History
Onyango was working as a computer programmer at Kenya Breweries in Nairobi, when she first met Barack Obama during his first trip to Kenya in 1988. Obama's father and Onyango's half-brother, Barack Obama, Sr., had left Obama and his mother when he was two, and was only known through the stories his mother and her parents told, and a month-long return visit eight years later. Barack Obama, Sr. had remarried in Kenya and fathered six children, then died in 1982. Obama's trip to Kenya was to meet the other half of his family. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama, Jr. writes about his journey and meeting Onyango, referred to as "Aunti Zeituni".
Onyango explained to Obama the significance of Obama's father being the first to fly in an airplane and study abroad; she also explained the complicated extended family on Obama's side from four marriages (two of them polygamous), and his rise in government to senior economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance before conflict with President Kenyatta destroyed his career. Barack Obama Sr. fathered six other sons and a daughter, in addition to Obama. All but one live in Britain or the United States as of 2010.
Read more about this topic: Zeituni Onyango
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)