Another Obama Family Story… This Time It’s George

Posted by Bridgette

George Has a Story to Tell…

Don’t All the “Unrelated” Obamas?

George Hussein Onyango Obama

We are watching several  of the Obamas go from rags to riches because of their falsified relationship to a fraudulent U.S. president.   We’ve read about books created by Auma, Mark, Barack Obama Jr.,  and we are told Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro’s  thrilling Indonesian blacksmithing thesis is to be published by Maya.   We’ve been exposed to Barack’s daddy’s dream of socialism for Kenya, and now George  believes he has a story to tell.   So many Obamas, so many stories!

As a reminder,  George was born in 1982  to Jael Otien, the supposed mistress/wife  of polygamist Barack H. Obama Sr.   He was raised in Nairobi by his mother and a French stepfather (name unknown)  until they divorced.   Supposedly,  Jael now lives in Atlanta, GA with her second husband (name unknown).   Coincidentally, George’s other half-brother, Mark Ndesandjo,  lived close to Jael when he attended Emory University, but that’s another story.

The newest book is authored by the alleged half-brother that lived on $12 a year in the slums of Kenya.  (Hannity was so outraged that Barack Obama hadn’t helped his brother that he offered to send him $10,000! ).

If we once felt sorry for him because his  renown brother refused to send him a few bucks,  we can now feel his pain, and  read the words of one of the “down and out”  family members in his  “riveting story.”   Amazingly,  a high school drop-out and a jail-bird,  is able to pen his own autobiography.

I wonder if George knows Bill Ayers?    Did he get writer’s block at anytime like his brother?  Did he go to Bali to complete his memoirs?  How much did this novice writer receive in compensation from Simon and Schuster?  Will he be going on book tours throughout the U.S.?  Will he show up on Oprah’s Book Reviews?  (Oh, I forgot she isn’t promoting books these days, nor does she have that afternoon show; but if she did, George could become an instant star!).   Did he get religion while in prison?

Will George follow the Obama family storyline?    Don’t you think that the Obama family is becoming convincingly famous for their conniving, convoluted,  continually  fabricated  histories?   Let’s read the preview and decide if it is  another constructed and manufactured  story or not.

Another Obama Tells His Story
Sunday, 13th February 2011
By Anyang’ Nyong’o

George Obama, the half-brother of the U.S. President Barack Obama, has released to the world his riveting story of growing up in poverty in the slum areas of Nairobi.  At age 28, he has published the story of his life under the title, Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

From a bright high school student in a middle class family with a French stepfather as a role model, George’s life crumbles when this stepfather suddenly leaves his mother and he is left in limbo not knowing exactly what the world of tomorrow would look like.  Here begins his tragic decent into a high school drop-out, a neighborhood hoodlum, a member of a survival gang, and finally a prisoner who rises up above the fray as an organiser for the rights of prisoners and their dignity as human beings.

One feels it is really the prison episode that heralds a meaningful life to George Obama; and it is after prison that he begins to make history.

In his own words:

“I was released from prison on September 11, 2003.    Jail was the worst time in my life, the lowest, darkest days, and it changed me forever.”

A good number of people who have been imprisoned, put in solitary confinement for days and months or detained go through similar experiences:  a sharp realisation that the inhumanity of man to man can only be confronted and changed by superior moral courage and acts of deep concern for the plight of the ordinary human being.   This is a sentiment that the powerful and privileged oppressors never understand. Instead, they take it as a weakness, a lack of understanding “the world we live in”, and an insecurity to look after the self.

“Prison was a place of utter hopelessness and despair, but if I hadn’t gone there,  God only knows what might have befallen me. I might have been shot dead, either by the police or by rival gangsters, and my family might never have known what had happened to me.  I would have become one of the ghetto’s countless disappeared.”

When George came out of prison, he had learnt the true value of freedom and how to use it to transform his life and that of his fellow slum dwellers in an atmosphere where the Government was far from them, access to social amenities non-existent, doing business fraught with insecurity, but association with people who had the same goal possible and vital.

Free and out of prison, George was determined to make use of his intelligence, organisational skills and determination to survive to make life better where he had grown up:   in the slums.

In the meantime, while he had been rotting in jail, his mother had met an African-American man and moved to the United States of America. Within no time, his mother had a baby:   George now had a baby sister called Chrissie.   Like his eldest half-brother Barack, he was now a child of three worlds:   born of a Kenyan mother and father, partly raised up by a French stepfather and now joined to the USA by a mother who remarried an African-American.   It looks as if the Obamas were destined to be a transcontinental family destined to do many things in this world.

By his mother leaving him alone in Kenya, it looked as if an umbilical cord had been severed that released tremendous energy from George that he would use to build a future on his own feet.

After having had the first telephone conversation with his mother after he was released from prison, he writes:

“Before finishing the call, I promised my mother that the wild days were over.   I had been too wild even to remember my own mother, but I would be a lost son no more.”

Let us remember that Kenya has many “lost sons and daughters” in the slums of our cities, towns and rural areas who may, soon rather than later, decide to be lost no more and come back home. When they come back home, they will be like the youth of Egypt:  seeking to straighten society by shaking the sloth of oppression and indignity off their shoulders.

That, in fact, is what George decided to do after he realised he would be a lost son no more.   He established the Pendo Moja Youth Group.

“Pendo Moja had a pretty simple set of goals, most of which were designed to counter the kind of gangster influences to which I had fallen prey.  It worked with the ghetto group to combat the ills that plagued the ghetto land – most specifically crime, prostitution, drugs, and alcohol abuse. And it aimed to provide alternative, legal sources of income to the young unemployed of the slums.”

One would have thought that George would have wanted to exploit the fame and power of his older brother Barack to “make it in life”.   He decided not to do that, notwithstanding a good relationship with his brother at the family level. He has decided to make a difference in the lives of those with whom he feels at home in the ghetto.

“The Kenyan elite,” he writes, “Try to pretend the slums don’t exist. They are ashamed of how some of their fellow Kenyans live.  But it wasn’t like that for me.   I valued life in the ghetto. I valued people’s vibrancy and the sheer belief in life that kept them going. And then there was the camaraderie.   People cared for each other in ways the outside world has no concept of.  In the generosity of those who had nothing, I realised the ghetto had a lot to teach the wider world, if only it would listen.”

But we rarely do listen until, perhaps, it is too late.  Today George is engaged full-time with Pendo Moja:   Doing environmental cleanups of neighborhoods in Huruma, running arts and culture programmes, getting ghetto youth into economic activities to earn some living, and better their lives and running educational programmes.

While doing all this, they also engage in intense political discussions.  Questions are raised why Kenya is a society of such gross inequality among people. Would it be possible for the community in Huruma to improve their housing standards if only part of the Value Added Tax everybody pays was somehow returned to them to decide how it is used for community improvement?

Is this what devolution is all about?   There are many Pendo Mojas asking these questions:   Let us listen to them.

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Are you as amazed as I am at this native Kenyan’s  command of English?