From Nyangoma-Kogelo, Kenya: The Obamas of the World

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Op-Ed Columnist
The Obamas of the World
By ROGER COHEN
Published: March 6, 2008

NYANGOMA-KOGELO, Kenya

Piecing together Barack Obama’s family is like piecing together the world. It’s a rich experience, but not easy.

Here, at the end of a road of reddish earth, past women carrying bags of maize to market, past mud shacks with thatch roofs and kids in school uniform, under the mango trees and beside the chickens poking around, sits Auma Obama, the senator’s older half-sister. She’s the key. Behind her, in a corner of the Obama homestead, where calves scamper and avocado trees grow, is the grave of their father. It says simply: Barack Hussein Obama, born 1936, died 1982. He’s the mystery.

The wind rustles in the branches; otherwise not a sound. Such peace is shocking, a stranger to modernity. I’ve come here to remote western Kenya to understand the breathtaking dimensions of the one-generation leap made by Senator Obama. It is his ability to bridge universes that is central to his appeal — particularly to Americans under 40, a post-baby-boom generation that has intuited how interconnected the globe has become and thirsts for a new American lexicon, a new approach to a transformed world....

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(Auma) is vibrant, spirited, precise. She studied linguistics in Heidelberg, Germany, lived in Britain for many years, and has a 10-year-old British daughter, Akinyi. But Kenya — this place in particular — is home. “My family crosses all the continents,” she observes. From here, the Obamas spanned outward.

I find her argument persuasive: that her brother is a “unifying figure” representing the “change people want to see in the world”; a man with a father “black as pitch” and a mother “white as milk,” as Obama has written, whose exposure to several continents gives him a particular understanding of a world in which violent division and unprecedented intermingling coexist, and danger and opportunity vie....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/opinion/06cohen.html?hp