"THE BLACKER THE BERRY THE SWEETER THE JUICE/
I SAY THE DARKER THE FLESH,THEN THE DEEPER THE ROOTS!"
TUPAC SAYS

BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY SUPREME!

BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY SUPREME!

"BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL" -NEW YORK CITY STREET SAYING

"BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL!
BROWN IS HIP,
PUERTO RICAN IS OKAY
BUT white AIN'T S___T!"

BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY OOO!

BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY OOO!

BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY OOO!

BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY OOO!

BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY SUPREME

BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY SUPREME
BLACK SKINNED BEAUTY SUPREME!

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Sunday, June 27, 2010

SAVING OUR YOUNG BLACK MEN-BLACK CHURCHES UNITE TO SAVE BLACK BOYS FROM JAIL AND DRUGS!- FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE SENTINEL,MAY ,2010




























A century of Christian Science healing





From baptiststandard.com

African-American churches see a revival of cooperation
PrintE-mail
By Adelle M. Banks, Religion News Service   
Published: April 22, 2010
WASHINGTON (RNS)—In Chicago, black Baptists announced they would raise $50 million for health clinics, schools and reconstructed churches in earthquake-devastated Haiti.
In South Carolina, three black Methodist denominations launched a plan to host Saturday academies nationwide to mentor young black males.
And in Miami, African-American Baptists, Methodists and Pentecostals decided to re-establish the Conference of National Black Churches to work together on health disparities, economic empowerment and social justice.
Recent months have seen a resurgence of interdenominational relations in some of the nation’s most prominent predominantly black churches.
Franklyn Richardson of Mount Vernon, N.Y., chairman of the National Action Network, exhorts his followers during an appearance at the National Baptist Convention, USA. (RNS File Photo/Aimee Jeansonne)
While some are responding to the tragedy in Haiti and others are trying to revive long-term efforts to help black communities, they all say they’ve determined they can do more together than any one group could do by itself.
“If we can make a difference with black men in our communities, it will affect the whole community,” said Carolyn Tyler Guidry, president of the Council of Bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the denominations that met at the black Methodist summit in Columbia, S.C. “It will affect families—black families in particular—when their men are not incarcerated or on drugs.”
Members of the AME Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church met in early March to plan the academies that will train youth in job preparation and study skills.
Just weeks before, leaders of those three denominations met with black Baptists and leaders of the Church of God in Christ to restart and rename the defunct Congress of National Black Churches.
The organization’s absence, combined with cyclical leadership changes, meant some black denominational leaders had lost touch with one another, said Franklyn Rich-ardson, chair of the new Conference of National Black Churches.
Now, he said, the denominations—with a combined membership of more than 21 million—hope to partner with groups like the Children’s Defense Fund and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network on AIDS, education, social justice and economic development.
“Denominations are so absorbed in trying to sustain ... their specific mission that no denomination has the resources to take on education by itself or to take on social justice by itself,” said Richardson, a Baptist pastor in Mount Vernon, N.Y., who also chairs Sharpton’s network.
Stephen Thurston, president of the National Baptist Convention of America, said the gravity of a tragedy like the earthquake in Haiti prompted the leaders of five black Baptist churches to join forces for their five-year project.
Staccato Powell, who chaired the black Methodist summit in South Carolina, said African-American faith groups are taking responsibility for the challenges in the black community in ways that might not be as effective when they work with predominantly white denominations.
“Their passion is not the same because they don’t have the same issues at stake as we do,” he said. “Their children are not being carted off to prison by busloads. ... This is about the survival of our people.”













Christian Science healing not medical practice: (a paper prepared for commissions to revise statutes in Ontario and Ohio)











































































Century of Christian Science Healing
















A complete concordance to science and health with key to the scriptures: Together with an index to the 

marginal headings and a list of the scriptural quotations ... and health as finally revised by its author


[LP Record] Science and Health - With Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy (Talking Book) - & in Brail

OBAMA! -GHANIAN WORLD CUP FANS APOLOGIZE TO OBAMA FOR DEFEATING U.S. TEAM!

Barack Obama President Topps Trading Cards (24 packs)



OBAMA! -GHANIAN WORLD CUP FANS APOLOGIZE TO OBAMA FOR DEFEATING US TEAM!

By Yeye Akilimali Funua Olade
U.S. President Barack Obama watches a live telecast of the 2010 World Cup soccer match between the U.S. and Ghana during a short break between bilateral meetings with South Korea's President Lee Myung-bak and China's President Hu Jintao at the G20 Summit in Toronto June 26, 2010.
Ghanian national football team supporters, one of them carrying a placard ‘Obama we are sorry’, celebrate in Accra after Ghana beat the US 2-1 after extra time in Rustenberg on June 26, 2010 during the World Cup football tournament in South Africa. The Black Stars are bidding to become the first African side to reach the semi-finals of the tournament. Asamoah Gyan was Ghana’s match-winner, smashing home the winning goal in the third minute of extra time after shrugging off a challenge from Rennes club-mate Carlos Bocanegra on the edge of the American penalty area.
Ghanian national football team supporters, one of them carrying a placard 'Obama we are sorry', celebrate in Accra after Ghana beat the US 2-1 after extra time in Rustenberg on June 26, 2010 during the World Cup football tournament in South Africa. The Black Stars are bidding to become the first African side to reach the semi-finals of the tournament. Asamoah Gyan was Ghana's match-winner, smashing home the winning goal in the third minute of extra time after shrugging off a challenge from Rennes club-mate Carlos Bocanegra on the edge of the American penalty area.

































































Finally, a poll that counts their vote.(Sports)(Obama appears to be the leader in the locker room as players make their choice): An article from: The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR)



















"MELANIN-THE CHEMICAL KEY TO BLACK GREATNESS"BY CAROL BARNES FROM SUZAR.COM

from suzar.com originally
(posted from yeyeolade.wordpress.com



MORE ON THE BOOK “MELANIN THE CHEMICAL KEY TO BLACK GREATNESS” BY CAROL BARNES FROM SUZAR COM

By Yeye Akilimali Funua Olade
from suzar.com
Blacked Out Through Whitewash
by SUZAR
Pages from Chapter 5
Copyrighted
Page 57
Most whites have calcified pineal glands
apparently thwarting their production of Melatonin
Why did Afrikans view the European as a child of God, but the Europeans viewed the Afrikan as a soulless savage? Because of “melatonin,” described as a mentally and morally stimulating hormone produced by the pineal gland. According to scientific research, most whites are unable produce much of this hormone because their pineal glands are often calcified and non-functioning. The pineal calcification rates with Afrikans is 5-15%; Asians 15-25%; Europeans 60-80%! 1 Dr. Richard Kings states “When we talk about cultural differences, some black scholars have raised the question that the European approach, that of the logical, erect, rigid, anti-feeling posture, reflects a left brain orientation and reflects that they lack the chemical key [melatonin] to turn on their unconscious and therefore cannot get into feelings…” Carol Barnes writes “Melanin is responsible for the existence of civilization, philosophy, religion, truth, justice, and righteousness. Individuals (whites) containing low levels of Melanin will behave in a barbaric manner.” Melanin gives humans the ability to FEEL because it is the absorber of all frequencies of energy. Since whites have the least amount of Melanin, this is why they are perceived by People of Color as generally being rigid, unfeeling (heartless), cold, calculating, mental, and “unspiritual.” Their historical behavior towards nonwhites often confirms this.
The scientific evidence of Melanin threatens the life of white supremacy
After considering Melanin to be a “waste” product of body-metabolism which “served no useful function,” Western science has now discovered that Black Melanin (neuromelanin) is the chemical key to life and the brain itself. All the studies, facts, and statistics about Melanin suggest that after four hundred years of attempting to inferiorize the Black race, “Western science is facing the sobering reality that, by its own self-defined standards, Black people are probably superior to whites in both intellectual potential and muscle coordination.” 2 The central role that melanin plays in the body has been “suppressed to maintain the mythological inferiority of blacks…and the defensive clinging to whiteness as some token of superiority.”
The “superiority complex” of white people
is a mask for their deepset inferiority complex
which they project onto people of color. They have an inferiority complex about their lack of color in a world where everyone else (the majority) is colored. If Albinos really believed white skin was “superior,” then why is “tanning” so important in white culture despite its known health risks? (thousands of whites die annually from skin cancer). In fact, Albinos are now making Melanin tanning ointments. The Wall Street Journal (8/26/88) reported that companies are developing Melanin-based products to help whites tan safely: a California company is developing a Melanin ointment that blocks the entire spectrum of burning ultraviolet rays; researchers in Arizona are testing an ointment that stimulates the skin to produce a natural melanin tan before you go out to the sunlight. And it is the white female who tells you her ideal mate is “tall, DARK, and handsome!” “Dark” indeed refers to more Melanin!
.
“The white man or white species is a genetically defective species. Their MELANOCYTES, MELANOSOMES, and MAST CELLS, etc., do not contain the proper catalyst concentration, chemical reactivity and/or electrical charge needed to produce significant levels of MELANIN in various MELANIN Centers throughout their bodies. Therefore, their organs and systems which depend upon MELANIN to work effectively do not operate well and may suffer numerous disorders such as rapid aging, cancer…” 3
.1) King, AOB, 58-59. 2) Sepia Magazine interview with Dr. Richard King. 3) Barnes, 19.
.
.
Page 58
.”Messed-up Melanin” is killing Black people!
.In their ongoing effort to destroy People of Color, whites (scientists, chemists) create “designer drugs” that are specially structured to chemically bind with the Melanin molecule and cause Melanin to become toxic to Blacks! The molecules of these drugs resemble the Melanin molecule. The body is thus fooled and its balance is thrown off as it relies on its messed up Melanin in order to function. Major culprits include cocaine, crack, and yes, marijuana.
Blacks get addicted faster, stay addicted longer, and suffer the worse…
from these drugs which are deliberately placed in Black communities. In his vital book, MELANIN: The Chemical Key to Black Greatness, essential reading for all Melanated People, Carol Barnes clearly documents this subject along with the wonders of Melanin. He shows how illegal drugs alter or change Melanin’s chemical structure and thus alter many life supporting activities. Toxic drugs and chemicals are destroying the heart of Black society and causing many deaths. Barnes writes:
.
“MELANIN can become toxic to the BLACK HUMAN because it combines with harmful drugs such as cocaine, amphetamines, psycholic, hallucinogens, neuroleptic (tranquilizers), marijuana, ‘agent orange’…paraquats, tetracyclines…” 1
.Toxic drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and even marijuana are very similar to Melanin and the sub-units that make up the Melanin substance. Many health-conscious Blacks consider marijuana to be a safe healthy herb, not realizing that once this (or any herb) is “cooked,” it becomes a drug as far as your body is concerned!
Even legal drugs (tetracyclines, neuroleptics, etc.) have a remarkable affinity for reacting with or binding to Melanin and may be toxic to all Melanin centers in the Black human.
Other culprits which bind with Melanin and cause death for Blacks are aromatic and lipid compounds. Melanin shows extreme affinity for binding with “aromatic and lipid compounds.” 2 Lipid means fat. Lipid or fat compounds (fatty acids) are animal and vegetable oil /fats used for frying and cooking. Examples are shortening and corn oil. Aromatic compounds contain benzene, a major component of gasoline.
Herbicides (paraquats, agent orange, etc.) bind irreversibly with Melanin and remain in the Black human throughout life causing many disorders. Hence Blacks especially, should buy organically grown food.
Most Blacks test positive in the urine test for marijuana! People having high levels of Melanin or a high number of pigmented centers, such as the Black human, tend to show a positive test for the use of marijuana because the chemical species found in the urine which indicates someone’s use of marijuana is also found in the urine of Black humans.
.
Further Information
MELANIN: The Chemical Key to Black Greatness
by Carol Barnes
Jazzy Melanin by Carol Barnes
African Origin of Biological Psychiatry
by Dr. Richard King
MELANIN: A Key To Freedom by Dr. Richard King
Handbook for a Melinated, Melatonin-Friendly Lifestyle
by Dr. Patricia Newton
The Melanin Symposium (video/audio tapes)
Institute of Karmic Guidance (see Resources)
.1) Barnes, MCK, 32. 2) Ibid.
.
All contents are Copyrighted by Suzar (Dr. S. Epps). Website by EppsPro.com

7 Responses to “MORE ON THE BOOK “MELANIN THE CHEMICAL KEY TO BLACK GREATNESS” BY CAROL BARNES FROM SUZAR COM”

  1. MORE ON THE BOOK “MELANIN THE CHEMICAL KEY TO BLACK GREATNESS” BY CAROL BARNES FROM SUZAR COM · Skin Cancer Information Says:
    [...] Original post by BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL! [...]
  2. lilkemet Says:
    This seems like a really interesting book. I would like to read it. Thank you
  3. Darrell Davis Says:
    To all of my brothers and sisters I have always sent information so that you can learn about your black heritage. This e-mail is of a warning. You won’t believe this. There is a company that is making sunglasses with melanin in it. I sent the link. Question: “How are they getting the melanin by manufacturing or harvesting?”
  4. underprivilegedjournalism Says:
    Beautiful post, my sister.
    Also, I have heard stories about them extracting eumelanin from our people’s corpses (without permission).
    S. Lightfoot
  5. yolanda Says:
    I enjoyed reading your article about melanin
  6. Insomniac Says:
    Good food! Thank you
  7. Antioch Hades Says:
    Traces of melanin (Eumelanin in blacks, Pheomelanin in the devil) are also found in the Pineal Gland (3rd Eye). This is of chief importance because it means “(UV) light activates the Pineal” and, in the case of the Iceman, also destroys it.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

OBAMA-HOW OUR BLACK PRESIDENT'S KENYAN SISTER CHANGED HIS LIFE!


He was young, successful... and selfish. Barack Obama's autobiography reveals how it took the sister he had never met to give his life meaning

By BARACK OBAMA
Last updated at 9:34 PM on 08th June 2008
He has made history as the first black man to get within reach of becoming the U.S. President. Here, in our second extract from his extraordinary autobiography, Barack Obama reveals with moving frankness the moment he met his half-sister and how she made him reassess his father, his career and his sense of identity...
A year after leaving college, my resolve to do something meaningful with my life was slipping away. On the face of it, I was a success, working in New York as a financial writer, with my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. But this was far from the grass-roots community work I had envisaged. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors.
Enlarge Barack Obama
Presidential hopeful: Barack Obama as he is today
In my suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand, I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
Then one day, as I sat down to write an article on interest-rate swops, something unexpected happened. Auma called.
I had never met this African half-sister; we had written only intermittently. I knew that she had left Kenya  -  the home of our shared father  -  to study in Germany.
Now, suddenly, I heard her voice for the first time. It was soft and dark, tinged with a colonial accent. For a few moments I couldn't understand the words, only the sound, a sound that seemed to have always been there, misplaced but not forgotten.
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Auma
Auma Obama,the half-sister of Barack Obama
Could she come to see me in New York? 'Of course,' I said. 'You can stay with me; I can't wait.' I spent the next few weeks rushing around in preparation: new sheets for the sofa bed, a scrubbing for the bath.
But two days before she was scheduled to arrive, Auma called again, the voice thicker now, barely a whisper.
'I can't come after all,' she said. 'One of our brothers, David  -  he's been killed. In a motorcycle accident. I don't know any more than that.' She began to cry. 'Oh, Barack. Why do these things happen to us?'
I tried to comfort her as best I could. After she hung up, I left my office, telling my secretary I'd be gone for the day. For hours I wandered the streets, the sound of Auma's voice playing over and over in my mind.
A continent away, a woman cries. On a dark and dusty road, a boy skids out of control, tumbling against hard earth, wheels spinning to silence.
Who were these people, I asked myself, these strangers who carried my blood? What might save this woman from her sorrow? What wild dreams had this boy possessed? Who was I, who shed no tears at the loss of his own?
I still wonder how that first contact with Auma altered my life. Not so much the contact itself (that meant everything) or the news that she gave me of David's death (that, too, is an absolute; I would never know him, and that says enough).
But rather the timing of her call, the sequence of events, the raised expectations and then the dashed hopes, at a time when the idea of working to help people was still just that, an idea in my head, a vague tug at my heart.
Maybe it made no difference. Maybe Auma's voice simply served to remind me that I still had wounds to heal, and could not heal myself. That I still felt confused about my identity. But if Auma had come to New York then and I had learned from her what I learned later about my father, it might have relieved certain pressures that had built up inside me. I then might have taken a more selfish course, and given myself over to stocks and bonds and respectability.
I don't know. What's certain is that, reminded of my family, my father and the sense of duty he inspired within me, I resigned from my big graduate job and began work as a community worker in Chicago.
Two years later, Auma came into my life again. She wanted to visit. At the airport, I scanned the crowds. How would I find her? I looked down at the photo she had sent me, smudged now from too much handling.
Then I looked up, and the picture came to life: an African woman emerging from behind the customs gate, moving with easy, graceful steps; her bright, searching eyes now fixed on my own; her dark, round, sculpted face blossoming like a wood rose as she smiled.
I lifted my sister off the ground as we embraced. I picked up her bag and, as we began to walk, she slipped her arm through mine.
I knew at that moment, somehow, that I loved her  -  so naturally, so easily and fiercely, that later, after she was gone, I would find myself mistrusting that love.
'So, brother,' Auma said as we drove into the city, 'you have to tell me about your life.' I told her about my white-as-milk mother and grandparents and how my black-as-pitch and hugely intelligent father had left us in Hawaii when I was two, to return to his family in Kenya.
How Father had come back to see us in Hawaii for Christmas when I was ten, and then left again  -  for ever. The Old Man. That's what Auma called our father. It sounded right to me, somehow, at once familiar and distant, an elemental force that isn't fully understood.
In my apartment, Auma held up the picture of him that sat on my bookshelf, a studio portrait. 'He looks so innocent, doesn't he? So young.' She held the picture next to my face. 'You have the same mouth.'
Her eyes wandered over my face as if it were a puzzle to solve, another piece to a problem that, beneath the exuberant chatter, nagged at her heart.
Later, as we prepared dinner, she asked me about girlfriends.
I went to the refrigerator and pulled out two green peppers, setting them on the cutting board.
'Well, there was a woman in New York whom I loved. She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes. Her voice sounded like a wind chime. We saw each other for almost a year. Sometimes in her apartment, sometimes in mine.
'You know how you can fall into your own private world? Just two people, hidden and warm. Your own language. Your own customs. That's how it was.
'Anyway, one weekend she invited me to her family's country house. It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us, and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves.
'The house was very old. The library was filled with old books and pictures of her grandfather with famous people he had known  -  presidents, diplomats, industrialists.
'There was this tremendous gravity to the room. Standing in that room, I realised that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as could be.
'And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers. After all, I'd been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider. So I pushed her away, and we began to argue.
'One night, I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humour. Everyone was hollering like they were in church.
'After the play was over, she started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering  -  nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said.
'We had a big fight. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn't be black, she said. She could only be herself, and wasn't that enough?'
'That's a sad story,' said Auma. I scraped the cut-up peppers into the pot. 'The thing is,' I said, 'whenever I think back to what she said to me, that night outside the theatre, it somehow makes me ashamed.'
Auma asked if we were still in touch. 'I got a postcard at Christmas. She's happy now; she's met someone. And I have my work.'
Is that enough?' Auma said. 'Sometimes,' I replied.
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1025052/He-young-successful--selfish-Barack-Obamas-autobiography-reveals-took-sister-met-life-meaning.html#ixzz0rz5Tg3zb

FROM mail-online.com
Barack Obama
Together: Barack Obama, back row, second from left, on his first visit to Kenya in 1987 and Auma, front left.
We talked about Father, who had died four years before when I was 21, after descending into alcoholism. He was killed in a car accident. 'I can't say I really knew him,' she began. 'His life was so scattered. People knew only scraps and pieces.
She described how he left her with her older brother, Roy, and mother, to travel to Hawaii to study. There, he met my mother, whom he married bigamously. When he returned to Kenya, his relationship with my mother having broken down, he brought back another American, named Ruth.
She refused to live with his first wife in the traditional manner, so he ordered his children to come from their rural village to live with him and Ruth in Nairobi.
Auma said: 'I remember that this woman, Ruth, was the first white person I'd ever been near, and that suddenly she was supposed to be my new mother.'
It transpired that initially, my father had done well, working for an American oil company. He was well connected to the top government people, and had a big house and car.
Our four other brothers were born at this time: Ruth's children Mark and David, and two further boys with his first wife, Abo and Bernard.
Then things changed, and Father fell out of favour with the government. He became known as a troublemaker. According to the stories, President Kenyatta said to the Old Man that, because he could not keep his mouth shut, he would not work again until he had no shoes on his feet.
He began to drink, and Ruth left him. Then he had a car accident while drunk, killing a white farmer. Auma told me: 'I was 12. He was in hospital for a year, and Roy and I lived basically on our own. When he got out of hospital, he went to visit you, in Hawaii.
'He told us that the two of you would be coming back with him and that then we would have a proper family. But you weren't with him when he returned, and Roy and I were left to deal with him by ourselves.
'He still put on airs about how we were the children of Dr Obama. We would have empty cupboards, but he would make donations to charities just to keep up appearances.
'He would stagger drunk into my room at night, because he wanted company. Secretly, I began to wish that he would just stay out one night and never come back. One year, he couldn't even pay my school fees, and I was sent home. I was so ashamed, I cried all night.'
She added: 'Eventually, the Old Man's situation improved. Kenyatta died, and he got a job with the Ministry of Finance. But I think he never got over the bitterness of what happened to him, seeing his friends who had been more politically astute rise ahead of him. And it was too late to pick up the pieces of his family. For a long time he lived alone in a hotel room. He would have different women for short spells  -  Europeans, Africans  -  but nothing lasted. When I got my scholarship to study in Germany, I left without saying goodbye.'
Auma saw Father one last time, when he came on a business trip to Europe. 'He seemed relaxed, almost peaceful,' she recalled. 'We had a really good time. He could be so charming! He took me with him to London, and we stayed in a fancy hotel, and he introduced me to all his friends at a British club. I felt like his princess.
'On the last day of his visit, he took me to lunch, and we talked about the future. He asked me if I needed money and insisted that I take something. It was touching, you know, what he was trying to do  -  as if he could make up for all the lost time.
'By then, he had just fathered another son, George, with a young woman he was living with. I told him, "Roy and myself, we're adults. What has happened is hard to undo. But with George, the baby, he is a clean slate. You have a chance to really do right by him." And he nodded.'
Staring at our father's photograph, she began to sob, shaking violently. I put my arms around her as she wept, the sorrow washing through her.
'Do you see, Barack?' she said between sobs. 'I was just starting to know him. It had got to the point where he might have explained himself. He seemed at peace. When he died, I felt so cheated. As cheated as you must have felt.'
Outside, a car screeched around a corner; a solitary man crossed under the yellow circle of a streetlight. Auma turned to me. 'You know, the Old Man used to talk about you so much! He would show off your picture to everybody and tell us how well you were doing in school.
'Your mum sent him letters. During the really bad times, when everybody seemed to have turned against him, he would bring her letters into my room and wake me up to read them. "You see!" he would say. "At least there are people who truly care for me." Over and over again.'
That night, I lay awake. I felt as if my world had been turned on its head; as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men.
All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own.
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Obama
Barack Obama in his senior picture at his prestigious private school in Hawaii
The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader  -  my father had been all those things. All those things and more. Because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image.
I hadn't seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father's body shrinking, their father's best hopes dashed, their face lined with grief and regret.
It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
My father's voice had remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. 'You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!'
Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat?
To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a moment I felt giddy; if Auma hadn't been in the room, I would have probably laughed out loud. The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please.
The night wore on; I tried to regain my balance. There was little satisfaction to be had from my new-found liberation. What had happened to all his vigour, his promise?
The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Even in his absence, his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live. Who would show me the way now?
I recalled once again the first and only time we'd met, the man who had returned to Hawaii to sift through his past and perhaps try to reclaim that best part of him, the part that had been misplaced.
He hadn't been able to tell me his true feelings then, any more than I had been able to express my ten-year-old desires.
Now, 15 years later, I knew the price we had paid for that silence. Soon, it was time for Auma to leave. Sitting in the airport terminal, I asked her what she was thinking about, and she smiled softly.
'I was thinking about home,' she said. 'I'm sitting under the trees Grandfather planted. Granny is talking, telling me something funny, and I can hear the cow swishing its tail behind us, and the chickens pecking at the edges of the field, and the smell of the fire from the cooking hut.'
Her flight was starting to board. We remained seated, and Auma closed her eyes, squeezing my hand. 'And under the mango tree, near the cornfields, is the place where the Old Man is buried.'
• Extracted from Dreams From Father (£12.99) and The Audacity Of Hope (£8.99) by Barack Obama, published by Canongate Books, (c)Barack Obama 2007. To order copies (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.
 
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The guy's a fake, and a fraud. What are his policies?
Click to rate     Rating   18
This is a very moving story. I am touched, but curious at the same time. I am very much interested in Barack's life back in Hawaii.
Click to rate     Rating   10
Good luck Barack, I hope America is 'grown-up' enough to elect you. Your choice of running-mate should be very interesting.
Click to rate     Rating   10
Stop it, just stop it, stop this demagoguery about this guy. The Obama stuff has become a cult, and all this media fawning over this rather creepy guy is even creepier. Obama is not the hero that some need him to be, mostly, he's a rather unethical, dullard. So's his wife.
Click to rate     Rating   8
Man! I had been wondering why Barack Obama had been called black, when he seemed quite light to me. He is certainly well placed to understand the suffering of so many, who have been cheated out of a stable 'mother and father' family life, in his case by his father's serial promiscuity. It makes me want to pray and work harder amongst Africans now living in Western culture, so that they internalize the concept of not living just to satisfy their own (political) aspirations, but to honour the true and living (Christian) God, who loves faithfulness in monogamous marriage.
Click to rate     Rating   1
You want selfish - John McCain dumped his first wife, who prayed every day for his release as a POW, because she got fat while he was in Vietnam! Then he married a rich trophy Stepford wife.
Click to rate     Rating   4

Barack Obama
Together: Barack Obama, back row, second from left, on his first visit to Kenya in 1987 and Auma, front left.
We talked about Father, who had died four years before when I was 21, after descending into alcoholism. He was killed in a car accident. 'I can't say I really knew him,' she began. 'His life was so scattered. People knew only scraps and pieces.
She described how he left her with her older brother, Roy, and mother, to travel to Hawaii to study. There, he met my mother, whom he married bigamously. When he returned to Kenya, his relationship with my mother having broken down, he brought back another American, named Ruth.
She refused to live with his first wife in the traditional manner, so he ordered his children to come from their rural village to live with him and Ruth in Nairobi.
Auma said: 'I remember that this woman, Ruth, was the first white person I'd ever been near, and that suddenly she was supposed to be my new mother.'
It transpired that initially, my father had done well, working for an American oil company. He was well connected to the top government people, and had a big house and car.
Our four other brothers were born at this time: Ruth's children Mark and David, and two further boys with his first wife, Abo and Bernard.
Then things changed, and Father fell out of favour with the government. He became known as a troublemaker. According to the stories, President Kenyatta said to the Old Man that, because he could not keep his mouth shut, he would not work again until he had no shoes on his feet.
He began to drink, and Ruth left him. Then he had a car accident while drunk, killing a white farmer. Auma told me: 'I was 12. He was in hospital for a year, and Roy and I lived basically on our own. When he got out of hospital, he went to visit you, in Hawaii.
'He told us that the two of you would be coming back with him and that then we would have a proper family. But you weren't with him when he returned, and Roy and I were left to deal with him by ourselves.
'He still put on airs about how we were the children of Dr Obama. We would have empty cupboards, but he would make donations to charities just to keep up appearances.
'He would stagger drunk into my room at night, because he wanted company. Secretly, I began to wish that he would just stay out one night and never come back. One year, he couldn't even pay my school fees, and I was sent home. I was so ashamed, I cried all night.'
She added: 'Eventually, the Old Man's situation improved. Kenyatta died, and he got a job with the Ministry of Finance. But I think he never got over the bitterness of what happened to him, seeing his friends who had been more politically astute rise ahead of him. And it was too late to pick up the pieces of his family. For a long time he lived alone in a hotel room. He would have different women for short spells  -  Europeans, Africans  -  but nothing lasted. When I got my scholarship to study in Germany, I left without saying goodbye.'
Auma saw Father one last time, when he came on a business trip to Europe. 'He seemed relaxed, almost peaceful,' she recalled. 'We had a really good time. He could be so charming! He took me with him to London, and we stayed in a fancy hotel, and he introduced me to all his friends at a British club. I felt like his princess.
'On the last day of his visit, he took me to lunch, and we talked about the future. He asked me if I needed money and insisted that I take something. It was touching, you know, what he was trying to do  -  as if he could make up for all the lost time.
'By then, he had just fathered another son, George, with a young woman he was living with. I told him, "Roy and myself, we're adults. What has happened is hard to undo. But with George, the baby, he is a clean slate. You have a chance to really do right by him." And he nodded.'
Staring at our father's photograph, she began to sob, shaking violently. I put my arms around her as she wept, the sorrow washing through her.
'Do you see, Barack?' she said between sobs. 'I was just starting to know him. It had got to the point where he might have explained himself. He seemed at peace. When he died, I felt so cheated. As cheated as you must have felt.'
Outside, a car screeched around a corner; a solitary man crossed under the yellow circle of a streetlight. Auma turned to me. 'You know, the Old Man used to talk about you so much! He would show off your picture to everybody and tell us how well you were doing in school.
'Your mum sent him letters. During the really bad times, when everybody seemed to have turned against him, he would bring her letters into my room and wake me up to read them. "You see!" he would say. "At least there are people who truly care for me." Over and over again.'
That night, I lay awake. I felt as if my world had been turned on its head; as if I had woken up to find a blue sun in the yellow sky, or heard animals speaking like men.
All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own.
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Obama
Barack Obama in his senior picture at his prestigious private school in Hawaii
The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader  -  my father had been all those things. All those things and more. Because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image.
I hadn't seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father's body shrinking, their father's best hopes dashed, their face lined with grief and regret.
It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
My father's voice had remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. 'You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!'
Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat?
To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a moment I felt giddy; if Auma hadn't been in the room, I would have probably laughed out loud. The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please.
The night wore on; I tried to regain my balance. There was little satisfaction to be had from my new-found liberation. What had happened to all his vigour, his promise?
The fantasy of my father had at least kept me from despair. Even in his absence, his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint. Now he was dead, truly. He could no longer tell me how to live. Who would show me the way now?
I recalled once again the first and only time we'd met, the man who had returned to Hawaii to sift through his past and perhaps try to reclaim that best part of him, the part that had been misplaced.
He hadn't been able to tell me his true feelings then, any more than I had been able to express my ten-year-old desires.
Now, 15 years later, I knew the price we had paid for that silence. Soon, it was time for Auma to leave. Sitting in the airport terminal, I asked her what she was thinking about, and she smiled softly.
'I was thinking about home,' she said. 'I'm sitting under the trees Grandfather planted. Granny is talking, telling me something funny, and I can hear the cow swishing its tail behind us, and the chickens pecking at the edges of the field, and the smell of the fire from the cooking hut.'
Her flight was starting to board. We remained seated, and Auma closed her eyes, squeezing my hand. 'And under the mango tree, near the cornfields, is the place where the Old Man is buried.'
• Extracted from Dreams From Father (£12.99) and The Audacity Of Hope (£8.99) by Barack Obama, published by Canongate Books, (c)Barack Obama 2007. To order copies (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.

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The guy's a fake, and a fraud. What are his policies?
Click to rate     Rating   18
This is a very moving story. I am touched, but curious at the same time. I am very much interested in Barack's life back in Hawaii.
Click to rate     Rating   10
Good luck Barack, I hope America is 'grown-up' enough to elect you. Your choice of running-mate should be very interesting.
Click to rate     Rating   10
Stop it, just stop it, stop this demagoguery about this guy. The Obama stuff has become a cult, and all this media fawning over this rather creepy guy is even creepier. Obama is not the hero that some need him to be, mostly, he's a rather unethical, dullard. So's his wife.
Click to rate     Rating   8
Man! I had been wondering why Barack Obama had been called black, when he seemed quite light to me. He is certainly well placed to understand the suffering of so many, who have been cheated out of a stable 'mother and father' family life, in his case by his father's serial promiscuity. It makes me want to pray and work harder amongst Africans now living in Western culture, so that they internalize the concept of not living just to satisfy their own (political) aspirations, but to honour the true and living (Christian) God, who loves faithfulness in monogamous marriage.
Click to rate     Rating   1
You want selfish - John McCain dumped his first wife, who prayed every day for his release as a POW, because she got fat while he was in Vietnam! Then he married a rich trophy Stepford wife.
Click to rate     Rating   4