British diplomats expressed concerns that Kenyans studying in the United States, including the father of President Barack Obama, had a reputation for turning “anti-American and anti-white,” London’s
Daily Mail reported.
The memo from a British diplomat in Washington, released by Britain’s National Archives, does not single out Obama’s father who grew up in Kenya under British rule and came to Hawaii in 1959 to study.
“I have discussed with the State Department. They are as disturbed about these developments as we are. They point out that Kenya students have a bad reputation over here for falling into the wrong hands and for becoming both anti-American and anti-white,” the memo said according to the paper.
Obama’s father does appear on a Foreign Office list of Kenyan students as “OBAMA, Barack H.” He was 23 at the time and enrolled at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu to study economics. There he met and married classmate Ann Dunham, who later gave birth to the future president and namesake, the Daily Mail reported.
The senior Obama was among about100 Kenyan students brought to America by the African American Students Foundation, a group viewed as political rather than educational by diplomats and suspected of having links to a Kenyan nationalist.
A letter warned, “The arrival here of these students, many of them of indifferent academic caliber and ill-prepared for the venture, is likely to give rise to difficult problems,” according to the Daily Mail.
Obama senior and Ann Dunham later divorced and he earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard and became a senior economist with the Kenyan government before dying in 1982.
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