fish. One only knows what one knows. Perhaps if I was young today, I would not have accepted these things. Perhaps I would only care about my feelings, and falling in love. But that’s not the world I was raised in. I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn’t make my heart heavy.’ “
13. MADELYN PAYNE DUNHAM
‘A trailblazer’
Right after he gave the most important political speech of his life — the electrifying 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address that made him a household name — Barack Obama got a call from his grandmother.
“My grandmother’s from the Midwest, so she has a real low-key sensibility,” Obama told a reporter the morning after the speech. “She called up, and she said, ‘You did well.’ And I said, ‘Thank you.’
“And she said, ‘I just kind of worry about you. I hope you keep your head on straight.’ “
Her name is Madelyn Payne Dunham, but to Obama she was always “Toot,” a shortened version of Tutu, a Hawaiian word for grandmother or older female relative.
“I didn’t want to be called Grandma,” she explained in a 2004 interview.
“I still get yelled at by young men calling at me down the street, ‘Hey toot!’ once in a while,” she added, laughing.
In his memoir Dreams From My Father, Obama described his grandmother as “suspicious of overwrought sentiments or overblown claims, content with common sense.”
He also called her “a trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice president of a local bank.”
“What Toot believed kept her going were the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism of her ancestors,” Obama wrote. “ ‘So long as you kids do well, Bar,’ she would say more than once, ‘that’s all that really matters.’ “
A widow, Dunham, 84, still lives in Honolulu.
And if she was deliberately low-key about that convention speech when she first spoke with her grandson, Obama ‘s grandmother let her true feelings show in the Sun-Times interview a few weeks later.
“I was a little amazed,” she told a reporter. “It was really quite an exceptional speech, or I’m being prejudiced, I don’t know. But, to me, it was really quite exceptional.”
14. BARACK OBAMA SR.
‘Wrestling with . . . a ghost’
To the son he barely knew, Barack Obama Sr. became an almost mythical, larger-than-life figure.
“All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own,” Obama writes in Dreams From My Father. “The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader — my father had been all those things.”
But, as an adult, he learned there was a darker side to his Harvard-educated father.
“A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat?” Obama wrote. “To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!”
Barack Obama Sr. was born in Kenya in 1936. He met Obama ‘s mother while both were college students in Hawaii. But the marriage broke up when the senior Obama went to study at Harvard.
“He and my mother divorced when I was only two years old, and for most of my life I knew him only through the letters he sent and the stories my mother and grandparents told,” Obama said in speech he delivered this year just before Father’s Day.
The senior Obama was also essentially a polygamist.
The way Obama describes it in his book, his father had two children by a woman he married in Kenya before meeting Obama ‘s mother in Hawaii. Then, when the junior Obama ‘s parents’ marriage dissolved around 1963, the senior Obama returned to Kenya with another woman he met in the United States, and married and had two children by her. But that didn’t stop him from resuming his relationship with his first wife.
After Kenya achieved its independence, Barack Obama Sr. worked for a U.S. oil company and eventually went to work for the Kenyan government as a senior economist. But, through a mix of conflicts between the ruling tribes and his own outspoken nature and drinking, the senior Obama fell from power for a long period during the late 1960s and ‘70s.
He died in a car accident in 1982.
“My dad didn’t suffer fools gladly, and you have to be diplomatic,” his daughter, Auma Obama , told the Sunday Times of London last year. “Barack is different. He is able to relate to people. I’m more like my dad. I don’t have Barack’s patience.”
15. HALF-SIBLINGS
‘A complicated family’
If he wins the White House, Barack Obama would by no means be the first president with half-siblings.
Bill Clinton and Franklin Delano Roosevelt each had a half-brother. And Gerald Ford had six half-siblings through second marriages of his mother and father.
But Obama ‘s immediate family would certainly be one of the more complex in presidential history.
He has eight half-siblings — seven of them living — by four other marriages or relationships of his parents.
His father, Barack Obama Sr., had four children by Kezia, a woman he married in Kenya before his 1960 marriage to Obama ‘s mother in Hawaii. Two of those children — son Abongo (Roy) and daughter Auma — were born before Barack Obama Jr.
After Obama Sr. divorced Obama ‘s mother in 1963, he married Ruth, another American woman he brought to Kenya, and had two more sons — Mark and David, who was killed in a motorcycle accident. That marriage ended in divorce, after Obama Sr. resumed his relationship with his first wife.
The elder Obama had two other sons — Abo and Bernard — by his first wife, though Obama wrote in his memoirs that there is some question whether another man actually fathered Bernard.
Obama Sr. later had another son, George, by a woman he was involved with but apparently did not marry.
Obama ‘s mother, the former Stanley Ann Dunham, had a daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, from a second marriage to Lolo Soetoro.
Soetoro-Ng married a Chinese Canadian. They live in Hawaii. Some of Obama ‘s other half-siblings live in Kenya and the United Kingdom.
“It’s a complicated family, don’t you think?” Soetoro-Ng said during a 2004 interview, describing Obama ‘s 1992 wedding. “I remember his wedding. And there were everything from the very fair Kansas complexion, you know, the Scots-Irish thing, to the blue-black Kenyan. And we looked like the rainbow tribe — and me in between. I’m Indonesian. . . . The united colors. Never a dull moment, right?”
