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Dropping In on Obama's Kenyan GrandmotherWhat it means to be an Obama in Africa.

By Andy IsaacsonPosted Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008, at 2:36 PM ET

Sarah Onyango Obama reading Kenyan press coverage of the U.S. campaign at her rural homestead in KogeloKOGELO, Kenya—Last Sunday morning, while Barack Obama stumped in Colorado, his paternal grandmother, 86-year-old "Mama Sarah" Obama, stood before a microphone and a crowd of several hundred villagers on a plot of land in Kogelo. Beside her was Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whose helicopter had descended unexpectedly onto her tin-roofed homestead moments earlier. Streams of excited villagers ran across the surrounding corn and cassava fields and from a soccer game at Senator Barack Obama Secondary School.

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Odinga addressed the crowd and the Kenyan TV cameras that followed him in Luo, the local tongue: "Today we have gathered here to say hello to Mama Sarah. The boy from here, he's gone to compete. We are praying for him so that he succeeds. Are you happy with Obama?"

"We are happy!" the crowd responded.

"Are you happy with him?"

"We are!"

Though I may have been the only person for miles around who actually has a vote in the U.S. presidential election, the occasion seemed oddly like a campaign rally. In a sense, it was. For Prime Minister Odinga, who, like the Obamas, belongs to the Luo tribe, and whose loss in a tainted presidential election last December touched off devastating ethnic violence, the appearance with Sarah Obama was not only an expression of solidarity, but also unambiguous political groundwork for what he might one day claim as a direct channel to the White House. For Obama's grandmother, the arrival of the Kenyan prime minister was another indication of how the phenomenal rise of an Obama child has changed the lives of the other Obama family half a world away.

Sarah Onyango Obama in her living room in Kogelo, as her grandson's likeness stands in the corner"At the beginning, I thought it was something that would be short-lived, but it's been getting bigger every day," Obama's uncle Said had told me earlier that day on the drive from the provincial city in Kisumu for what I expected would be a quiet interview with the family matriarch. "It will continue to be a major preoccupation—or maybe my employment." Said wasn't referring only to his changed daily routine, which now involves rising at 4 a.m. to track the latest U.S. campaign news on Anderson Cooper 360—"people will ask me to comment on a development, and I don't want to be caught unawares"—before a full workday as a technician for a spirits company, followed by night school for his business management degree. Said was also referring to what it has meant, and what it may mean for at least the next four years, to be an Obama in Kenya: the frequent visits from people asking for money or help getting a U.S. visa; the requests to help sponsor scholarships for study in the United States; and the random pale faces, African dignitaries, and international journalists that have been arriving at Mama Sarah's home on a daily basis for the last year, paying respects and seeking favors and quotes.

"You can't fail to see there's a perception that we are in a better place economically," Said said. "People know that if you are in a senior position, you become rich. Leaders here steal. But our lives go on. We are a hardworking family. We should not just stand idly and think Barack is going to fix everything for us."

A 36-year-old cousin of Barack's, a hairdresser in Nairobi who has returned to Kogelo to support Mama Sarah during the final weeks of the campaign, told me that he tries to maintain a low profile. "I won't be able to walk freely," he said, asking that his name not be publicized out of concern for both unwanted attention and personal safety. His girlfriend, he added, doesn't even know about his family ties to the U.S. senator. "She might think I've been hiding money from her. She'll expect a lot." Last August, Italian Vanity Fair "discovered" Barack's half-brother George, who lives in the marginalized outskirts of Nairobi; his plight was sensationalized by international media and in turn exploited by conservatives who suggested that the candidate doesn't care for his own family. Because of the widely brachiated nature of the Kenyan Obama family tree, as for many traditional African families, notions of family are very complicated. Certainly, the Obamas that Barack seems closest with appear loved, financially secure, and not at all resentful.

Related in Slate

Michela Wrong assessed the rivalry between the Luo and the Kikuyu. Days after the December 2007 election that kicked off the violence, Alex Halperin filed a dispatch from Nairobi. Anne Applebaum argued that Kenya's problems aren't uniquely African.

A perception of family wealth was likely the motive of an attempted burglary of Mama Sarah's home in September. When I arrived at the homestead, I was met by armed Kenyan police officers posted behind a newly erected 8-foot fence. I was asked to sign a visitors log. Hundreds of names from all over the world had filled the book since the first entry on Sept. 16. The guards were securing what may be the world's most modest gated compound: With the exception of a small solar panel on the corrugated tin roof of Mama Sarah's two-room home, the most obvious signs of affluence appeared to be a pair of cows, which mooed as I walked in.