As a tall, strangely familiar figure leaves his one-room shack in a notorious African slum this week, a few people jokingly call out to him: ‘Mister President! Mister President!’
Heading for breakfast through his junk-strewn yard, stepping over streams of sewage, the appearance of this slim, angular man prompts giggles and pointing from children in rags playing in the muck.
The man’s name is George Hussein Obama and his half-brother is Barack Hussein Obama, Kenya’s most famous son, the first black President of the U.S. and the most powerful man in the world.
George Hussein Obama in Nairobi: The half
brother of Barack Obama has agreed to appear in a documentary which is
critical of the U.S. President
Today, while Barack entertains at the White House, flies aboard Air Force One and is a friend of film stars and royalty, George, 30, is to be found slumped in his corrugated iron shack which even fellow slum-dwellers regard as a hovel.
Details of his unorthodox lifestyle emerged with news that he has agreed to appear in a documentary film being made by one of Barack Obama’s most trenchant critics.
Called 2016, and directed by the production team behind Schindler’s List, the film sets out the supposed horrors of another four years of Obama in office — though George does not criticise the President on screen. It is the idea of U.S. author Dinesh D’Souza, whose book The Roots Of Obama’s Rage paints a deeply unflattering portrait of the ‘narcissistic’ President.
George Hussein Obama George now spends his time
drinking what locals call Chang’aa — a spirit distilled with maize and
spiked with chemicals — from the moment he wakes to the moment he slips
into unconsciousness
Whilst his half-brother inhabits a desolate
Kenyan slum, U.S. President Barack Obama, pictured during an election
campaign rally in Colorado Springs, is firmly in the limelight
And the book quotes George thus: ‘My brother has risen to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world. Here in Kenya, my aim is to be a leader among the poorest people on Earth: those who live in the slums.’
In what sounds like the script for a Hollywood film, he claims to have been the driving force behind the transformation of a slum football team into one of the top sides in Kenya, known as ‘Obama’s champs’.
But, as I discovered, this may prove beyond George. Indeed, standing — let alone talking much sense or walking in a straight line — is tricky for the U.S. President’s brother much of the time, due to his chronic addiction to drink and years of drug abuse.
Nor is there anything heroic and altruistic about his motives for living in the slums. His principal reason is that the potent local moonshine is cheap and readily available here, as is cocaine, heroin and marijuana.
Clearly following the dictum that the best place to hide a tree is in a forest, George’s decision to settle in a slum called Huruma — which is scarred by alcoholism, drug addiction and violence — means his own destructive behaviour attracts little attention.
Although he claims not to be using heroin or cocaine, George now spends his time drinking what locals call Chang’aa — a spirit distilled with maize and spiked with chemicals — from the moment he wakes to the moment he slips into unconsciousness.
Laced with ethanol, embalming fluid or battery acid to give it more kick, this substance is regularly blamed for causing blindness and death when the criminal syndicates behind the trade mix it wrongly.
A glass costs about 10p and, after just five small shots, even hardened drinkers can barely remember their own name. Regular users suffer liver and kidney failure, as well as mental impairment known as ‘wet brain’
George Hussein Obama says that his last name is a
curse, but members of his community say that he trades on it
shamelessly for alcohol and food
Whilst Barack Obama enjoys all the perks which
come with the role as U.S. President, his half-brother is caught in a
spiral of chronic addiction to drink and drug abuse
Introductions are made by George’s ‘security man’ — a red-eyed slum dweller and fellow heavy-drinker who drags George out of the den, shouting at him to come and see the ‘muzungu’ (white man) outside.
Then, after shaking hands, I make a mistake. I invite George to lunch at my hotel. For the next two days, he lays siege to my mini-bar, invites a succession of girlfriends and ‘security advisers’ to wine and dine at my expense, and behaves like he is a famous, spoilt celebrity.
He also repeatedly demands ‘kitu kidogo’ — Swahili for something small, which, of course, means something large and financial — and is appalled when I refuse to hand out cash to his assorted girlfriends.
President Barack Obama, pictured aboard Air
Force One, is as far removed in the imagination as could be possible
from his Kenyan relative
The Huruma slum of Nairobi which is scarred by
alcoholism, drug addiction and violence - and is where the President of
the United States' brother lives in squalor
‘People are only interested in me because of my brother,’ he sighs, slurping a double Johnnie Walker, with a beer chaser — one of many. ‘I hate it. People all want me to be someone else.’
George first met his now-famous sibling in a playground when he was at primary school. Barack was a young visitor to Nairobi just a few years after their father died in a car crash. George recalls he was playing football when his brother arrived to say hello.
The second time their paths crossed was when Obama — then a Senator — was on a tour of East Africa in 2006, and visited Nairobi to see his family. They shook hands — the two utterly different worlds they inhabited coming together under the African sun.
‘He is an inspiration,’ George observes. ‘We have met a couple of times. We do speak . . . he is my brother.’
George says, apparently without a shred of self-awareness, that he is under pressure to follow his older brother’s footsteps into politics. ‘I have got a lot of people telling me to stand as a member of parliament. But I’m not interested in politics.’
Then he pauses, and adds: ‘But if Barack was President, and I was president of Kenya it would be easier to meet.’ He says it is only his poverty that prevents the two of them having a closer relationship.
‘He’s got responsibilities. He’s not supposed to take care of me,’ he says. ‘I’m an adult. Everyone thinks he sends me cash. But I’m not a beggar.’ But asked if he’d take cash if Obama offered it, George smiled and said: ‘Seriously! Yes! Who wouldn’t?’
Though he is consumed with self-pity about his plight, he is, officially, the co-ordinator of Huruma Football Club, a township team made up of orphans, former prisoners and reformed drug addicts.
He, too, had a good start in life. Born into a poor family near Lake Victoria, the brothers’ father — also Barack — was a brilliant student. He became the first African to win a scholarship at a prestigious university in Hawaii.
It was on the American island that Barack Snr met Ann Dunham, an American academic and anthropologist. Despite the fact he was already married to a woman in Kenya, he claimed, dishonestly, that he was divorced. He married Ann in 1961 when she was already three months pregnant with Barack. But when Obama Snr pursued his studies at Harvard, he continued to have affairs — and split from Ann in 1964.
Eventually, he returned to Kenya — leaving Barack in Hawaii — and his heavy drinking spiralled out of control: after fathering George to his fourth wife Jael in Kenya, he died six months after the birth in a car crash in 1982.
George grew up in a middle-class Nairobi suburb with his mother, who married again, to a white man, a French aid worker — a fact he blames for his subsequent rebellion. ‘I was the only guy with a white father in my street. I wanted to be the same as the other black kids,’ he says.
He admits that after becoming addicted to cocaine and heroin at 17, he became an armed robber to pay for drink and drugs. Living with his ‘black brothers’ on the streets, he was jailed in 2003, accused of playing a part in an attempted armed robbery.
Held on remand for nine months before being acquitted for lack of evidence, George claims his spell behind bars changed him. ‘It was hell on earth — literally,’ he tells me. ‘You either come out of there worse, or you change for the better. I changed. I wanted to help other people.’
Of course, George is not the only Obama sibling to have tried drugs. President Obama was a habitual drug-user in his teens and 20s. He tried cocaine. He was also a member of the ‘Choom Gang’ — slang for a group of dope smokers who used to drive round Hawaii getting stoned.
At college in Hawaii, Barack had regarded himself as a ‘cat’ — a cool character. Known as Barry, he was also notorious for ‘intercepting’ — grabbing a joint when it’s not your turn and taking a puff. The Honolulu Advertiser reported that Obama’s High School picture ‘prominently displayed . . . a package of ‘Zigzag’ rolling papers — used to make marijuana joints — and a matchbook.’
In his autobiography, Barack Obama revealed that he ‘got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind’ — a reference to his own difficult relationship with his talented, but wayward, father. ‘Junkie. Pothead,’ he wrote. ‘That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.’
Then U.S. Senator Barack Obama holds his
step-grandmother Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama upon his returned to his
ancestral rural village, Kogelo in August 2006
Excited Sarah Hussein Obara, hugs then Senator
Barack Obama in 2006 when they met after 17 years at his ancestral home
in Nyangoma village in Siaya , about 500km West of Nairobi in Kenya
Family portraits showing President Barack Obama (back row 2nd from left) that hang in his family house in Kogelo, western Kenya
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