He is arguably the most powerful man on the planet today. The United States of America President Barack Hussein Obama was once "just another African-American young man". This was until he joined elective politics, eventually becoming the Senator for Illinois state in November 2004.

The now 55-year-old worked up the political ladder to become America's 44th president in 2009. What a journey!!

Barack's ancestry is known to many people, but for the sake of some of us who might not be in the know, or want to refresh that part of history, here is a brief life history about U.S President Barack Obama.

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Barack's dad, Barack Obama Sr., was a Kenyan from Nyang'oma K'Ogelo, a remote village in Siaya County. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.

The couple married in 1961, and separated when, in late August 1961, Barack's mother moved with their newborn son to attend the University of Washington in Seattle for a year. During that time, Obama Sr. completed his undergraduate economics degree in Hawaii in June 1962, then left to attend graduate school at Harvard University on a scholarship.

There he earned an M.A. in economics. Barack's parents divorced in March 1964. His father returned to Kenya in 1964 where he remarried. It's said that he visited Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. When he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, his son was 21 years old.

But in his quest to know his ancestry, Barack visited Kenya several times as a young man, where he was eventually reunited with his grandmother Sarah Obama in Kogelo. In one of the visits as a 29-year-old in 1990, the video below was made of him gifting Mama Sarah with a new sweater and helping her put it on.

The video is now part of a film directed by his sister Auma Obama, the first Kenyan to ride in the American president official car.

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