President Obama's Father: A 'Bold And Reckless Life'

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/11/137553552/president-obamas-father-a-bold-and-reckless-life

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President Obama's Father: A 'Bold And Reckless Life'

July 01, 201112:10 PM


A photograph of Barack Obama's father hangs on the wall of his grandmother Sarah Hussein Obama's house in the Kenyan village of Kogelo.
Ben Curtis/AP Photo

The Other Barack
By Sally H. Jacobs
Hardcover, 336 pages
PublicAffairs
List Price: $27.99

Read An Excerpt

President Obama is the son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father who met at the University of Hawaii in 1960. The president last saw his father when he was 10, when Obama Sr. made a brief visit to Hawaii from Kenya, where he moved when the future president was just a toddler.

But what was Barack Obama Sr. really like? Biographer Sally H. Jacobs takes an in-depth look at his life — and his legacy — in The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father.

The Childhood Of Barack Obama Sr.
Jacobs tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that the president's father grew up in an extremely strict household. His father, Onyango, who later changed his name to Hussein, regularly beat his wives and children with a four-pronged whip. He also forced his children to recite long lists of memorized facts before their meals.

"Barack Obama Sr. would have to recite his math tables while standing at the table before he could have any food," Jacobs says. "[Math] was a relatively new concept for Onyango ... and he wanted his son to have this skill."

And when Obama Sr. later went to the village school, he was immediately recognized for his strong math abilities.

"A principal described him to me as the smartest boy in the school," says Jacobs. "He was particularly good at math, even then. That would become his trademark and he would go on to become an economist, but even as a boy he excelled with numbers."

In 1959, Obama Sr. went to study at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in Honolulu, where he stood out for his fastidious dressing habits, his forays into public speaking and his fabulous dancing skills.
"A woman who had known him in Hawaii told me of how she ... would go down to some of the famous nightclubs with him and start to dance," says Jacobs. "And everybody would watch because he was so beautiful on the floor — and also because he was a black man. Blacks were very few in number in Honolulu and he was the first African student at the University of Hawaii."

Meeting Stanley Ann Dunham
A year after Obama Sr. enrolled at the university, he met Stanley Ann Dunham, a 17-year-old from Kansas who was studying Russian.

"Both of them were quite taken with each other," says Jacobs. "This relationship picked up speed pretty quickly. The president describes it in his own memoir [Dreams from My Father] of how drawn they were to each other. [And] in a fairly short time, she becomes pregnant."
Obama Sr. told Dunham that he had divorced Kezia Aoko, his wife in Africa, but that wasn't true. He also did not reveal that he had had two children with Aoko, who, like Obama Sr., was a member of the Luo ethnic group.

"The thing you have to understand about this is that it was deeply rooted in Luo culture," says Jacobs. "Divorce wasn't common. You could get a divorce but you had to go through a very complex process which involved the couple sitting before a council of elders and then there had to be a return of the dowry."

Later on, Obama Sr. told immigration officials that he thought of himself as divorced in Kenya before he arrived in the United States. Jacobs says that Obama Sr.'s immigration files also show that Obama Sr. and Dunham may have considered putting President Obama up for adoption before he was born.
"I [made a Freedom of Information Act request for] his immigration file because I wanted to confirm the date he arrived in the United States," she says. "In this record, there was an extraordinary memo in which the foreign student adviser at the University of Hawaii has ... realized [Obama Sr.] might have two wives."

In the adviser's memo, she noted that she had asked Obama Sr. about his family situation.
"And he says, 'Don't worry, my wife is pregnant. But she's making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby up,' " says Jacobs. "Now did that really happen? It's not clear. Members of the family on both sides say they've never heard of it ... [But] Obama Sr. had every reason to not want to have that baby in his life at the time. He was, at the time, up for the renewal of his visa. The last thing they were going to look kindly on, if they chose to see it this way, was a bigamist with a mixed-race baby. So Obama Sr. would say that the baby was going to vanish and that baby would be the [future] president of the United States."

The Birth of Barack Obama Jr.
Of course, that baby didn't vanish. Shortly after Dunham gave birth to Barack Obama Jr. on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, she moved with him to Seattle. Obama Sr. stayed in Hawaii, leaving a year later to go to Harvard University for a graduate fellowship in economics. In 1964, Dunham filed for divorce. That same year, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya, which had just obtained its independence the year before, and got a job in management at Shell.

"Obama [Sr.] makes it less than a year," says Jacobs. "He wasn't fired exactly, but he was not asked back. So he left Shell and gets another potentially terrific job — this one at the Central Bank of Kenya. Again, he runs into trouble within months. He shows up late, he drinks on the job, he has to borrow money and he is asked to leave."

Obama Sr. returned to the U.S. in 1971 because his life was falling apart. A third wife was planning to leave him, he had no job and he had suffered massive injuries in a car accident. He spent a short amount of time with his son Barack Jr. in Hawaii and then returned to Kenya, where a second car crash cost him his legs. In 1982, Obama Sr. was in a third car accident and died from his injuries.
All of Obama Sr.'s children, Jacobs says, have had to come to terms with their complicated relationships with their father. Five of his children have written soul-searching memoirs about Obama Sr., including the president's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

"If Obama the president had had [Barack Obama Sr.] as a father, I think it's fair to say that he wouldn't be the president," she says. "I think he would have had to wrestle with a neglectful father, an insecure person and someone who probably would have prevented him from following the path he close. In Dreams, you feel Obama Jr. struggling with [questions like] 'Who am I? What kind of a man am I? What will I be?' The person he comes out as is clearly very determined and rooted and a responsible person — everything that Obama Sr. was not."


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Excerpt: 'The Other Barack'

by Sally H. Jacobs

July 06, 2011 6:12 PM

Late on a November evening in 1982, Obama [Sr.] was driving home when he rammed his white pickup truck headlong into the high stump of a eucalyptus tree at the side of the road and died instantly. He was forty six.

Obama's eight children, some of whom had not seen him for years, largely closed the door on the subject of their father. For better or worse, the Old Man was gone.

A quarter-century later another Barack Obama emerged, this one a cerebral U.S. Senator from Chicago who was angling, quixotically it seemed, for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency. As that heavily laden name dominated the headlines and the nightly news, it triggered a flood of complex emotions among some of the elder Obama's children.

They were struck at how oddly the younger Barack's name was pronounced. The Old Man had also been called Barack, but his was a working man's name, with the emphasis on the first syllable. The American pronunciation was heavy on the second syllable, giving the name a more formal, somewhat aristocratic cast. This particularly amused the elder Barack's three surviving wives—not that they were talking to each other. Reporters scoured the younger Obama's background, and questions invariably arose about his namesake and the Kenyan family he had met on a handful of occasions. The phenomenon of Obama's candidacy and the worldwide prominence that his name achieved after he became America's first African American president prompted some of the children to begin rethinking their relationship with the Old Man and to grow curious about the elements of his chaotic life. Somehow they were all bound by that restless, bespectacled onslaught of a man who was their father and now to this gentler but no less intense version of him on the front pages of America's newspapers.
The questions led to more questions. Who was their father? And who, for that matter, were really his children? To get to the truth of the man, how could any of them penetrate the skein of lies and half-truths he had woven? Even the makeup of his immediate family was a confounding jumble.
Three years after his death some of his children and wives became embroiled in a legal brawl aimed at establishing exactly who his legitimate heirs were and to which of his "wives" had he actually been married. The colorful legal drama, which went on for years, pitted the first wife against the fourth, the eldest son against the youngest, and generally divided the family into two warring camps. At the heart of the matter was a claim by Obama's first wife, Grace Kezia Aoko Obama, that she had never divorced her husband and remained married to him at the time of his death. If that were true, then none of his subsequent three marriages—including the one with the president's mother—would have been legitimate. A host of family members who took sides on the issue provided conflicting affidavits peppered with name-calling and insults.

Even Obama's sixty-seven-year-old mother, frail and heartbroken over her first son's death, weighed in and declared that Grace had long ago divorced her son.3 The Nairobi High Court judge considering the dizzying squabble apparently believed Obama's mother: In 1989 Judge J. F. Shields ruled that not only had Grace divorced her husband but also that two of the four children she claimed he had fathered with her were not his sons at all.4
And that was just the first phase of the battle.

The name of Barack Hussein Obama II, the second son, crops up only incidentally in the bulging pink case files in Nairobi's High Court. No one in the case ever challenged the legitimacy of his paternity. But in July 1997 Barack Hussein Obama of Chicago, Illinois, deftly extracted himself from the matter with a brief letter to the court disavowing any claim he might have on the estate, which was worth about 410,500 Kenyan shillings, or $57,500, at the time his father died. He wrote the letter six months after he was sworn in to serve his first term in the Illinois Senate representing the 13th district.

Nearly a decade earlier, in the summer of 1988, Obama had launched his own effort to uncover the father about whom he had often wondered.

At the time, his father had been dead for six years and he had just completed work as a community organizer in Chicago and was preparing to enter Harvard Law School. During a five-week visit to Kenya, Obama met many members of his sprawling clan for the first time and listened to their stories of his father's political frustrations and domestic travails. He also found that many of his relatives had no greater command of his father's essence than he had gleaned from his mother's recollections. The elder Obama seemed a baffling mystery to many with whom he had lived and worked, including his disparate tribe of children.

Although he was a master of the verbal parrying and one-upmanship that are the Luos' stock in trade and was famous for his legendary black velvet baritone, the elder Obama confided in virtually no one, not even those in his wide circle of drinking comrades. Talk of personal matters, and certainly of children, he considered to be a show of weakness. He mentioned the son he had fathered while in Hawaii to only a handful of his closest friends and family members, even though he kept a photograph of that little boy, riding a tricycle with a small cap perched jauntily on his head, on his bureau. Taken a couple of years after he had left his small family in Hawaii, the picture always followed him through his many moves and dislocations. His children may have understood him least of all. As Auma Obama, President Obama's half-sister, says in Dreams from My Father, "I can't say I really knew him, Barack. Maybe nobody did . . . not really. His life was so scattered. People only knew scraps and pieces, even his own children." Some of his children have pored over the letters and papers their father left behind, trying to pull all those inconclusive scraps and pieces together.

Four of the five children indisputably fathered by Barack Obama have written books that are at least in part a rumination of the Old Man and his impact on their lives. Like Dreams from My Father, each of the works is a yearning of sorts, an effort to make some sense of their father's character and complex legacy.

Only his firstborn son, Abong'o Malik Obama, a volatile fifty-three-year-old who lives with his three wives near the family's compound in western Kenya, has not written a book about his father—at least not yet.

Malik recently made headlines of his own when he took a nineteen-year old schoolgirl as his third wife. He has also irritated some Obama family members when he built a small mosque on his property that the steady parade of tourists heading to the Obama compound pass daily. Some Obamas worry that such a glaring symbol of the family's Muslim faith will negatively impact the Obama presidency. Malik has accused others of trying to profit from his father's life and says that he intends eventually to write the definitive biography of his father himself.

Auma Obama, Obama's only daughter and the second of his children born to his first wife, Grace Kezia, has painful recollections of a distant father who rarely spoke to her and often returned home from work drunk and irritable.8 But as she read some of the newspaper accounts of his life, she found she wanted to understand more about the forces that shaped his experience and left him so embittered. She called Peter Oloo Aringo, a longtime friend of Obama's and then a member of Kenya's Parliament representing the Alego district where he spent his childhood, who recalled that Auma was "very troubled about [her father's] life. She had spent more time with him than most of the children, but she felt she had not known him at all. She wanted to know how we had gotten along, how we had been friends, that kind of thing. But mostly she wanted to understand what had led to his downfall."

Excerpted from The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father by Sally Jacobs. Copyright Sally Jacobs 2011. Reprinted with permission of PublicAffairs, a member of The Perseus Books Group.

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Books Featured In This Story 

The Other Barack

The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father

by Sally Jacobs

Hardcover, 297 pages

Nonfiction
Biography & Memoir
More on this book:
NPR reviews, interviews and more

©2013 NPR

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http://www.npr.org/2011/05/03/135840068/the-singular-woman-who-raised-barack-obama

The 'Singular Woman' Who Raised Barack Obama

May 03, 201111:41 AM

Listen to the Story　34 min 12 sec

 Fresh Air from WHYY

A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother
By Janny Scott
Hardcover, 384 pages
Riverhead Hardcover
List price: $26.95

Read An Excerpt

In 1990, Barack Obama became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. A year later, he was approached by a literary agent, who asked if he would be interested in writing an autobiography about his life.

Obama said yes, and in 1995, his book Dreams from My Father was published. As the title suggests, it focused mainly on the relationship he had with his father, Barack Obama Sr. When articles about the book started coming out, they referred to his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, as simply "a white anthropologist from Kansas."

But the characterizations of Obama's mother — first as "a white anthropologist from Kansas" and then as "a single mother on food stamps" and "the woman who died of cancer while fighting with her insurance company at the end of her life" — don't encompass who she was, the unconventional life she led or the influence she had on the future president of the United States, says writer Janny Scott.

Scott's biography of Obama's mother, A Singular Woman, traces Dunham's life and the relationship she had with her son, whose rise in the political world came largely after her death in 1995. But he has said he largely thanks his mother for the values that led him to the work he now does.

"He credits her with impressing upon him the importance upon one's duty to others — perhaps that the best thing that one can do is to give opportunities for others," Scott tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And her work in many ways foreshadows his. There was a period in 1979 where she was working in what her boss described to me as 'community development in Java.' That's five years before he becomes a community development person in Chicago."

Obama's Roots
In 1960, Dunham's family moved to Hawaii, where she enrolled in college. It was in Hawaii that she met a Kenyan student named Barack Obama. Three months pregnant with their child, she married him in 1961. Obama Sr. stayed in school in Hawaii, and Dunham returned to Seattle with her newborn baby, Barack. She returned to Honolulu in 1963; she and Obama divorced in 1964. In 1966, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian man studying in Honolulu on a student visa.

Obama was largely raised in Hawaii for the first six years of his life, but in 1967, he moved to Indonesia with his mother to join Soetoro, who worked as a surveyor for the Indonesian government and then a consultant for Mobil. Dunham taught English, worked in rural development and consulted on microfinance projects. Obama attended local schools in Jakarta. He also, at her insistence, took English correspondence classes and regularly woke up before dawn to go over his English language skills.

"She believed that he deserved the kind of opportunities that she had had [like] the opportunity to a great university," Scott says. "And she believed that he would never get that if he didn't have a strong English-language education. So at a certain point, she decided she wasn't serving his interests well by keeping him in Indonesia and in Indonesia schools."

Four years later, Obama moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents while his mother stayed in Indonesia with her second husband and daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng. It was a complicated decision — and one that most people don't give her credit for, Scott says:
"She was juggling a number of things: She wanted her son to get a good English-language education, which wasn't available to her in Indonesia. She had an Indonesian daughter and an Indonesian husband at the time. She needed to be able to work to pay for the education she wanted for her son and her daughter. In order to work, she was going to need some kind of advanced degree. So she was juggling a lot of things." In 1972, Scott says, Dunham rejoined her son in Hawaii and stayed there during his middle school years. She returned to Indonesia to do anthropological field work shortly after he entered high school.

Obama decided not to return to Indonesia with his mother. In 1985, she wrote a list of her long-range goals, which included "finish[ing] her dissertation, making a salary of 60K, los[ing] weight ... and having constructive dialogue with Barry" — a nickname used for the junior Barack Obama.

Scott says she doesn't know of any problems between Obama and his mother, but there were some indications that his mother felt some sadness about the physical distance between them.

"At different moments in her life she is upset, and at one point, in his senior year of high school in Hawaii, she goes back just to be with him because she realizes it's the last year of his childhood," she says. "Later, one friend describes her as wistful about his decision to move to Chicago and root himself in Chicago and emphasize the sort-of black part of himself. So I think there was a theme — and this is just snippets of little things I've stumbled upon — that she had a kind of longing for a closer relationship with him."

Interview Highlights

On her thoughts about articles written about Obama after he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review

" 'His mother is a white woman from Kansas,' [or] 'His mother is an anthropologist,' or 'His mother is an anthropologist working in international development,' and that would be about it. [There were] long descriptions of his father's family history. She went back to Indonesia during that period and confided to a friend how distraught and upset she was to be reduced to one sentence."

On interviewing President Obama for the book

"I asked him about the [implication left] by his book that his mother was sort of a naive idealist — something that comes through in the way he talks and sometimes in the way other family members talk about her. But that's not at all the description that I get from people who knew her as a colleague — close friends of hers. No one has ever described her in that way to me. [Obama] said that he did think of her as a bit that way, but he didn't think of it as a pejorative. He described those qualities as a source of her strength in many ways."

On the "birther" movement
"The birther movement began during the campaign, when I was actually writing a series of biographical pieces for The New York Times on then-Senator Obama. And then it kind of faded out a bit. So during the period when I was doing the research, it wasn't something I was thinking a whole lot about ... and then was resuscitated by Donald Trump. In the beginning, particularly because of speaking to so many people about President Obama's mother's life, and of course that covered his birth, I really had no question as to where he was born. He was born in Hawaii. When it became more and more pressing in recent months, I went back and looked at everything I had ever gathered on that subject. ... And it seemed so clear. So I came to the conclusion that many people have come to — that this is a classic conspiracy theory, and it feeds on information that may well be to the contrary but is all taken to be evidence of the conspiracy."

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Excerpt: 'A Singular Woman'

by Janny Scott

May 02, 2011　12:23 PM

 

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. — BARACK OBAMA, MARCH 18, 2008

The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half­step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed the color of indigo, a silver earring half hidden in the cascading curtain of her dark hair. She carried her chin a few degrees higher than most. His right hand rested on her shoulder, lightly. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me twenty years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. The man was Barack Obama at age twenty-six, the community organizer from Chicago on a visit to New York. The woman was Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother. It was impossible not to be struck forcefully by the similarities, and the dissimilarities, between them. It was impossible not to question, in that moment, the stereotype to which she had been expediently reduced: the white woman from Kansas.

The president's mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama's life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively with the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not. In Dreams from My Father, the memoir that helped power Obama's political ascent, she is the shy, small-town girl who falls head over heels for the brilliant, charismatic African who steals the show. In the next chapter, she is the naive idealist, the innocent abroad. In Obama's presidential campaign, she was the struggling single mother, the food stamp recipient, the victim of a health-care system gone awry, pleading with her insurance company for cover­age as her life slipped away. And in the fevered imaginings of supermarket tabloids and the Internet, she is the atheist, the Marx­ist, the flower child, the mother who "abandoned" her son or duped the state of Hawaii into issuing a birth certificate for her Kenyan­born baby, on the off chance that he might want to be president someday.

The earthy figure in the photograph did not fit any of those. A few months after receiving the photo, I wrote an article for The New York Times about Dunham. It was one in a series of bio­graphical articles on then Senator Obama that the Times published during the presidential campaign. It was long for a newspaper but short for a life, yet people who read it were seized by her story and, some said, moved to tears. As a result of the article, I was offered a chance to write a book on Dunham, and I spent two and a half years following her trail. I drove across the Flint Hills of Kansas to the former oil boomtowns where her parents grew up during the Depression. I spent many weeks in Hawaii, where she became pregnant at seventeen, married at eighteen, divorced and remar­ried at twenty-two. I traveled twice to Indonesia, where she brought her son, at six, and from whence she sent him back, alone, at age ten, to her parents in Hawaii. I visited dusty villages in Java where, as a young anthropologist, she did fieldwork for her Ph.D. disserta­tion on peasant blacksmithing. I met with bankers in glass towers in Jakarta where, nearly two decades before Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their work with microcredit, Dunham worked on the largest self-sustaining commercial microfinance program in the world. I combed through tattered field notebooks, boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, photo albums, the archives of the Ford Founda­tion in Midtown Manhattan, and the thousand-page thesis that took Dunham fifteen years to complete. I interviewed nearly two hundred colleagues, friends, professors, employers, acquaintances, and relatives, including her two children. Without their generosity, I could not have written this book.

To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas is about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story—of a girl with a boy's name who grew up in the years before the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the Vietnam War, and the Pill; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at age twenty­-four, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anti-communist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians are believed to have been slaughtered; who lived more than half of her adult life in a place barely known to most Ameri­cans, in an ancient and complex culture, in a country with the larg­est Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where an unmarried, Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of a sacred craft long practiced ex­clusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who adored her children and believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Harry Belafonte, then died at fifty-two, never knowing who or what he would become. Had she lived, Dunham would have been sixty-six years old on January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama was sworn in as the forty­fourth president of the United States.

From A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother by Janny Scott. Copyright 2011 Janny Scott. Reprinted by arrangement with Riverhead, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
 
 

 A Singular Woman
The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

Hardcover, 376 pages
NonfictionBiography & Memoir

More on this book:

• NPR reviews, interviews and more

©2013 NPR

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Obama's Half-Brother Lives A World Apart

 

by Gwen Thompkins

March 30, 2010 4:00 PM

Listen to the Story　　6 min 4 sec



All Things Considered




George Hussein Obama, the youngest half-brother of President Obama, in Nairobi, Kenya.

Stephen Morrison/epa/Corbis
 
Listen to the Story
6 min 4 sec
All Things Considered

President Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., married four times before he died. To this day, not all of his children have met one another.

The seven surviving children are scattered from Kenya to China to the White House. The youngest of them has written a book about his life in Kenya — and the life he describes is altogether different from that of his half-brother, the U.S. president.

At the very least, George Obama's memoir answers the perennial question: Why can't you be more like your brother?

Riding Around 'The Ghetto'
On a recent afternoon in Nairobi, George Obama is slouched way down in the passenger seat of a dull gray sedan cruising through his neighborhood, Umoja, which is filled with working people getting on with the business of the day.

Aside from the hip-hop reggae beat pulsing out of the car, the neighborhood has its own soundtrack of electric saws, Nigerian soap operas and the occasional cluck of a live chicken.

Obama likes to call where he lives "the ghetto." But he knows better than that. This is just Umoja. And yet in the car, every other word coming from the radio seems to be "ghetto."
"Ghetto Radio! R&B, hip-hop, East African music. Ghetto, Ghetto, Ghetto Radio. Get down with Ghetto Radio!"

Technically, the nearest ghetto is a 10-minute drive away — or maybe an hour and a half, depending on traffic. Most of the roads are not paved, and they rut and rise like a roiling sea.

'Back To A Good Life'

On this day, the car is pitching through the middle distance between the slum that Obama once called home and the apartment where he lives now. And at 28, George Obama is somewhere in the middle distance between being a boy and being a man.

And that is tough when you are also a husband and a father. And when you have done jail time. And when your half-brother is the president of the United States.

"I just think I'm, like, I was born a rebel, or something. I don't know. I'm not sure why," he says, with a low laugh.

At his tidy apartment, Obama talks about his memoir, Homeland. The writing style seems closer to the way his British co-author, Damien Lewis, talks. But the feelings expressed in the book — the regrets of a criminal youth, the desire to do better and maybe even to do some good — appear to be the exclusive property of George Hussein Obama.

"I've done a lot of bad things in my life, and I regret them," Obama says. "I've gone through a good life to a bad life and I've come back to a good life."
Homeland also emphasizes George Obama's first and most abiding love: the playground.

Meeting Barack
At a nearby field, Obama and his friends kick around a soccer ball while waiting for the local team he sponsors to begin practice.

George Obama first met his brother Barack on a playground. He was in primary school, and the future U.S. president was a young visitor to Nairobi. Their father had died years before in a car crash, and the two were raised by different mothers.

George says the meeting interrupted a hell of a soccer game. And that is pretty much all he remembers.

Back at the apartment, George recalls his only other meeting with his brother, who returned to Kenya as a U.S. senator in 2006. It was little more than a handshake.

"I don't know him particularly well," Obama says about his brother. "But he's an inspiration."
And the connection has made George Obama a minor celebrity in Nairobi. He gets free rides on the local buses and, of course, he got that book deal with Simon & Schuster. But neither perk would very likely be possible if George hadn't earned the reputation of being something of a thug.

'I'm Good With My Fists Too Much'

At 15, he ran away from home and dropped out of school. He is now a former gang member who is generous with his friends and fusses over babies. But he's prickly. And, judging from the fresh scars on his knuckles, George leads with his right.

"You know, I don't know how to explain this but, I'm really, um, violent. I know how to beat people," he says. "I'm good with my fists too much."

In 2003, Obama spent several months in jail for a robbery he says he did not commit. But he says he had robbed plenty of other people, often at gunpoint. Nowadays he calls himself a community activist in the slum where he once lived as a gangster.

George Obama likens his activism to that of his brother in Chicago. But even back in 2006, George says he knew he could be no more like Barack than Barack could be like him.

He wrote in his book: "I wondered what my American brother might make of me. I was the kid from the slum, the Obama son who had been a gangster and served time. He was a U.S. senator and Harvard graduate. 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."

Getting Exposure
There's no particular schedule to George Obama's day. But riding around with him in the car is kind of fun. It's like being in a music video.

Obama is always on the lookout for donations to his soccer team and for children in the slum. He says that is why he wrote the book. He needs the money — and the exposure — for himself and his projects.

He is equally candid about why anyone would be interested in a guy like him — including the reporter in the back seat. Near the end of the ride, George turns and asks, "Do you want to meet my brother?"

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