Lolo............Obama's stepfather worked for one of the oil companies.........maybe she found out something there...........again.........a lot of this is supposition.........................





Ikranagara was the daughter of a development economist from the University of California who taught at the University of Indonesia in the late 1950s. She lived in Jakarta as a teenager, studied anthropology and linguistics in the 1960s at Berkeley and then returned to Jakarta, where she met her husband. She met Ann while teaching part time at the management school and writing her dissertation in linguistics. They had a lot in common: Indonesian husbands, degrees in anthropology, babies born in the same month, opinions shaped by the 1960s. They were less conscious than others of the boundaries between cultures, Ikranagara told me, and they rejected what they saw as the previous genera­tion’s hypocrisy on the subject of race. “We had all the same atti­tudes,” she said. “When we met people who worked for the oil companies or the embassy, they belonged to a different cul­ture than Ann and I. We felt they didn’t mix with Indonesians, they were part of an insular American culture.” Servants seemed to be the only Indonesians those Americans knew.

But by the early 1970s, Lolo’s new job had plunged him deeply into the oil-company culture. Foreign businesses in In­donesia were required to hire and train Indonesian partners. The exercise struck some people as a sham: companies would hire an Indonesian director, pay him well and give him little or nothing to do. Trisulo, Lolo’s brother-in-law, told me he did not recall the exact nature of Lolo’s job with Union Oil