KENYA: U.S. Senator Barack Obama returns to his ancestral village in Kenya to a hero's welcome

Record ID: 361121

  • Title: KENYA: U.S. Senator Barack Obama returns to his ancestral village in Kenya to a hero's welcome
  • Date: 27th August 2006
  • Summary: VARIOUS OF U.S. SENATOR BARACK OBAMA AND HIS WIFE MICHELLE HAVING HIV TEST
  • Embargoed: 11th September 2006 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Kenya
  • Country: Kenya
  • Topics: International Relations,People
  • Reuters ID: LVAF39D9MQ0UZ3C8Q3J2L60MM6O2
  • Story Text: The U.S. Senator Barack Obama, considered a rising star for the Democrats, returned to his ancestral village in west Kenya on Saturday (August 26).
    Thousands of well-wishers cheered the 45-year-old on his arrival.
    He flew into Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria and took an AIDS test at a local hospital with his wife Michelle, setting an example for the tens of thousands of Africans who fear the stigma of being tested for the disease ravaging sub-Saharan Africa.
    He was then driven 100 km (60 miles) northwest to the village where his father was born and buried.
    This was to be the climax of his two-week African tour.
    Unlike his last visit in the early 1990s when he travelled by public minibus with chickens in his lap, Obama reached the verdant village in a motorcade with police escorts.
    A carnival atmosphere prevailed as villagers banged drums, sang songs and waved flags reading "Obama we love you."
    Weaving through the excited masses, vendors sold red popsicles to ward off the Equatorial heat, while others hawked T-shirts and calendars saying "Welcome home Senator Obama".
    Born in Hawaii to a white American mother and a Kenyan father, Obama is revered by many Kenyans the way the Irish idolised former U.S. President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s -- as a native who succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
    Obama said his return as a senator represented a cyclical journey like that of his father, who grew up herding goats and then travelled to America where he studied at Harvard before returning to Kenya to become a noted economist.
    "Whenever I see a young boy five or six or eight or even ten,I think about my father and I think about the journey he travelled so many miles and such great distance and I think about those young boys and I think their is no reason why they cant do the same," said Obama.
    Waiting at his father's farm, his extended family sang, chanted and waved a U.S. flag, before his 83-year-old step-grandmother, Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama, greeted him with a hearty handshake and a big hug.
    Thronged by dozens of journalists, it was hardly a private reunion, as he and his grandmother walked arm-in-arm to her farm next door. There they talked away from the cameras and ate chicken, cabbage and porridge.
    The senator told reporters his grandmother had accepted his apology for bringing so many camera people to her home.
    Since 2004 when the Harvard-trained lawyer and civil rights activist was running for the Senate in Illinois, he has been a star in the east African nation.
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