Was Obama's father murdered?

„Lately, I’ve been reading the galleys of Peter Firstbrook’s »The Obamas«, a history of the African side of the President’s family and a fascinating look at their tribe, the Luo. The book will be published in the spring by Crown; it is already out in the U.K. Firstbrook, a former director and producer for the BBC, interviewed Obama family members, friends, and scholars in Kenya and adds many interesting details to what we know of the President’s heritage. The most provocative pages are those in which some of Barack Obama, Sr.,’s relatives and friends cast doubt on the official version of his death—that he drove his car into a tree following a day of drinking in Nairobi.

That was the version that Barack Obama, Jr., heard on the night of November 24, 1982, when, as a senior at Columbia University, he got a phone call from a relative in Kenya telling him the bad news. At time of Obama, Sr.,’s death, he later wrote, »my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man«. Eventually, Obama met his African relatives and learned that his father was as brilliant as his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, had always said, but that he had also been an abusive husband, a drunk, and a bitter, broken man who raged against the course of post-colonial Kenya and his own thwarted career in the nation’s hierarchy. During the research for »The Bridge«, my book on Obama’s life before the Presidency, I spoke to many of Obama, Sr.,’s friends and acquaintances, and the resulting portrait of him is even more tragic than the one in his son’s bittersweet memoir, “Dreams from My Father«.”