Actor

Events

Senior

Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (Senior) was born in Nyangoma-Kogello, Siaya District, Kenya in 1936.  He was a member of the Luo tribe and grew up in the sleepy village of Alego-Kogello.

The myth is that Obama Sr. was a goat herder.

Obama Sr. may have herded some goats that were part of Grandfather's  extensive livestock collection, but Obama Sr. spent his time at school where he was actually an extremely bright student and sufficiently educated to go on to obtain degrees from the University of Hawaii and Harvard.

In 1955, at 18 years of age, Senior married a girl called Kezia from the local village.  It was Kezia who remained his one true love and to whom he always returned.

In 1958, Obama Senior was awarded an American sponsored scholarship in economics to the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  He was selected by a former Kenyan cabinet minister, the late Tom Mboya, who was earmarked as the successor to Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first prime minister and  leader of the terrorist Mau Mau.

The presumption was that Senior would return to Africa and use his "Western-honed skills in a new Kenya."

In 1959, at the age of 23, Obama Sr. became the first African student enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Kezia, who is pregnant, remains in Kenya.  Senior would have two more children with Kezia in subsequent years.

Eventually, Senior will have three wives and one mistress.  With them, he will have seven children, although there are some reports of an eighth.

Kezia

Kezia was a 16-year-old schoolgirl while Senior, two years older, had just got his first proper job as an office clerk in Nairobi.

Kezia said: "It was at a dance in Kendu Bay, my home town.  Barack (Senior) was there on holiday with his family.

"I went to the dance hall with my cousin William and I saw Barack enter the room.  I thought, 'ohhh, wow'.  He was so lovely with his dancing.  So handsome and so smart.

"We danced together and then the next day my cousin came to our house and told me that Barack liked me.

"It was December, so I was off school.  Each day Barack and my cousin would stop by the house.

"Every time I looked they were always there, trying to convince me to go with Barack to Nairobi.

"About a week later, William and I took Barack to the station.  We were going to say: 'Bye bye, see you next time.'  Except there was no bye bye.

"When the train arrived William and Barack said, "You are going to Nairobi."  I went with him.'

Her father, a local driver, was furious.

Kezia said: "He did not like Obama.  My father and brothers came to Nairobi to bring me back.  They said I had to go back to school.

"When I wouldn't, they said they would never speak to me again.

"Barack was also worried about what his father (grandfather) would think because I was so young, but he gave us his approval.  He sent my mother and father 14 cows for my dowry.

Kezia and Barack Sr. were married in a tribal ceremony in January, 1957, and  set up a home in Jericho, a section of Nairobi created for government employees, and began a family.

First son Roy was born in March 1958.  Kezia insisted: "Barack was a good husband."

Can you imagine if a Republican was running for president and it came out that his father had bought his first wife for 14 cows???!!!Just wow!!

The
Dunhams

Madelyn and Stanley shed their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.

"In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as 'the little Red church on the hill,'" said Peter Luton, the church's senior minister.  Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here.

As an historical aside, Anna Dunham's forebears were slaveholders.  One of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Ky.  The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.

Curious and precocious, Anna was greatly influenced by left-wing and communist teachers in the Mercer Island High School, who had the students read the philosophers Sartre and Kierkegaard, "The Communist Manifesto" and question the existence of God.  Anna touted herself as an atheist.

Mercer Island High was a hotbed of pro-Marxist radical teachers.  John Stenhouse, board member, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party USA and the school has a number of Marxists on its staff.  Two teachers at this school, Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman, both Frankfurt School style Marxists, taught a critical theory curriculum to students which included; rejection of societal norms, attacks on Christianity, the traditional family, and assigned readings by Karl Marx.  The hallway between Foubert’s and Wichterman classrooms was called "anarchy ally."

Susan Blake, a classmate and former city councilwoman from Mercer Island who long ago changed the infant Barack's messy diaper, said of her friend: "Hers was a mind in full tilt."

Anna gravitated toward an intellectual clique.  According to former classmate Chip Wall, she caught foreign films at Seattle's only art-house theater, the Ridgemont, and trekked to University District coffee shops like the Encore to talk about jazz, the value of learning from other cultures and the "very dull Eisenhower-ness of our parents."

"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today: The press is dumbed-down, education is dumbed down, people don't know anything about geography or the rest of the world," said Wall, who later taught at Mercer Island High and is now retired in Seattle.

A high school classmate described Anna as "a fellow traveler. . . . We were liberals before we knew what liberals were."

The descriptive, "fellow traveler," was first applied to non-communists who were inclined toward the views of the Communist Party by Leon Trotsky.

On February 2, 1961, against Madelyn's hopes, and against the desires of Obama's father back in Kenya, Ann, three months pregnant, and Obama hopped a plane to Maui and got married.

The wedding had no witnesses, not even her parents, and no record of the event has yet been found.  The only evidence that suggests a February, 1961 date for the wedding was a document included in Ann Dunham's 1964 divorce proceedings against Obama Senior.

Obama, himself, hints that his father and mother’s wedding may not have been properly documented.  "How and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never quite had the courage to explore," Obama writes in his memoir.

It's understandable that Obama overlooks the particulars, since Ann Dunham was probably a minor when Barack Obama Sr., an already married 24-year-old, impregnated her?

Obama weighed eight pounds, two ounces when he was born on August 4, 1961 (p. 22 of Dreams from My Father), so we can assume he went close to full term, or nine months.

Michelle Obama contradicts this version.  She described Anna as "very young and very single when she had him (Obama)."

His parents’ alleged marriage took place six months before his birth on February 2nd, 1961.  Nine months before Obama’s birth would be early November 1960, about three to four weeks before Ann Dunham’s 18th birthday on November 29, 1960.

The lack of any documentary evidence, when such evidence for legal marriages that took place in Hawaii during 1961 is readily available today to any inquiring family member, strongly suggests that Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Senior were not ever legally married and that Obama Sr., a married man of about 24, almost certainly impregnated a 17-year-old Dunham.

And this -- There is no evidence whatsoever that Senior and Anna ever lived together anywhere, at any time.  The living arrangements between the announcement of the wedding and the birth of the child were uncertain.  Most likely, Obama Senior remained in his dorm room while Ann lived with her parents.  Letters written by acquaintances of Senior during the period 1960-1961 with accompanying photographs do not mention or show Anna at all.

Senior eventually told Anna about a former marriage in Kenya but said he was divorced, which she would discover years later was a lie.

The
Families
React

This is the same Sarah who also said she was in the delivery room when Obama was born in Kenya.

And, prompted by the video, here's a real mystery for you.

Why would Ann Dunham, at age 18, travel from Honolulu to Mercer Island (outside of Seattle) with a newborn infant for a "brief" visit?

What were the logistics of a Honolulu-Seattle round trip in 1961: how long was the flight, and how much would the trip have cost?

Were there any restrictions in 1961 about flying with newborn babies?

Did Dunham travel alone with "Barry" (the name Blake used) or was she accompanied by Barack Sr., her mother, or others?

Is it possible that Dunham actually delivered Barry someplace close to Mercer Island -- either in the US or Canada -- and she popped in to visit Ms. Blake on her way back to Hawaii?

This is the guy who Obama romanticized in his first book, writing, "It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself..." -- some role model -- Obama Sr. selfishly abandoned his family and eventually became a drunk.

Anna filed for divorce in 1964 and remarried two years later, when her son was 5.

Years later, Abercrombie and another grad school friend looked up their old pal during a trip through Africa.

At that point, the senior Obama was a bitter man, according to the congressman, feeling that he had been denied due opportunities to influence the running of his country. "He was drinking too much; his frustration was apparent," Abercrombie said.

To Abercrombie's surprise, Obama Sr. never asked about his ex-wife or his son.

Ruth is the third woman Obama Senior "marries" in 8 years.  Senior had two children with Ruth.

In Obama's account of this move, he states his mother was shocked to discover how her new husband reverted to chauvinist Indonesian ways as soon as he left America and that Indonesia was a nasty right-wing dictatorship (although the latter doesn’t jibe with her spending much of the rest of her life in that country).

In "Dreams," he inadvertently sheds some light on his formative years and the political views of his mother, an anthropologist and Islamophile who hated America and subsequently goes native.

"Looking back, I'm not sure Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through ... why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them ... He landed a job in the government relations department of an American oil company. ... Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo's back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help.  He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother's voice would rise to almost a shout."

"They are not my people!"

Ann filed for divorce in 1980.  As with Obama's father, she kept in regular contact with Lolo and did not pursue alimony or child support, according to divorce records. 

Lolo died in 1987.

But this raises the question of why Obama Sr. flew halfway across the world to make his only visit to his son.  Remember, this was in the era before the de-regulation of the airlines, and a plane ticket from Kenya to Hawaii must have cost a small fortune [even by American standards, much less third-world Kenyan standards].

Typical
White
People

On the other hand, Stanley Dunham was in the habit of taking the 11-12-year-old Barry to a bar in the black "red-light district," the hangout of prostitutes and drug pushers, according to Obama's book.

Senior
Crashes
and
Burns

"He was excessively fond of Scotch.  He had fallen into the habit of going home drunk every night.  His boasting proved his undoing and left him without a job, plunged him into prolonged poverty and dangerously wounded his ego."

Ochieng recalls how, after sitting up all night drinking Black Label whisky at Nairobi's famous Stanley Hotel, Obama Sr. would fly into rages if Ruth asked where he had been.

Ochieng remonstrated with his friend, saying: "You bring a woman from far away and you reduce her to pulp.  That is not our way."

But it was to no avail.  Ruth sued for divorce after her husband administered brutal beatings.

In fact he was a menace to life, said Ochieng.  "He had many extremely serious accidents.  Both his legs had to be amputated.  They were replaced with crude false limbs made from iron.

"He was just like Mr. Toad [from Wind In The Willows], very arrogant on the road, especially when he had whisky inside.  I was not surprised when I learned how he died."

Ruth refused to comment on the abuse charges when we tracked her down to the Kenyan school where she now works.

She said: "I was married to Barack's father for seven years so, yes, you could say Barack is my stepson.

"Barack's father was a very difficult man.  Although I was married to him the longest of any of his wives he wasn't an easy person to be around."

After Obama Sr.'s return to Kenya, he fathered two more children by Kezia. [Kids 3 and 4]

Somewhere in that period, he also married Ruth, who followed him to Africa from Harvard. [Wife #3]

The Daily Mail quotes a relative of Obama as saying, "We told him [Obama] how his father would still go to Kezia and it was during these visits that she became pregnant with two more children.  He also had two children with Ruth." [Kids 5 and 6]

According to the Daily Mail, even after losing both legs in the car accident, Obama senior fathered yet another son, his eighth child, [Okay, they got me, that would only be 7 by my count.  Not sure old BHO, Sr. was keeping a close count either] by yet another woman, and "continued to come home drunk."

Regardless of the motives, in "Dreams from my Father" Obama never states precisely how many wives his father had, or how many half-brothers and -sisters he has from different mothers, whether married to his father or not.

Barack
Marries
Michelle

Michelle has also been an associate dean at the University of Chicago and is currently a vice president at the University of Chicago Hospitals.  She sits on six boards, including the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

At any rate, this is pretty good for a guy earning $165,200 per and who once ran his credit cards up so high that the credit card company denied him access to further use of his card.

The video.

Obama -- escorted by Secret Service and accompanied by a few campaign staff and a pool of reporters and camera crews -- arrived at about 4:10 p.m. yesterday and spent an hour with his 85-year-old maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who helped raise him.  He was not accompanied by his wife, Michelle, and two daughters.

The original "typical white person," probably doesn't have a lot of time left, but Obama didn't think to bring her grandchildren for a visit -- and after almost 2, years spent an hour -- what a loving grandson.

The
Obamas
of
Kenya

Obama and Odinga share the same Luo heritage and history and has made it possible for them to share the same spotlight at this defining moment in Kenyan and American histories about hope and fear.

On December 27th, 2007, when Raila Odinga lost the presidential election to Mwai Kibaki, he claimed the vote was rigged, whereupon his tribal followers went on murderous rampages, such as in the town of Eldoret, where on New Years Day dozens of Christians were burned to death in a church set on fire.  Throughout Kenya, hundreds of people have been politically murdered in the last few days.

Islam had picked Raila to win.

The Evangelical Alliance of Kenya has posted on its website a photograph copy of a Memorandum of Understanding, dated and signed on August 29, 2007, between Raila Odinga and Shiekh Abdullah Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum of Kenya.

Here is a summary on the agreement which was signed:

* It pledges the support of Kenyan Moslems for Raila’s election.  In return, as President of Kenya, Raila agrees to 14 actions, listed a) through n) on page two.

* Within 6 months re-write the Constitution of Kenya to recognize Shariah as the only true law sanctioned by the Holy Quran for Muslim declared regions.

* Within one year facilitate the establishment of a Shariah court in every Kenyan divisional headquarters.  [Note: everywhere in Kenya, not just in "Muslim declared regions."]

* Popularize Islam, the only true religion… by ordering every primary school in Kenya in the regions to conduct daily Madrassa classes.

* Impose a total ban on open-air gospel crusades by worshippers of the cross…

* Outlaw gospel programs… on KBC, the National Broadcaster.

* Impose a total ban on the public consumption of alcoholic beverages…

* Impose an immediate ban on women’s public dressing styles that are considered immoral and offensive to the Muslim faith…

Obama's involvement in Kenyan politics, whether tribal or religious, is bothersome.

Especially if it is both.

Then, On January 2nd, 2008, in classic Marxist tradition, Odinga, accused President Mwai Kibaki of stealing the Dec. 27 election, and rallied his Luo followers in western Kenya, demanding a new election.

Kibaki "must step down or there must be a re-election -- in this I will not be compromised.  You cannot steal my cow, and I catch you red-handed, and then expect me to share the milk because the cow is mine."

More than 1,000 people, mostly Kikuyu Christians, have been killed and 300,000 forced from their homes by Odinga's followers.

Kezia said, "I'm very proud that he wants to include us in his life. As a family, we are very friendly, very close.

"The family are still very important to him. That would make Barack Sr. very happy.

"We have seen each other many times since that first visit, in the US, in Kenya and in England. I was very fond of Barack Jr.'s mother, Ann.

"She came to Kenya after Barack Sr. died and she and I became great friends. She was like a sister to me."

Since then, the Obamas have formed an extraordinary bond -- despite their fractured family history and the vast cultural and geographic differences.

As well as Auma, Kezia has three sons by Barack Sr. Her two youngest, Bernard and Abo, live in Nairobi.

Bernard sells mechanical parts while Abo runs an international telephone shop.

Malik Obama, older brother to Barack Obama, holds an undated picture of Barak, left, and himself, middle, and an unidentified friend wearing traditional Muslim garb in his shop in eastern Kenya.

Bernard converted to Islam 18 years ago.  The father of one said, "I’m a Muslim, I don’t deny it.  My father was raised a Muslim."

Bernard leads a quiet life, running a car parts firm in Nairobi, Kenya, but he is a regular visitor to the UK to visit Elvis fan Kezia.

Bernard smiled when he spoke of his famous half-brother. He said:

"I was around 17 when I first met Barack."

"He was visiting Kenya and it was obvious from the way he spoke and his charisma that he was going to be a success."

"He is charming, very good company and very charismatic."

"I’ve met him since with his wife Michelle in Kenya. She’s very nice, a very strong and intelligent person.  I don’t think we will see him on this visit to Britain.  It’s official business and he’ll be very busy."

Bernard is remaining with Kezia for the next month as she recuperates from illness.

Mark's internet-based company, Worldnexus Ltd., provides corporate communications and website design to Chinese firms seeking customers in English-speaking markets, of which the United States is the biggest.

Worldnexus is not registered to conduct business in Shenzhen and officials at the city’s commercial administration bureau said this raised potential issues of taxation and compliance with the law by its customers.

Ndesandjo, who had an elite education in the United States, collecting a degree from Brown University, a masters in physics from Stanford and an MBA from Emory, did not share Obama’s emotional view of his roots.

Obama painted a disappointed picture of his half-brother in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, in which he celebrated his own return to Kenya and rediscovery of his African inheritance.

At a rather tense lunch, Obama quoted "Mark" -- his family name is never given away in the book -- as saying Kenya was "just another poor African country" to which he felt little attachment.

Mark added: "there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone."

According to Obama’s account, Mark looked him in the eye and said: "You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing.  Well, you’re right."

"At a certain point I made the decision not to think about who my real father was.  He was dead to me even when he was still alive.  I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife and children.  That’s enough."

Barack Obama senior fathered eight children by four different women.

Obama has described Mark as "a black man of my height and complexion with a bush Afro and horn-rimmed glasses" who was studying physics at Berkeley during Obama's 1987 visit.

Obama wrote that Mark didn’t want to ask himself a lot of questions about the meaning of racial identity, dismissing the idea with the words: "life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage."

Asked last week whether he was quoted accurately in the book, Ndesandjo did not respond.

Obama wrote that on parting, "we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache."

Two decades after that encounter, the extended and complex Obama family is bound to come under further scrutiny as the US election enters its final months after the Democratic and Republican party conventions.

"That not enough has been written about his family is strange," wrote columnist Roger Cohen in the New York Times last March, "If nominated, Obama’s family baggage will be pored over."

According to Italy's Vanity Fair his two meter by three meter shack is decorated with football posters of the Italian football giants AC Milan and Inter, as well as a calendar showing exotic beaches of the world.

Vanity Fair also noted that he had a front page newspaper picture of his famous brother -- born of the same father as him, Barack Hussein Obama, but to a different mother, named only as Jael.

He told the magazine: "I live like a recluse, no-one knows I exist."

Related:  the Evening Standard recently revealed the fact that Obama also failed to honor the pledges of assistance that he made to a school in his father's village, named in his honor, when he visited here amid great fanfare two years ago.

Also related:  according to Obama’s tax returns from 2000-2006, in all but the two most recent years reported, the Obamas gave around 1% or less of their income to charity. Their contributions increased in 2005 and 2006 to 4.7% and 6.1% respectively -- illuminating video.

Obama frequently mentions his relatives in Kenya when he needs the political relationship, but this millionaire hasn't done a damned thing to help them.  He won't go into his pocket.

But he'll tax Americans into the next century in order to send them our tax money, while he keeps his book-millions safe in a tax-exempt trust.

Obama is tight with his and loose with yours.

Jael, George's mother, is a new name.  Perhaps the mistress mentioned on the Family page.

It was only a matter of time: A website has been created to provide donations to Obama's half brother, who lives on $12 a year in a shack in Kenya.  Called "Help Obama's Brother", the site draws attention to George Hussein Onyango Obama, living in a hut in the "tough" town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi. 

"If Barack Obama won't send his brother a few bucks for rent, we can step up and help a brother out," headlines the site.