Posted on 10/29/2008 7:20:09 PM PDT by Fred
In his bestselling autobiography Dreams from My Father Mr Obama recalls how, during his first visit to Kenya, his cousin referred to an uncle, Omar, who had left Africa and moved to Boston, but had been “lost”.
A little later in the book Mr Obama travels to the family village in western Kenya where he meets his step-grandmother, Sarah, the woman who had raised his father. On the walls of her tin-roofed hut, Mr Obama noticed photographs of the missing Omar, “the uncle who had left for America twenty-five years ago and had never come back”.
The woman he calls “Granny Sarah” was plainly anxious for news of her son, the half-brother of Mr Obama’s father. “Her only real problems were the roof of her house,” he writes, “and the fact that she had not heard from her son Omar in over a year. She asked if I had seen him, and I had to say no.”
Granny Sarah then made a remark in the Luo language, which a cousin translated for the American visitor. “She says when you see him, you should tell him she wants nothing from him . . . Only that he should come visit his mother.”
Mr Obama’s visit to Kenya took place in 1988. Dreams from My Father was first published in 1995. Had he been in contact with his missing uncle in the intervening years? Had he passed on his grandmother’s message?
Earlier this year The Times asked Mr Obama’s Kenyan family whether they had received any news of this missing relative in the US. Sayed Obama, another uncle and the family’s unofficial spokesman, insisted that he knew of no relative named Omar.
The other person who features prominently in Mr Obama’s book but had since disappeared was his Aunt Zeituni.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
From my own personal experiences, there is a distinct difference between and among people who identify themselves by the PC term “African American”.
Again, speaking strictly from personal experience, it is much the same among those of us who can honestly proclaim ourselves “Native Americans”, by virtue of our ancestry in any of the indigenous tribes.
What do I have in common with a reservation born and raised second cousin, twice removed, “kinsman”?
What does a new (legal) immigrant from Africa have in common with a USA born second cousin, twice removed, “kinsman”?
Other than the hues of our skin color, and researchable geneology, we really have nothing in common with our respective “native born cousins”, except a certain uneasiness around those who cling to the grievances of certain aspects of history, and conveniently forget the totality of history.
IMHO the USA is still the last best hope for humanity to escape the cult of clan, and exalt the ideal of individual human worth.
“Those who forget history, are doomed to repeat it.”
Which seriously enrages those of us who not only did not forget history, but can clearly see members of our own community, our neighbors/citizens/clans, seemingly hellbent on destroying every gain humanity has made in the last three centuries.
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