Early in Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss defines an African word, jadak, that will weave its way through his biography of our 44th president. “Pronounced juh-DAK,” Maraniss writes, “it meant ‘foreigner,’ ‘immigrant,’ ‘alien,’ and was delivered and received as an insult.” The word is first applied to the president’s paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, whose family only went back four generations in Luoland, a region of western Kenya bordering Lake Victoria, and thus were still considered outsiders.
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