. Opiyo is a name for a firstborn twin, and given that the Luo consider twins “a bad omen,” his life would have begun with the careful carrying out of rituals to keep away harm. Despite this, he “grew to be a strong and respected leader among the Luo of south Nyanza.”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/may/12/apple-fell-far-tree/
Opiyo/Apiyo — First born of a twin pair
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Luo_surnames
David “Opiyo” Obama
Many thanks for that link, I had read that entire article on another website, and I've been looking for it for quite some time. There's a paragraph in it, that has always made me wonder:
Of course, in the world from which he came, having a wife or two was not a reason to avoid other women. There is some uncertainty about whether Obama visited his American wife and child in Hawaii in the three years he was at Harvard: one of his friends from the period recalls him boasting about his son and visiting him “more than once.”
In the INS docs, one finds that the faculty at Harvard wondered if he also had 'another wife' at Cambridge. The assumption might have been due to the fact that he did tell his associates about his regular visits to 'his son' - and as he didn't travel to Hawaii from Boston any number of times, it's a fair question...who was this son and with whom was he living?