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Obama's relatives overwhelmed
05/02/2008 15:53 - (SA)
Nairobi - Barack Obama's Kenyan relatives have been overwhelmed by the hordes of journalists descending on his ancestral village, and upset by distortions of their family story, an uncle said on Tuesday.
Said Obama said the family had been misrepresented in interviews with villagers claiming to be relatives, and complained that comments by the presidential hopeful's 85-year-old grandmother Sarah had been distorted by translators.
"Some days we meet 10 media houses who descend here and we cannot handle them," Obama said in telephone interview from Nyang'oma, where Barack Obama's father was born.
"It's very hectic... It's distracting us from other things that we do for a living."
Obama, the official spokesperson for the family in Kenya, has put out a request that journalists set up appointments before turning up in Nyang'oma, a poor village of a few thousand people on the shores of Lake Victoria.
"We are saying 'we don't want to get crushed'. Let us know that you want to come and meet the family and let them give you the story the way it is," he said.
Some of the international news focus has zeroed in on the Obama family's Muslim roots and the widespread poverty in the village where grandmother Sarah lives modestly.
About 30 relatives of the Democratic contender live in Nyang'oma where Barack senior was born and grew up before he moved to Hawaii for his studies and later was admitted to Harvard University where he trained as an economist.
Rooting for Obama
Said Obama said they were all rooting for the Illinois senator in the "Super Tuesday" contest.
"We are praying that he wins," he said.
"He has all that it takes to be president. He is someone from humble origins, coming from a multicultural family," he added.
"He is somebody who has a better view of the world than the other candidates."
The 46-year-old presidential contender was born in the United States and barely knew his Kenyan father who returned to his homeland when Barack was a young boy.
Barack Obama was given a hero's welcome during his last visit to Nyang'oma in 2006 where he visited his grandmother who does not speak English.
The relatives are ethnic Luos from a region in western Kenya that has been spared from the violence that has wracked other parts of the country following disputed elections in December, claiming 1 000 lives.
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