From Barack Obama’s high-school yearbook

Journal archives

BOSTON

BARACK OBAMA may be a gifted and eloquent speaker, but he is authentic — the real deal. Forget race, forget party allegiance, and look at character. What you see is what you get.

My main vocation is writing biographies about international heroes and heroines for young adults. These are people they can hope to emulate. The list is not very long. Obama is the 13th, and there are only two women: Margaret Thatcher and Benazir Bhutto (recently translated into Vietnamese). The one on Obama is titled Barack Obama: Voice of Unity, Hope, and Change. It will be out very soon.

Like many, I was wowed by Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston. He was a fresh voice with some unifying ideas and memorable phrases. When he announced his candidacy for president, I knew this was a role model for young adults (and adults, too). Thus, I embarked on the research.

But what drew me even more to the biography were some common ties that made me feel connected to Barack Obama. He had lived in the enchanted land of Indonesia as a boy from the age of 6 to 10. His mother had met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, at the University of Hawaii. After they married, Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro and her young son followed Lolo to Jakarta, where they lived in primitive conditions on the outskirts of that capital city.

I, too, had lived in Jakarta the same year Barack and his mother arrived, in 1967. My former husband was writing a book about the overthrow of President Sukarno, who had flirted seriously with communism. Temporarily, we moved with our babies from Hong Kong to an embassy official’s house in the heart of Jakarta to do the research.

Indonesia has a mystique about it. At night, the frangipani bushes and trees fill the air with a sweet fragrance similar to honeysuckle. At that time, the street lamps were a soft yellow, leaving people, bicycles and cars in shadowy silhouettes. The Indonesian people radiate such a sweetness and are soft-spoken. They are irresistibly likable. The turmoil of the coup (in 1965) and the students, who had protested so vigorously, had subsided.

When young Barack landed at the Jakarta airport and drove with his parents to their new home, he would have seen what I did — the water buffaloes sloshing through rice paddies; he would have sniffed the fragrant air and felt the humid days; he would have seen the women in colorful batik long skirts and blouses and men in batik shirts; he might have attended shadow puppet shows at dusk and heard the gamelon (like a xylophone) orchestras playing as they sat cross-legged behind their instruments. It was all very mysterious and romantic.

Barack’s mother found a job at the American Embassy, teaching English to Indonesian businessmen. Her greatest concern was for her son’s education since they couldn’t afford to send him to a private school. First, he attended a Catholic school and then a public Muslim school. The religion was of no interest to her, but the academics were. To supplement his learning, Ann Soetoro sent to America for education tools. Every morning she would awaken Barack at 4 a.m. to do flash cards. Barack yawned, but cooperated through most of these sessions.

Finally, when Barack was 10, Mrs. Soetoro decided to send him back to Hawaii to live with her parents. There he went to the Punahou School to complete his high-school education. Like many teenagers, Barack had some identity problems, but outgrew them at Occidental College, in California, Columbia University and Harvard Law School.

The other common tie I felt to Obama was to Kenya, the land of his father. We had lived in Africa six years and in Kenya a couple of times. So I was familiar with the landscape. Outside of Nairobi is a hilly area called the Highlands, where coffee and tea farms are found in abundance.

Barack Obama senior began his childhood in a village near Victoria Falls. He was part of the Luo tribe, known for its interests in intellectual matters.

Eventually, he moved to Nairobi to attend a British school. Then, because of his intellect, two American ladies wrote 26 letters to American universities to find a scholarship for him. He was accepted at the University of Hawaii, where he met 18-year-old Ann Dunham in a Russian class. They married and lived with her parents. Young Barack was born in August 1961. When the elder Barack won a scholarship to Harvard University in economics, the family couldn’t go with him. They divorced. Father and son met only once after that, when Barack was 10. He missed the father figure desperately.

In any event, you should know that Barack Obama can turn a bitter enemy into his best friend. I call him the “healer-in-chief” in my book.

Whether he wins or not, his future will be spectacular, be it in the Oval Office or elsewhere.

Libby Hughes has written 17 books and 45 plays.