Barack Obama Sr.’s romantic life was tumultuous, ambiguous, and left a lot of questions after his death in 1982. As NPR reports, when Obama Sr. met Ann Dunham, he was already married to his first wife, Kezia Aoko, and had two children with her. But he also married Dunham in 1961, and at the time, she didn’t know about Aoko. Obama Sr. was part of the Luo ethnic group, where polygamy is perfectly normal. However, he was aware that Dunham wasn’t Luo, hence his dishonesty. In 1964, Dunham filed for divorce (via Oprah Daily) and, the same year, Obama Sr. married his third wife, Ruth Beatrice Baker (via BlackPast). In 1973, they got divorced, and Obama Sr. reunited with his first wife. Meanwhile, he had eight children.

As Sally H. Jacobs explained in “The Other Barack” (via NPR), three years after his death, a complicated legal drama started, as his children and wives tried to decide who were his legal heirs. Aoko claimed she never divorced Obama Sr., so his other marriages were never legitimate. It turned out that Aoko lied about the divorce, and also about having four children with Obama Sr. — two of them were fathered by someone else. The legal battle went on for years, dividing the family, and leaving the children with a lot of uncertainties about Obama Sr.’s life. As Jacobs noted, five of the Obama children have written memoirs about their dad.

ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue82erqxnp528bsPEq5xmmpGnrqS3jKiZmqWRqHqxrdGepa2rXw%3D%3D