He fought and beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He was captured by pirates - twice - and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved seconds before the noose dropped over his head. And all this happened before he was thirty years old. This is Captain John Smith's life.
Peter Firstbrook spent many months in Kenya researching the history of Barack Obama's family. Peter is the only person to have traced Obama's roots from the present back through more than twenty generations, thanks to the Luo tribe's remarkable oral tradition.
Seen though the eyes of the Obama family this will be the story of an African dynasty going back over 400 years. It is a truly astonishing drama culminating in the inauguration of Barack Obama on 20 January 2009, watched by Obama's African family on a flickering television clustered under a group of trees in the twilight of Kobama village in Kenya. A very special hundred or so men, women and children amongst billions all around the world who viewed the momentous event of the swearing in of the first black President of the United States.
This book establishes the early ancestry of the Obama family in the Alego region, telling the story of farmers and fishermen, of love and tribal warfare, of families lost and found. It traces the Obama roots from famous tribal warriors in the seventeenth century to the first encounters with the white man in the early 1900s; generation by generation we follow the family through colonial rule and the fight for Kenyan independence, including the Mau Mau and the relationship of Barack Obama's father with President Kenyatta.
This is a book about a family whose destiny is unknown to them. It is a true testament to the belief that any person can make their mark in the world no matter how humble their origins.
In the first in-depth history of the Obama family, Peter Firstbrook recounts a journey that starts in a mud hut by the White Nile and ends seven centuries later in the White House. Interweaving oral history and tribal lore, interviews with Obama family members and other Kenyans, the writings of Kenyan historians, and original genealogical research, Firstbrook sets the fascinating story of the president's family against the background of Kenya's rich culture and complex history.
From the tribe's cradleland in southern Sudan, he follows the family generation by generation, tracing the paths of the famous Luo warriors'Obama's direct ancestors'and vividly illuminating Luo politics, society, and traditions. Firstbrook also brings to life the impact of English colonization in Africa through the eyes of President Obama's grandfather Onyango. And Firstbrook delves into the troubled life of Obama's father, a promising young man whose aspirations were stymied by post-independence tribal politics and a rash tendency toward self-destruction'two factors that his family believes contributed to his death in 1982. The Obamas reveals a family history'epic in scope yet intimate in feel'that is truly without precedent.
