Barack Obama, Sr.

According to Barack Obama Sr.'s stepmother, Sarah Onyango Obama, Hussein was subjected to beatings and abuse which caused permanent physical disabilities and a loathing of the British.

Obama Sr. was raised in a Muslim family, but converted to Anglicanism and changed his name from "Baraka" to the more Christian-sounding "Barack" when he was about six years old at the insistence of the Christian missionary schools he attended. He became an atheist as a young man, before meeting his second wife, Ann Dunham.

While still living near Kendu Bay, Obama Sr. attended 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, an exclusive Anglican boarding school in Maseno that is run by the Anglican Church of Kenya. The head teacher, B.L. Bowers, described Obama Sr. in his records as "very keen, steady, trustworthy and friendly. Concentrates, reliable and out-going." Read Less

The program offered Western educational opportunities to outstanding Kenyan students. Initial financial supporters of the program included Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson, and Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, a literacy advocate who provided most of the financial support for Obama Sr.'s early years in the United States, according to the Tom Mboya archives at Stanford University. Funds provided the following year by John F. Kennedy's family paid off old debts of the project and subsidized student stipends, thereby indirectly benefiting Obama Sr. and other members of the 1959 group of scholarship holders. Read Less

Ruth subsequently married a Tanzanian named Ndesandjo and took his surname, as did her sons Mark and David. Mark said in 2009 that Obama Sr. had been abusive to him, to his late brother, David, and to his mother.

Obama Sr. 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. In 1959, a monograph written by him had been published by the Kenyan Department of Education, entitled Otieno jarieko. Kitabu mar ariyo. 2: Yore mabeyo mag puro puothe. (English: Otieno, the wise man. Book 2: Wise ways of farming.) That same year, Obama Sr. published a paper entitled "Problems Facing Our Socialism" in the East Africa Journal, harshly criticizing the blueprint for national planning, "African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya", which had been produced by Tom Mboya's Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. The article was signed "Barak H. Obama." Read Less