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Obama: the moulding of a multicultural leader

David Watts reflects on author and activist Tariq Ali's views regarding how Pakistan's history has impacted on the country's current situation, as well as its political prospects.

By Rani Singh

Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President,
by Dinesh Sharma
ABC-CLIO, LLC
(an imprint of Praeger), 2011
Santa Barbara, CA

There have been many books written about Barack Hussein Obama, but Indian cultural psychologist Dinesh Sharma is the first of his biographers to examine the initial 18 years of his life in psychological and ethnographic detail. Sharma's profession makes him perfectly suited to the task of biography, and he makes a compelling case for the relevance of Hawaii and Indonesia in gaining a full understanding of Obama. These influences and additional input from his Kansas-born mother and Kenyan father, notes Sharma, make Obama America's first multicultural president.

Indian-born Sharma — a senior Fellow at the Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Psychology in New York — walked the streets of Jakarta where Obama played as a child from the ages of six to eleven, mixing with Christians, Buddhists and Muslims, visiting the cultural settings there and in Honolulu where Obama grew up, as well as the schools, the church and the mosque he prayed in. He found that Obama did not convert to Islam, nor did he go through any religious rites of passage in Jakarta. His stepfather never legally adopted him. Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham (her father, a World War II veteran, wanted a son so badly that he named his only daughter after himself) was in a profession not dissimilar to Sharma's own: she had a PhD in cultural anthropology and worked in micro-lending and women's development. Dunham travelled widely through Asia and Africa and, together with the future president's maternal grandparents, was a seminal influence on Obama's world view; he learned empathic listening from her. The Dunham family fostered high ideals of African-American culture and role models in the young Obama.

They also projected a strong image of Barack Obama Senior — who died in a car accident while Barack was a student in New York — to the young Barack. Obama's parents eloped in 1961, as indicated in their divorce decree, and most probably had a registry marriage, but Sharma notes: 'Obama himself has not been able to find a marriage certificate, wedding rings, wedding invitations, or a guest list.'

He also observes that fatherless boys often grow up with a biological craving for a father-figure — hence Obama's desire to measure up in the eyes of his late father, and some of his haunting dreams. For instance, in one dream his father was in a jail cell and he was trying to get him released; in another he visited him in jail and his father, weak and frail, collapsed into his lap.

Obama's maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, emerged as the family matriarch, who rose from humble beginnings to become vice president of the bank of Hawaii. She funded his education, including the elite Punahou School in Honolulu. 'Although Obama inherited his mother's progressive vision and idealism, it was his hard-knuckled grandmother who gave him his steely spine,' writes Sharma. He interviewed schoolteachers, friends, colleagues, distant relatives and close friends of Obama's family — especially friends of his mother. His many exclusive interviews include Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, his homeroom teacher Eric Kusoniki, and his ninth grade English teacher Barbara Nelson. They told him that Obama was popular, social and respectful of his peers and teachers. His English teacher observed the young Obama's early development as a leader in the classroom and on the basketball court.

Despite the apparent instability of a broken family — not only was his own father absent for most of his life, his stepfather also left after divorcing his mother — Obama counteracted these family patterns, Sharma contends, by marrying Michelle, who provided the stability he needed.

The Hawaii experience is what Sharma finds vital to Obama's development — his 'incubator'. Hawaii was the last and most diverse state to join the American union yet no one ethnic minority holds power there — it truly is a multicultural mix. The young Barack, therefore, did not stand out because of the way he looked, and in his elite private school he was able to explore and develop his potential in a way, argues Sharma, that an African-American boy from a single parent family may not have been able to had he lived in mainland USA.

Sharma's book not only helps the reader to understand Barack Obama in a new way, it also shines a light on his likely motives and direction for the future — if he is re-elected to lead one of the most powerful nations on earth for another four years.

Rani Singh worked with the BBC and is the author of Sonia Gandhi, an extraordinary life, an Indian destiny, published in 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan

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