The Other Barack Read Online Free Page A

Obama died and had little contact with other Obama family members until his political half-brother came on the stage. His mother’s claim as an heir is what triggered the legal battle over the question of who was Barack Obama’s wife at the time of his death.
    George too has grappled with his enigmatic father. A year after Obama’s election George wrote a memoir called Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival . For George, the absence of his father initially propelled him downward, not up. But his tale is one of resurrection. It begins with a grim depiction of his youth: School expulsion is followed by the drinking of the alcoholic brew known as chang’aa and the smoking of weed which culminates in a prison stay on robbery charges that are ultimately dismissed. Confronted with Obama’s inspirational Senate victory in 2004, however, George managed to bring an end to his ghetto lifestyle and recast himself as an advocate for Huruma’s poor and dispossessed. Now, soccer is his passion.
    Obama Sr. wafts through his book like the ghost that he was to his youngest son, materializing briefly in often heroic proportions. Family members describe him as famously generous, readily paying the school fees for a host of nieces and nephews and doling out fistfuls of cash on his visits back home. A man of abiding principle, Obama Sr. burned with a passionate faith in his country and a willingness to challenge its increasingly corrupt political leaders at a profound personal cost. He may not have always shown it—he was an African man, after all—but he felt deeply. As George flounders through his early teenage years in the book, family members are forever reminding him of the brilliant economist who was his father and urging him to follow in his father’s footsteps. He quotes his mother as saying that Obama Sr. “would have been a role model for me
if he were still alive.... She remarked what a tragic loss his death had been for her and the wider family, if not the country as a whole.” 15
    Despite the sometimes brash tone of his book, in person George is a shy young man who seems a bit bewildered by the juggernaut of his American brother’s success, not to mention the trail of international reporters who began to journey down the rutted dirt road to his shack in 2008, marveling in their stories at the disparity between his life and that of the president. The comparison was jarring on both ends, as each Obama son was cast at the radical end of an astonishingly unlikely spectrum.
    Although George has mourned the lack of his father, the absence of much of his immediate family occupies him even more as he sits under a string of drying laundry in the makeshift tin shack in which he lives with several cousins. In fact, only when Obama visited Kenya in 2006 did George meet some of his relatives on his father’s side for the first time and visit the home of his step-grandmother, known globally as Mama Sarah. 16 Jael has remarried and lives with her new family in an Atlanta, Georgia, suburb, though she has tried repeatedly without success to get him a visa to come to the United States.
    In the churning alleys of Huruma, however, an Obama is still an Obama, and many in Kenya assume that must mean a link to the White House and all its power and riches. George is often accompanied by a heavy-set young man with blood-shot eyes whom he half-jokingly calls “my security man.” But the truth is that George has little more access to the president than the tattered beggars who live next door to him in Huruma. George has met Barack Jr. on two occasions—once when Obama dropped in on his school when he was a five-year-old and again when he visited as a U.S. Senator.
    George is hopeful that eventually he will get to talk to President Obama about their father. For when George himself wanted to learn about the Old Man, it was to Dreams that he turned . “I still have a lot of