Author of the week: George Obama

last updated 8 January 2015

Barack Obama’s bad-seed half-brother has apparently turned his life around, said David M. Shribman in Bloomberg.com. In a new memoir, Homeland, 28-year-old George Obama, a former petty thief who once spent a year in a Kenyan prison, claims that a 2006 meeting with his famous relative provided an important wake-up call. Barack was a high-profile U.S. senator, visiting the native country of his late Kenyan father. George, 21 years Barack’s junior, was just beginning to redeem himself from what he now describes as his “badass gangster” period. “If there was a leading light in the Obama clan, then he was it,” George writes of the current U.S. president. “And if there was a shadowed place that no one wanted to talk about, then I guess that was me.”

By 2006, the younger Obama had already begun his climb back by launching a youth soccer team in the slums of Nairobi. Using his famous surname, he has since greatly expanded his youth group’s programs. “My American brother has risen to be the leader of the most powerful country in the world,” he says. “Here in Kenya, my aim is to be a leader among the poorest, most powerless people on earth—the people of the ghetto.” George Obama wasn’t raised in the slums, but he was drawn to them in his teens and still chooses to live there now. “It is because of who and what I was—the lost years—that I can do the type of work I do,” he says.