Against all odds: Obama's brother closer to reality

He lives on less than one dollar a month: Obama's brother George identified in the slums of Nairobi

He is living in a hut. He has a brother who might soon be perhaps (and against my prediction) the most powerful man in the world, moving into the White House...


Obama's brother George
George Onyango Hussein Obama (26) is half brother of Barack Obama (47), the presidential candidate of the U.S. Democrats.

Reporters of the Italian edition of the magazine "Vanity Fair" have found George Obama: He lives in a rundown suburb of Kenya's capital Nairobi, in a hut of two by three meters. On the walls to see are posters of Italian football teams AC and Inter Milan, writes "Vanity Fair". And then there is the title of a newspaper picture with the face of his brother Barack...

The two have the same father but different mothers. The father studied in the U.S. state of Hawaii, where Barack was born. After the separation of Barack's mother the father returned to his native Kenya.

George Obama has seen his big brother only twice. The first time when George was five years old, the second time in 2006, as the senator from Illinois toured through East Africa. At that time, they had only a few minutes talking. "It was as if a stranger speaks to me," George recalls.

He keeps his prominent brother as a secret from his friends: "If somebody asks me about my last name, I say that we are not related."

The life of the young man can hardly be more different from that of his American relatives: While the presidential candidate Barack Obama spends hundreds of millions for his presidential campaign, the little brother lives in Africa from less than one dollar per month!

But he now hopes to improve his life and wants to visit a course at a technical university.

So far, the life of George Obama was very hard in Huruma: In the suburb where he lives serious riots broke out during the last presidential elections in Kenya - six of his neighbors were massacred, two friends killed. George: "The police here don't arrest people, but they shoot them dead at the spot."

He has scars all over his body, successfully defending with his fists.




Meanwhile the presidential election campaign thousands of kilometres away in America is always exciting too: Barack Obama and his opponent John McCain are almost equal in the polls right now. According to a survey by the TV channel "CBC News" and the newspaper "New York Times" Obama came to 45 percent, McCain at 42 percent, others have them only one point apart where before two weeks Obama had a six points lead.