THE family of President Barrack Obama in Kenya has reacted angrily over a new book to be released next week. It claims that Barrack Obama Senior planned to give his son up for adoption. Obama family spokesperson Malik Abongo described the book authored by Boston Globe reporter Sally Jacobs as "a fabrication, malicious and a political ploy." The Other Barrack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father will be released on Tuesday by Public Affairs Press in the US.
In the book, Jacobs claims that 24-year-old college student Obama Snr and his five-months-pregnant 18-year-old wife, Ann Dunham initially planned to give up their unborn child for adoption via the Salvation Army.
Jacobs' candid look at Obama Snr paints a portrait in sharp contrast to the one in the President's memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Jacobs portrays Obama Snr as a brilliant but troubled man who lived a reckless life. Jacobs claims that Obama Snr told immigration authorities in 1961 that he and his wife were not planning to keep their child.to read more go here..
Lyle J Dahling of Honolulu office of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service penned a memo after interviewing Barrack Snr. The INS was concerned with Obama's "playboy" ways and that he had married two different women.
Obama told Dahling that he had divorced his wife back home in Kenya, and that he and Ann Dunham were expecting a child but that she would be putting the boy up for adoption. "Subject got his USC wife 'Hapai' (Hawaiian for pregnant) and although they were married they do not live together and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away," the writer quotes the memo from Dahling. Dahling was however unclear if the parents were committed to adoption or if they fibbed to "appease immigration officials." Jacobs got the memo after she filed a Freedom of Information request. The president himself was unaware of the memo.
Former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Obama was never told that his mother had considered putting him up for adoption and that he is "absolutely convinced that she did not" have a conversation with the Salvation Army.
According to the Daily Mail, Charles Payne, the late Miss Dunham's maternal uncle, said he "never heard any talk of adoption whatsoever." "From day one, as far as I could tell, she and Madelyn [Dunham] and Stanley [Dunham] were all completely committed to Barrack," said Payne. "Every Tom, Dick and Harry is writing about the Obama family just to make money out of it," said Obama family spokesman Malik who is the first son of Obama Snr with his first wife Kezia. He is President Obama's stepbrother and lives at Kogelo in Kisumu. "Sally Jacobs came here to get a comment from us and we told her to go on and do whatever she wanted to do because that was her right. We told her that as a family, we did not approve her intentions neither did we agree with such statements," said Malik.
He said the family told Jacobs to get approval from Prime Minister Raila Odinga before seeking any views on Obama Snr from them. "These are people who are out to spoil our good name. This is a political ploy to demean President Obama's second presidential bid. We know there are some political forces working behind the scene to support the book which is being used to fight President Obama," he said. Obama Snr was born in 1936 in Kanyadhiang village, Rachuonyo district on the shores of Lake Victoria.
He studied at Gendia Primary School and transferred to Ng'iya Intermediate School once his family moved to Siaya district. From 1950 to 1953, he studied at Maseno National School.
He later received a scholarship to study economics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in the United States through the airlift program organized by nationalist leader Tom Mboya.
Obama Snr married fellow student Ann Dunham in Maui, Hawaii, though she did not find out that her new husband was already married until much later. Their son Barrack Obama II was born on August 4, 1961. Dunham quit her studies to care for the baby, while Obama Snr completed his degree. Obama's parents separated when he was two years old and divorced in 1964.
On his return to Kenya in 1965, Obama Snr was hired by an oil company and then served as an economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Transport and later became a senior economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance. His decline began after Tom Mboya's assassination in 1969.
Obama Snr was fired from his job and began to drink. He had a serious car accident, spent almost a year in the hospital, and by the time he visited his son in Hawaii in late 1971, he already had a deformed leg. He died in 1982, at the age of 46, in a third car crash in Nairobi.
