Barack Obama lived in Indonesia (1967-1971) from age five to ten. After his parents broke up and his father went back to Africa, his mother married a man from Indonesia named Lolo. She met him at the University of Hawaii. He was suddenly called back to his country along with all the other Indonesians studying abroad. She and Obama followed about a year later.
During that year Obama’s new stepfather was in the Indonesian army fighting in New Guinea. Leeches got in his boots to bite him and drink his blood. It could have been worse: those who had been studying in communist countries were thrown in prison or shot dead.
When Lolo got out of the army, the three of them went to live in Java. They lived at his house near what was then the edge of Jakarta, a place where people still washed their clothes in the river. Lolo had a monkey named Tata, a mango tree and two crocodiles.
Lolo took Obama under his wing as his son. He is the father of Obama’s sister Maya. He taught Obama how to fight and told him to be strong or the powerful will take advantage.
If you have seen Mel Gibson in “The Year of Living Dangerously”, it is the same time and place. But in the year or so between when Gibson left and Obama arrived the streets ran with blood during a failed communist uprising in which hundreds of thousands died.
Indonesia was not just poor, it was a hellhole. Obama dropped there from a star called America. Everywhere you went poor people held out their hands. Cruel men ruled the country for the benefit of their families and friends – and the ugly Americans who wanted the oil. One year the rains did not come, the next year they did not stop. The spirit of the people was broken: you cannot fight fate.
In the middle of all this his mother woke him up every morning before the sun rose and taught him English. And taught him the virtues she learned in a faraway world known as Kansas: to be fair, honest, straight-talking and think for himself. She held up his father in Africa as a shining example: a poor man who did right.
For two years he went to a Muslim school, where he was taught about Islam once a week, and then two years at a Catholic school.
One day Obama saw a picture in Life magazine of a black man trying to turn himself white. Doctors had found a way to make black skin white. It was a picture that has stayed with him ever since.
He looked at himself: he was black. He seemed all right. Was there something wrong with him that he did not know about? Or, what seemed just as frightening, maybe the world had gone mad and saw something in blackness that was not there.
At age ten his mother sent him to back to America to live with her parents so he could get a good education at one of the top schools in Hawaii.
See also:
- “Dreams from My Father”, a book by Barack Obama, which is where I got most of this account from.
- Barack Obama
- Obama in Hawaii – where he went next
- Java – I saw it in the 1990s when it was still poor but not as bad as what Obama saw in the 1960s.
- English
- America
Leave a comment