Barack Obama Senior, son of Hussein Onyango and father of the American president, was a bona fide genius, intellectually. Known as a highly gifted youth in otherwise poor surroundings, the first Barack was given the best education that his poor family could provide. But like father Onyango, young Barack was stubborn (despite his brilliance). When the two clashed, Onyango was ruthless, a stern and brutal disciplinarian. In later years Barack continued to excel, proving himself a veritable mensa, or in youthspeak, a "brainiac" -- studying econometrics at Harvard. But he had an irascible temperament, perhaps dogged by the harshness of his upbringing. As a father for the future president, he was largely absentee.

The white woman:

Stanley Ann Dunham actually never set foot on Kenyan soil (or indeed Africa) -- it would have been extremely unsafe for her to be in Kenya during the early 1960s. Tribal warfare between the Kikuyus and the Luos was raging in Kenya at the time of her pregnancy. The ethnic warfare erupted in the immediate aftermath of the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonialists. There's no way that Barack Obama Sr., a Luo, would have dared to bring his pregnant white American wife to Kenya at the time, knowing full well that her safety -- and that of their unborn son -- would have been in grave jeopardy.

In fact, the president's mother did not leave the United States until 1967, when she moved to Indonesia to live with her second husband, geographer Lolo Soetoro. (She divorced the senior Obama in 1964 after she learned that he was married to another woman in Kenya). He had temporarily left her and his small son when he won acceptance (a prestigeous honor) to the econometrics program at Harvard University, a personal ideal of the gifted mathematician and economically oriented genius, who has been called a brainiac, a mensa, a black Einstein.

But to the young Barack, he was also an absent father, and a husband who bailed out on his marriage.

An ancient people:

The Luo (also called Jaluo and Joluo) are found in the western part of Kenya in the well known Nyanza province. They are the second largest ethnic group in Kenya. They are found on the shores and hinterland of Lake Victoria. Kin groups of the Nyanza Luo are found spread far and wide into Uganda and southern Sudan, from where Kenya's Luo migrated some hundred years ago. The Obama clan, mostly Seventhday aventist, are found on both sides of the inlet known as Kendu Bay.

Nairobi Skyline
"Green City in the Sun"

along the Great Rift Valley between Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro

Barack Obama's maternal family tree

Presidential heritage: Genealogies of Presidents

Washington to Clinton: Genealogy of U.S. Presidents

Quirks of genealogy: presidential pedigrees

Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu
[Oh God of all Creation]

Famous White Kenyans

• Jessica Posner - Jessica is the co-founder and director of Shining Hope for Communities
  
• Chris Froome - championship cyclist and leader of the Team Sky
  
• Richard Dawkins - award winning evolutionist and science author (now UK)
  
• Peter Hain - liberal UK politician (born in Kenya), anti-aparteid in South Africa
  
• Beryl Markham - bush pilot, adventurer, racehorse trainer; the Amelia Earhart of east Africa
  
• The Leakey family - paleontologists, archaeologists, paleo-anthropologists
  
• And then, of course, there's Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, the famous author of "Out of Africa"