A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  Ann’s approach to matters of the spirit was eclectic. She would meditate in Buddhist monasteries and make small offerings in the Hindu communities that she visited. When she had a kris made for herself in Java, Maya said, she went through the ritual of sleeping with it under her pillow—a process through which a kris is thought to communicate with its owner through dreams—and having her dreams interpreted. “It was important to just sort of acknowledge that everyone had something beautiful to contribute spiritually,” Maya told me. “She always counseled us to be very open-minded, to have deep respect for everyone’s religions, to recognize that every religion had something good to offer.” According to others, she was skeptical of organized religion and ceremonial excess. Don Johnston, a Southern Baptist from Little Rock, Arkansas, and a colleague of Ann’s in the early 1990s, said she seemed at that time to be leaning toward deism or Unitarianism—the religion of the church in Bellevue, Washington, she attended as an adolescent. God, she thought, could be found at the intersection of many belief systems. “As anthropologists, we tend to talk about religion more as ritual practice and part of human society,” said Nina Nayar, who became a close friend of Ann’s several years later. “Rarely do we converse about belief in God. I would not say Ann was a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist. I would not put a label on her. But she had a general interest. And I think she probably had more spiritual stuff in her than most people who profess to be religious and faithful. She never once used words in my presence about being atheist or agnostic. She was not a woman of labels. The only label she would not shun was the label of anthropologist.”

  In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his mother, despite her professed secularism, as “in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known.” Without religious texts or outside authorities, he says, she worked to instill in him the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school. She possessed, too, “an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional.” She would occasionally wake him in the middle of the night, as a child, he writes, to look at the moon or have him close his eyes as they “walked together at twilight to listen to the rustle of leaves. . . . She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life.”

  In the late summer of 1986, Ann arranged for Maya to fly to Jakarta, on her way back to Hawaii from Pakistan, to visit her father. Lolo Soetoro had been hospitalized in Jakarta with the liver disease that had been diagnosed a decade earlier when Maya was a small child. Though Ann had been led to believe by his doctors, during his hospitalization in Los Angeles, that the disease would cut short his life, Lolo had lived another seven years. Now he was gravely ill. Maya, having just turned sixteen, flew by herself to Jakarta, where relatives met her at the airport and took her to the home of her uncle Trisulo. Lolo, released from the hospital, spent a week with her in Trisulo’s house. He was more talkative than Maya had remembered. He asked about her school, her favorite subjects, and her friends. He brought photographs of himself that he wanted her to keep. There were moments of affection and tenderness. But their time together felt awkward to Maya. “I felt a teenage resentment that he hadn’t been present in a more meaningful way and that he had left the rearing of me to Mom,” she remembered later. “I was sort of feeling like I wanted him to be sorry about that.” Later, she would come to regret not having stayed longer. But she had been away from Hawaii for three months, and she was impatient to go home. It never occurred to her that her father might be dying—and that he might know it. Afterward, she wrote him a long letter from Hawaii and tried to send it in time to reach him before his birthday on January 2. She wanted them to have a meaningful relationship, she told him in the letter; she wanted to know him better. But the letter was waylaid in the Christmas rush, she told me, and did not arrive as planned. In the meantime, a family member telephoned from Indonesia to say that Lolo had fallen into a coma. In early 1987, he died.

  The house in Menteng Dalam, to which Maya and Ann had returned from Hawaii in 1975, went to Maya (and was sold some years later, with the proceeds going to help pay for her graduate-school education). To protect Maya’s rights, Ann stopped in Jakarta on her way home from Pakistan the following November. The house was being rented by Dick Patten, whom she had gotten to know while she was working on the provincial planning project in Central Java in 1979 and 1980. Patten, who had extensive experience in credit systems in Indonesia, had gone on to work as a consultant to one of the largest banks in Indonesia on a program not unrelated to the work he and Ann had done earlier. The aim of the new program, run by a state-owned bank called Bank Rakyat Indonesia, or the People’s Bank of Indonesia, was to make small loans on a broad scale to low-income rural households throughout the country. At a time when the term microfinance was not the household word that it has since become, the Bank Rakyat Indonesia project, launched in early 1984, had gotten off to a remarkable start. By late 1985, the bank had made nearly one million small loans, ranging in value from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars. It would soon be initiating new loans at a rate of 120,000 a month. The program held the potential to benefit small enterprises of the sort Ann had studied as an anthropologist, worked with as a development consultant, and tried to help in her years at Ford. So in the summer of 1988, after Maya graduated from Punahou with plans to enroll at Barnard College in the fall, Ann moved back to Jakarta to work with Patten on what was quickly becoming the most successful commercial microfinance program of its kind in the world.

  Once again, her dissertation would have to wait.

  “Anyway, they are paying me well and I need to fill up my bank account again. (How’s that for revolutionary fervor?),” she wrote to Suryakusuma in August 1988.

  The credit program had arisen out of the ruins of an earlier effort at rural lending. During the 1970s, Bank Rakyat Indonesia had set up a network of 3,600 small banking units for the purpose of channeling government-subsidized credit to rice farmers under the country’s push for rice self-sufficiency. Lending under that program had peaked in the mid-1970s, after which operational losses had ballooned. So it had been phased out, leaving the bank with an extensive network of fully staffed loan offices with little to do. With the encouragement of the Ministry of Finance and advice from the Harvard Institute for International Development, with which Dick Patten was affiliated, the bank had tried something new.

  From the beginning, anthropologists had shaped the new credit program. Marguerite Robinson, an American anthropologist who had done fieldwork in India and spent twenty years teaching, had joined the Harvard institute and been sent to Indonesia to work with the Ministry of Finance. James Fox, the anthropologist from Australia whom Ann had known in Jakarta in the early 1980s, had worked with Robinson and Patten advising the bank. From anthropological fieldwork, including Ann’s, they knew that rice farming was just one of many economic activities in Indonesian villages that needed credit in order to grow. They also knew, from village studies, that government-subsidized credit, under the old system, had reached only a small fraction of villagers. It needed to be more widely accessible. So, working with the finance minister, the consultants began exploring a program of unsubsidized commercial microfinance. The bank would lend money for any reasonable economic activity, not just rice farming. The program would soon operate without an ongoing subsidy; instead, it would charge interest at the market rate. The market rate was nearly twice the old rate. But most villagers, if they borrowed money, did so through loan groups or moneylenders, who charged in excess of one hundred percent interest on an annual basis. Even with an interest rate of thirty-two percent, it was argued, the new program would be an improvement.

  The project took off. Within two years, with the help of a microsavings program, the new general credit program was self-sustaining. By 1989, the bank had 2.7 million rural savings accounts; it had made as many as 6.4 million loans to 1.6 million borrowers. The microfinance program would become the biggest a
nd most lucrative part of the bank’s operations. In 1999, Fox called the program “probably the single largest and most successful credit program of its kind in the developing world.”

  Ann joined the team in 1988 and worked on and off over the next four years as a research coordinator and consultant under three separate contracts funded by the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ann had what Patten lacked—an intimate knowledge of Indonesian villages. Working with teams of staff researchers from the bank, she designed and carried out what might be described as customer surveys and market research, the results of which were used to fine-tune and measure the success of the microfinance program. She spent weeks at a time traveling with her teams on field trips through Java, North Sumatra, South Sulawesi, and Bali, meeting with bank branch managers and interviewing customers for hours on end. The teams examined how customers were using the money they had borrowed. They gauged its impact on households and rates of employment. They studied repayment rates by gender, estimated the scope of unmet demand, and tracked the rates at which customers were either keeping up with or falling behind on their payments. The consultants used the studies—original research at a time when there was little like it—to refine the microfinance program and to convince the bank not simply to continue the experiment but to expand it, increasing the size of the loans. For every million rupiahs that the bank loaned, Ann told Kamardy Arief, the bank’s chief executive officer, her research showed that one additional job was created.

  “Ann provided a justification from the field for the approach of commercial microfinance,” said Don Johnston, who joined the Harvard group in early 1990 and worked closely with her and Patten. “She was showing that this was something that was benefiting the customers—not something the banks were doing out of desperation. That left Dick and me free to worry about the operational side. We had our ammunition to deal with outsiders, and we had the information that gave us confidence that the basic product approach and expansion direction we were taking was right. So then we could worry about fighting the internal battles . . . to keep the institution on track.”

  The microfinance program was an extraordinary success. In June 1990, it was making 115,000 loans a month with a value of $50 million and an average loan size of $437. It was soon a major source of the bank’s growth. During the East Asian monetary crisis of the late 1990s, when the repayment rate on the microloans remained higher than that of the small, medium, and corporate customers of the bank, the program helped the bank weather the crisis. As of 2009, the bank operated more than four thousand microbanking outlets in Indonesia. It had 4.9 million microloan customers and 19.5 million microsavings customers.

  “If you work in the development racket, you’re lucky at the end of ten years or twenty or thirty to be able to look back and say, ‘I think I did more good than harm,’” Richard Hook, who was hired as an adviser on the Bank Rakyat Indonesia project the same year as Ann, told me. “The non-successes are all too numerous. Often you inflict collateral damage, albeit unwittingly and unwillingly. This project met Indonesian needs. It was based in a massive Indonesian institution—a state-owned commercial bank. It was run by Indonesians. We were external advisers. The concept was making small loans to low-income rural people. The conventional wisdom was you won’t get repaid and these people don’t know how to handle a loan, they were too innocent of sophisticated procedures and financial know-how to know how to handle credit. We didn’t believe that. A number of Indonesians didn’t, either. We worked together and made this project work. That was just such a delight.”

  Patten was brilliant, creative, and not necessarily easy to get along with. Akhtar Hameed Khan, the microcredit pioneer whom he had known in East Pakistan in the 1960s, once described him as “the finest development worker I have ever met.” The son of a successful midwestern banker, he had grown up on a daily regimen of meat and potatoes so rigid, his daughter told me, that it drove him to swear off potatoes for life. He had spent most of his adult life in East Pakistan, Ghana, and Indonesia—a long way from Norman, Oklahoma. A divorced father of three, he inhabited the persona of an inveterate bachelor. He liked people who did not need to talk all the time, and he hated the sort of questions that began with “Don’t you think . . .” He was hardworking and occasionally napped on the office floor. For a time, he lived in a house with a two-story cage that served as home for a black Sumatran gibbon—until the gibbon terrorized various neighbors and found its way into the electrical wires above the street, necessitating a neighborhood-wide power shutoff. Patten was opinionated and blunt but not without compassion. After three months as office manager, Flora Sugondo went to him in tears, saying she wanted to quit because, working for Patten, she had become convinced she could do nothing right. Patten apologized, persuaded her to stay, and vowed never to treat her that way again. When Johnston, a graduate student in economics at Harvard, arrived in Jakarta for a temporary stint as a research assistant in Patten’s office, Patten gave him a paper to edit, and Johnston “marked the hell out of it in red ink,” as he put it. Patten was thrilled. Johnston was suddenly the permanent project assistant. “When I got there, everybody was so happy,” Johnston told me. “I was one of the few people who could work productively with Dick.”

  Ann was another. Patten valued Ann’s ability to recognize what kind of research would be useful in building the microfinance program. They shared a certain midwestern straightforwardness and a fascination with Indonesian culture and Indonesian people. Patten operated the house in Menteng Dalam as a kind of guesthouse for expatriate consultants. During periods when Ann was between contracts or not renting a house of her own, she stayed there. She treated Patten like a favorite uncle, said Johnston, who lived in the house. Sometimes she called him her surrogate father. There might be as many as ten or twelve people at the table for dinner—pot roast or meat loaf, and vanilla ice cream for dessert. Patten kept the lights dim and the radio tuned to the BBC. He liked Bach—“up and down music,” as Ann dismissively called it. Patten found her good company and entertaining. Once, he told me, Maya telephoned Ann from Yogyakarta, where she was taking time off from college and working for a travel company, leading cultural tours in Java and Bali. An older, unmarried American tourist, who happened to be a teacher, had arranged to have a blind masseur come to her hotel. The woman had become hysterical, accused the masseur of molesting her, and had him arrested. Maya wanted her mother’s advice. “First, give the teacher a good, hard slap,” Patten remembered Ann saying. “Then go to the police station and make sure nothing happened to the masseur.”

  Recalling the story, Patten laughed.

  “It’s so entertaining and so indicative of the way she thought: Just worry about the masseur.”

  Ann’s methodology in the field was meticulous. She designed novella-length questionnaires to be used as a guide for interviewing potential customers about matters ranging from working-capital turnover periods to the number of relatives employed without pay. For inexperienced research assistants, she appended handy tips. “Has the Respondent ever been inside a bank before?” one question asked. If not, why not? If the respondent answered that he or she was afraid of banks, the interviewer was to find out why. “This is an important question, so take whatever time is necessary to discuss it with the Respondent,” Ann wrote. Another question required that the interviewer fill out a chart with ten vertical columns under headings such as “type of account,” “maximum amount of savings,” and “use of withdrawals.” The interviewer was to list every savings account the respondent had had in the previous seven years, as well as other deposits through savings-and-loan societies, credit unions, and other organizations. “If the Respondent has any savings in kind, for example in a rice bank, list this also, but give a rupiah value underneath,” Ann’s instructions said.

  She had an unusual ability to adapt. With bankers, she came across as professional, methodical, and not the least bit eccentric. With older Indonesians, her accent and diction took
on a precision that Don Johnston thought sounded faintly Dutch. Arriving in a village for the first time, she transformed herself into the beloved visiting dignitary—her bearing regal, her silver jewelry flashing, her retinue in tow. “She was clearly the queen bee of the entourage,” recalled Johnston. “Then she gets there and they realize, ‘Oh, this is not just a foreigner but this is a foreigner who can speak Bahasa Indonesia, and who knows a lot about what we’re doing and who wants to talk to us about this stuff. And she has some connection to this big bank, BRI, but she’s not a banker, so I don’t need to be scared of her.’” She was even deft in her dispensing with inevitable Indonesian comments about her physical dimensions. When a boatman professed trepidation about whether the personage boarding his boat was going to sink it, Ann switched, humorously, to the role of the grand lady: How dare you! There was showmanship involved, but she was never inauthentic. “Ann was a genuinely complex person who had a really varied background,” Johnston said. “So she could legitimately tap those different experiences to build empathy with different people.” It made them want to line up and tell her their life stories.