Early Life:
Barack Obama was born on 4 August 1961 in Hawaii to Stanley Ann Dunham, an American woman with mostly English decent. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was however a Kenyan and had met his mother at a Russian language class in University of Hawaii at Manoa almost a year prior to his birth.
The couple got married on February 02, 1961. Barack Obama was born almost six months after the marriage. Obama Sr. subsequently went to pursue his PHD at Harvard and separated from his wife at the same time.
Obama Standing with His father Barack Obama Sr. |
The couple divorced in 1964 when their immensely talented son was just two years old. Ann Dunham then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student in Hawaii. However, the political landscape in Indonesia changed dramatically and all the Indonesian students studying abroad were called to Indonesia. As a result, Ann Dunham shifted to Indonesia with her new husband and the son she had produced out of her previous marriage.
Barack Obama Jr. attended Indonesian schools in Jakarta from age six to ten. However, he returned to Honolulu in 1971 to live with his maternal grandparents. He was to study here from his fifth standard until his graduation from high school in 1979. Obama has publicly conceded by both writing and talking about using marijuana and cocaine during his teens to ‘push questions of who I was out of my mind’.