Barack Hussein Obama Sr was the father of former US President, Barack Obama. He was born in 1936 in Kogelo, Siaya District (currently Siaya County) to a Muslim father.
While attending a Christian missionary school aged 6 years, Obama Sr converted from Islam to Anglicanism after being strongly encouraged by the staff.
He changed his name from “Baraka” to “Barack.” He tended goats and walked to school barefoot, but dreamed big.
Obama Sr traveled to many places in his youthful years, like Zanzibar where he converted from Roman Catholicism back to Islam and took the name “Hussein.”
In 1959, Obama Sr received a scholarship from the University of Hawaii to study economics through a program organized by Tom Mboya which sponsored education in the USA to outstanding Kenyan students.
There, he joined the debating club and the International Students Association and had been named as the editor of the International Students Newsletter.
He met Ann Dunham who was his classmate in 1960 and he married her after she falling pregnant. Their son, Barack Obama was born in August 1961.
Thereafter he went to Harvard to pursue a graduate degree in 1962. Obama Sr was forced to leave his Ph.D. program at Harvard University in May 1964 and instead got master's degree in economics.
He returned to Kenya after graduating and worked as an economist in an oil company, Ministries of Transport and Finance. He flew back to Hawaii where he met the 10-year-old Barack Obama in 1971 for a month.
Obama Sr died in 1982 in a road accident in Nairobi.