Barack Obama will be making his 4th return to his father's ancestral home later on Monday but the mystery of Obama's could still be haunting him, over five decades down the wire.
While the former US president remains the most famous son to the late Barack Obama Snr, intrigues surrounding his father's complicated early life is still at glance evidently through his many half-brothers and sisters.
Although Obama Snr's first wife, Kezia Obama's children are know, predictably Dr. Auma Obama and Malick Obama, the former President has another Israeli brother, Mike Okoth Obama Ndesandjo.
Born to Ruth Baker, an Israeli mother from Boston, Mr. Okoth, a musician and writer, lives in Shenzen, a little town in South East China.
His mother, Ruth, the third known wife to Obama Snr, divorced his husband in 1972 but has lived in Nairobi throughout her life, remarried and detached herself from Obama's.
“It’s no secret that my father was a troubled person. Anybody who’s read my first book, ‘Dreams from My Father’, knows that, you know, he had an alcoholism problem and that he didn’t treat his families very well,” Obama said when he met Okoth in Beijing in 2009 for five minutes.
And it is Barack who persuaded his half brother, who 'hated' his father for 'poor' upbringing, to reconnect with his lost 'heritage' after many years.
“I hadn’t had contact in [two] decades with the Obamas, because I had shut them out of my life,” he said. “And then I saw Barack doing such amazing things, and everywhere I turned, I saw him and I was proud of the impact he was having. My father pushed me away from my heritage, and in a sense, Barack made me proud and eventually I reached out to him.”
Okoth was born in 1965, four years after Obama Jnr's birth. His mother had met Obama senior at Harvard when he was doing his masters while the former President's mother, Ann Dunham met the economist at Hawaii.
Barack is expected in the country on Sunday and will be gracing Auma's foundation, Sauti Kuu's launch on Monday.