Eventually, Obama discovered the truth about his father from his half-sister Auma. Still, Obama didn't give up on his father. He went to his grave and wept. He pressed his hand into the earth and tried to commune with his father "through Africa's red soil". But Obama couldn't get back his dead father, so instead he decided to take his dream. He concluded that, although flawed as a man, the senior Obama had great ideals. Obama would realise those ideals, and perhaps in this way he could complete the family circle and be worthy of his father's love. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's ideology became the son's birthright.

But what was Barack Obama Sr's ideology? First and foremost, he was an anti-colonialist. He came of age in Kenya during that country's struggle for independence from the British. The Obama family suffered the scars of colonialism. In the 1950s, when the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, cracked down on the Mau Mau guerrillas in Kenya, Obama Sr was arrested for his political activities, and Barack's grandfather Onyango Obama was placed in a detention camp and allegedly tortured. Anti-colonialism arose out of anger and humiliation, and in the case of Obama Sr those sentiments were the product of direct experience.

I know quite a bit about anti-colonialism because I grew up in India in the period immediately following British rule. Anti-colonialism was very much in the air during the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a boy roaming the streets of Mumbai. My father was an anti-colonialist, as was his father and most of my uncles, and pretty much everyone else I knew. Anti-colonialism was the dominant political ideology in the Third World in the second half of the 20th century. Barack Obama Sr's anti-colonialism is very familiar to me, although many Americans view it with incomprehension. 

The premises of anti-colonialism, although familiar, are worth spelling out. The general idea is that the world is divided into two camps: the colonisers who are the white West, and the colonised, who are the peoples of the Third World. Anti-colonialists usually assume that the rich countries got rich by invading, occupying and looting the poor countries. Further, they claim that today it is no longer Europe but America that is the rogue elephant stampeding its way across the world. America now invades and occupies other countries in much the same way that the French and the British once did. Anti-colonialists hold that even when colonialism formally ends, there remain powerful concentrations of economic power in the rich countries. These economic elites are faulted with "neocolonialism", which is colonialism in a new form, economic exploitation. In the anti-colonialist view, these wicked elites — the banks, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the oil companies and so on — continue to oppress not only their own people but also people across the globe. 

Barack Obama Sr was an economist, and he described his economic views as "African socialist". In 1965, he wrote an article in the East Africa Journal in which he placed his socialist views firmly within the larger framework of anti-colonialism. He began with the anti-colonial objective, which is of course national liberation. But for him, political liberation is not enough. Kenya, after all, became politically independent in 1963. What Obama Sr is concerned about is economic independence. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"