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Фото автораНика Давыдова

Obama’s Kenyan Half-Brother Recalls Life of Drugs, Redemption

George Obama


Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) — The son of a Kenyan economist with a Harvard degree. The middle name Hussein. A strong mother. A biracial upbringing. A yearning to know more about his past. The determination to be a leader. We know this as the Obama story.

Actually, it isn’t only Barack Obama’s story. It’s George Obama’s story, too.

George Obama, you ask? His half-brother Barack hardly knows him, either — in fact, they’ve only met twice. Their father, Barack Obama Sr., had eight children by four women.

While the title of the older Obama’s memoir is “Dreams From My Father,” the younger writer’s new book might easily have been called “Dreams From My Half Brother.” The theme of this memoir, which carries the evocative title “Homeland,” is the way the famous Obama has inspired the lesser-known one.

“My American brother has risen to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world,” says George Obama. “Here in Kenya, my aim is to be a leader among the poorest, most powerless people on earth — the people of the ghetto.”

George Obama, like his powerful relative, isn’t really from the ghetto. He had a mostly middle-class upbringing in Kenya, attending good schools, dreaming of becoming an airline pilot.

He never made it to the skies. Drawn into the destructive underworld of urban Africa, he became a denizen of drinking dens and discos, served almost a year in prison and had the sort of friends you don’t ordinarily see at the White House, even among the uninvited guests.

There was pick-pocketing, mugging, school suspension, expulsion. And living in a drug-induced stupor. “In my mind I was a mean and badass gangster,” he writes, “and my deep pain and anger made me the wildest of the bunch.”

Questions of Race

And yet there was something of Barack Obama to the little brother — the agonizing about his place of privilege in a landscape of poverty, the weighing of questions about race and class in a post-colonial setting, the irony of being raised a Christian with an Islamic middle name, the reflections of being black with a white parent, in George’s case a white stepfather (his father died when he was a baby).

All of Kenya was inspired by the Barack Obama tale, and of course his drifting relative came under the story’s powerful sway as well. The American senator offered two things: perhaps some insights into his father’s life, perhaps a reason to straighten up and do what his childhood dreams demanded, which was to stop being a self-destructive, self-pitying jerk.

In the spring of 2006 the politician and his family visited Kenya and George Obama draws the contrast deftly: “If there was a leading light in the Obama clan, then he was it; and if there was a shadowed place that no one liked to talk about, then I guess that was me.”

Telling Stories

The two men met, told stories, shared regret about a father they didn’t know. We can only guess what effect this encounter had on Barack Obama. It may have saved George Obama.

Now George Obama lives in the ghetto in Nairobi, Kenya, working to motivate its young people through a soccer team, drama workshops, tae kwan do classes and other projects, using the platform of being an Obama to speak out.

“It is because of who and what I was — the lost years — that I can do the type of work that I do in the ghetto, especially with the youth,” he says, getting it half right. It is also because of who his half-brother is, and perhaps because of the dreams of their father.

“Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival,” written with Damien Lewis, is published by Simon & Schuster (294 pages, $25).

(David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: David M. Shribman at dshribman@post-gazette.com.

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