Observations: Barack Obama recalled

President Donald Trump’s ugly characterization of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes a couple of weeks ago has led me to recall my own association with the Obama family.

About 20 years ago, I was teaching at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, on a Fulbright grant, when I received a copy of Barack Obama’s new book, “Dreams from My Father.” Living and working in Kenya, I was fascinated by his story, particularly as he wrote about his own trip to Kenya, his impressions of the country and the family he had never known.

I wrote an article about the book, which was published in the Nairobi Nation, Kenya’s most important newspaper, and later in the Cincinnati Post. I sent a copy to Obama, who was then teaching at the University of Chicago, and got a reply saying that he wished – and his publisher wished – that others felt as strongly about the book as I had.

Meanwhile, I spoke to Gloria Hagberg, an older American woman in Nairobi, who had become a good friend, indeed a kind of surrogate mother, to my wife Sara when she had been in Kenya several years before, leading a semester-long foreign study program for her Earlham College students. Gloria had come to Kenya in the early 1960s, when her husband Gordon was the cultural attaché at the American diplomatic mission, before it became an embassy. This was at the time of Kenyan independence. The American mission was in the process of sending a huge number of young African men to the United States for a college education, so they could play a role in the creation of their new country.

Gloria and Gordon had a cook who had a college-age son – a bright young man named Barack. They sent him to the University of Hawaii, where he met Stanley Ann Dunham, an American from Kansas, married her, and fathered future United States President Barack Obama.

Gloria regaled me with stories about their interaction with the Obamas. She told me about giving a bicycle that her daughter Paula had outgrown, to the Obamas, and wondered what had become of it.

Many years later, Sara and I were leading another foreign study program, this time for Earlham College and Miami University students. Sara was away at the time, but the students and I were in the midst of a three-week homestay in the part of Kenya inhabited by the Luo tribe. The Obamas were Luo, and Willis Okech, my student at Miami who was assisting with this part of the program, told me that the Obama family homestead was nearby. He asked if I would like to visit. I said of course.

And so we went off in his Land Rover, but found no one at the homestead. It turned out that everyone was a few kilometers away, at the dedication of a school which had been donated by a Japanese group. We drove down there and found a huge celebration going on, with dignitaries sitting in a large circle, watching the singing and dancing. Mama Sarah, the last wife of Barack Obama’s father, who was the one family member who came to the inauguration in the United States, was there, and there was an empty seat next to her. One of the organizers asked me if I would like to go sit next to her and I nodded yes.

And then I had a wonderful, 15-minute conversation in Swahili about the Obama family. At one point, I asked her about the bicycle and she replied they still had it and still used it.

It was a wonderful day, one which I still recall, all the more when I think about our current president and his obscene characterization of his predecessor. I long for those better days now past.

Allan M. Winkler is a University Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Miami University, where he taught for three decades. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press.