Obama's extended family rejoices

KENYA | Extended family rejoices at victory -- and ancestral home lands on tourist map

NYANGOMA-KOGELO, Kenya -- The jubilant cries that rocked Grant Park in Chicago on election night echoed across the world, but perhaps nowhere more deeply than in this small village in western Kenya, the ancestral home of the Obama clan.

President-elect Barack Obama's extended family members rejoiced, dancing around their homestead and chanting in the Luo tongue: "Our son / has won! Our son / has won!"

In the ground beside the tin-roofed home of his stepgrandmother Sarah Onyango Obama, the newly elected president's father and grandfather lie buried.

It is the site where, by his own account, Barack Obama discovered a deeper sense of himself.

"I saw that my life in America -- the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago -- all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away," he wrote of his first visit in 1988, recounted in Dreams From My Father. "I felt the circle finally close."

With Obama's election, the world spotlight suddenly flooded this sleepy village near Lake Victoria that, until the government promptly dispatched utility crews the next day to install power lines, was literally off the grid.

Obama has seven half-siblings through his father's three wives and one girlfriend, and one half-sister through his mother. One half-brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama, lives in a hut outside Nairobi on less than a dollar a day. Another, Mark Ndesandjo, was educated in the United States and has a business that helps Chinese businesses market themselves to American companies. His half-brother Malik Obama, a Kenyan accountant, was the best man at the president-elect's wedding. Half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng is a teacher in Hawaii married to a Chinese Canadian, the only half-sibling to spend any part of her childhood with Obama.

Obama's 86-year-old paternal stepgrandmother, "Mama Sarah" Obama, lives here. Her stepson, Barack Obama Sr., Obama's father, was born and raised here. After he died in a car wreck in 1982, he was buried here on the family farm.

When CNN projected victory, at sunrise local time, neighbors paraded into the Obama family compound, beating drums and exclaiming: "Jakogelo yiengo piny" -- "The one from Kogelo shakes the world!"

With Obama's growing celebrity, Kogelo has seen increased traffic -- and a budding presidential tourism.

Partly in response to an attempted burglary in September, the modest Obama family property -- which contains three small concrete homes, two cows and a corn crop -- is now gated and under constant guard. The government also wasted no time paving the dirt road that leads to the compound.

"They want to see where Barack traces his roots," his uncle Said said of the interest.