ONYANGO OBAMA

Barack Obama’s depictions of his Kenyan father and grandfather are challenged in a new biography of the American president, that is drawing attention in the United States.

Interviews and research conducted by author David Remnick suggest that President Obama’s grandfather was not merely “a cook and a houseboy,” as the president has claimed.

The Bridge similarly says that Mr Obama misportrayed his father’s status by describing him as a “goat herder” who “leap-frogged from the 18th century to the 20th century in just a few years.”

Mr Barack Obama Snr was in fact the product of a “middle or upper class” household, says Olara Otunnu, a former Ugandan foreign minister and a friend of Obama Snr’s.

Mr Onyango Obama, the president’s grandfather, was “exalted in his village” in western Kenya, Mr Otunnu adds in comments quoted in The Bridge.

The grandfather did work for the British as a cook, both in Nairobi and with colonial troops in Burma, but he was a Westernised and high-spirited man who supported the Kenyan resistance to British rule, Mr Remnick’s portrait shows.

The Bridge notes that Mr Onyango Obama, born in 1895, was for a time in Zanzibar and converted to Islam for reasons that remain unclear.

Mr Barack Hussein Obama Snr emerges from the book’s 656 pages as a far less appealing figure.

Mr Remnick, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent who now edits The New Yorker literary and political magazine, sketches Mr Obama Snr as a brilliant and bold political thinker with “a rich musical voice and a confident manner”.

Mr Ottunu calls Mr Obama Snr “a rarity in Kenya,” noting: “Most people in the political class were respectful, to a fault, of the leadership. Not Mr Obama. He felt free to speak his mind, and loudly.”

But Mr Obama Snr degenerated into a frustrated, self-destructive and duplicitous alcoholic who beat at least one of his four wives, The Bridge says.

“He was dead to me even when he was alive,” Mr Remnick quotes Mr Mark Ndesandjo as saying of his father, Obama Snr. “I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife and children.”

Trader in China

Mr Ndesandjo, a trader in China, dropped his father’s last name. He says in The Bridge that his father beat him and his mother, Ruth Nidesand, the third of Mr Obama Snr’s wives.

Returning to Kenya in 1965 after receiving a master’s degree in economics at Harvard, Mr Obama Snr fell into a spiral of dissolution that has ensnared other Africans educated abroad, who no longer feel at ease in their native societies, Mr Remnick writes.

Obama Snr took to drinking “quadruple shots” of Vat 69 or Johnnie Walker scotch whiskey while chain-smoking 555 and Rex cigarettes, Mr Remnick recounts.