AUMA OBAMA

'Her restlessness, her independence'

Barack Obama and his half-sister Auma didn't meet until they were in their 20s, but both have said they immediately clicked when she first came to visit him in Chicago in the 1980s.

"There was a lot of apprehension," Auma Obama told the Guardian of London last year. "I had a plan B in case it didn't work out, but it worked out. We just didn't stop talking when we met -- it was absolutely as if we'd lived together all our lives."

When he picked Auma Obama up from the airport, Barack Obama knew "somehow, that I loved her, so naturally, so easily and fiercely, that later, after she was gone, I would find myself mistrusting that love, trying to explain it to myself," he wrote in Dreams From My Father.

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In this Obama Family photo are: (bottom row, from left) half-sister Auma, her mother Kezia Obama, Obama's step-grandmother Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama and unknown; (top row, from left) unknown, Barack Obama, half-brother Abongo (Roy) Obama, and three unknowns.
(Courtesy of the Obama Family)

Auma Obama was born in Kenya to Barack Obama St. and his first wife. She studied in Germany and now lives in Great Britain, where she works as a social worker running a children's trust.

"Her restlessness, her independence, her constant willingness to project into the future -- all of this struck the family as unnatural somehow. Unnatural . . . and un-African," Barack Obama wrote of his half-sister in Dreams From My Father.