Helen Marguerite (Emery) Roberts was an American writer, photographer, and multilingual educator. From 1958 to 1975, she battled illiteracy in Africa, teaching reading, writing, health and Christian religion to thousands of illiterate adults. In the course of her African work, she mentored and sponsored many promising young Africans, encouraging them to pursue higher education, including Barack H. Obama, the father of President of the United States Barack Obama.

Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was a Kenyan senior governmental economist and the father of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States. He is a central figure of his son's memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995). Obama married in 1954 and had two children with his first wife, Kezia. He was selected for a special program to attend college in the United States and studied at the University of Hawaii where he met Stanley Ann Dunham, whom he married in 1961 following the conception of his son, Barack. Obama and Dunham divorced three years later. Obama then went to Harvard University for graduate school, where he earned an M.A. in economics, and returned to Kenya in 1964. He saw his son Barack once more, when his son was about 10.