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George Hussein Onyango Obama — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Malia Obama and Sasha Obama

Barack and Michelle Obama have two daughters: Malia Ann (), born July 4, 1998, and Natasha Marian (known as Sasha ), born June 10, 2001. They were both delivered at University of Chicago Medical Center by their parents' friend and physician Anita Blanchard. Sasha was the youngest child to reside in the White House since John F. Kennedy Jr. arrived as an infant in 1961. In 2014, Malia and Sasha were named two of "The 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014" by Time magazine.

Before his inauguration, President Obama published an open letter to his daughters in Parade magazine, describing what he wants for them and every child in America: "to grow up in a world with no limits on your dreams and no achievements beyond your reach, and to grow into compassionate, committed women who will help build that world".

While living in Chicago, the Obamas kept busy schedules, as the Associated Press reported: "soccer, dance and drama for Malia, gymnastics and tap for Sasha, piano and tennis for both". In July 2008, the family gave an interview to the television series Access Hollywood. Obama later said they regretted allowing the children to be included. Malia and Sasha both graduated from the private Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., the same school that Chelsea Clinton, Tricia Nixon Cox, Archibald Roosevelt and the grandchildren of Joe Biden (when he was Vice President) attended. The Obama girls began classes there on January 5, 2009; Malia graduated in 2016. Before the family moved to Washington in 2009, both girls attended the private University of Chicago Laboratory School.

In his victory speech on the night of his election, President Obama repeated his promise to Sasha and Malia to get a puppy to take with them to the White House. The selection was slow because Malia is allergic to animal dander; the president subsequently said that the choice had been narrowed down to either a labradoodle or a Portuguese Water Dog, and that they hoped to find a shelter animal. On April 12, 2009, it was reported that the Obamas had adopted a six-month-old Portuguese Water Dog given to them as a gift by Senator Ted Kennedy; Malia and Sasha named the dog Bo. The White House referred to Bo as the First Dog. In 2013, the family adopted a second Portuguese Water Dog named Sunny.

As a high school student, Malia Obama spent a portion of the summer in 2014 and 2015 working in television studios in New York and Los Angeles. She spent the summer of 2016 working as an intern in the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, Spain.

During the week June 26, 2016, to July 3, 2016, Michelle, Sasha, Malia, and Michelle's mother Marian Robinson went to Liberia to promote the Let Girls Learn Peace initiative, for which the United States has provided $27 million in aid. They met with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia and the first elected female head of state in Africa. Then they went to Morocco, where they had a panel with Freida Pinto and Meryl Streep moderated by CNN's Isha Sesay in Marrakesh and delivered a substantive amount of money to aid 62 million girls lacking access to formal education. They proceeded to Spain where Michelle delivered a message about the initiative.

In August 2016, Sasha began working at Nancy's, a seafood restaurant in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. In the fall of 2016, Malia went on an 83-day trip to Bolivia and Peru. In February 2017, Malia started an internship for Harvey Weinstein at The Weinstein Company film studio in New York City. In August 2017, Malia started attending Harvard University. Sasha graduated from Sidwell Friends in 2019 and began attending the University of Michigan in the fall. Sasha transferred to the University of Southern California and graduated in 2023.

Malia graduated from Harvard in 2021 and began working as a writer on the Amazon Prime Video television series Swarm. In spring 2023, Donald Glover confirmed that Malia was working on a short film for his production company; The Heart, starring Tunde Adebimpe, was announced as part of the Short Cuts program at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Written and directed by "Malia Ann" (her credited name), the film screened at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Hussein Onyango Obama (c. 1895–1975)

Paternal grandfather to Barack Obama, he was born Onyango Obama. One source gives 1870–1975 as his dates of birth and death, possibly based on his tombstone in his home village. His probate record shows a death date of 28th November 1975. Barack Obama relates finding in 1988 a British document, based on a 1928 ordinance, recording his grandfather as 35 years old. The date of the document was estimated to be about 1930, which would mean that his grandfather had been born c. 1895.) The Luo are given names related to the circumstances of their birth, and Onyango means "born in the early morning".Onyango was the fifth son of his mother, Nyaoke, who was the first of the five wives of his father, Obama. Barack Obama relates how his step-grandmother Granny Sarah (Sarah Onyango Obama) describes his grandfather: "Even from the time that he was a boy, your grandfather Onyango was strange. It is said of him that he had ants up his anus, because he could not sit still." As a young man, Onyango learned to speak, read and write in English, the language of British colonial administration in Kenya. Onyango worked as a mission cook and as a local herbalist. He joined the King's African Rifles during World War I. In 1949, Onyango spent at least six months in Kamiti Prison. He was tried in a magistrates' court either on charges of sedition or being a member of a banned organization. Records do not survive; all such documentation was routinely destroyed after six years by the colonial administration. Onyango was then subject to torture due to suspicions that he was an associate of the Mau Mau rebels. In his memoir, Obama recounted family descriptions of his grandfather's shocking physical state when released from prison:

"When he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice." For some time, he was too traumatized to speak about his experiences. His wife told his grandson Obama: "From that day on, I saw that he was now an old man." Onyango was permanently scarred, suffering pain and requiring assistance in moving until his death. Although previously he had worked closely with the British, Onyango became bitterly anglophobic after his experiences in Kamiti Prison. According to his third wife, Sarah, Onyango had converted from tribal religion to Roman Catholicism early in life. When Seventh-day Adventist missionaries visited the Kendu Bay area many people were baptized into the church, including Onyango. When he later converted to Islam, he took the first name Hussein. She said that he passed on the name of Hussein to his children, but not the religion. Onyango is sometimes referred to as Mzee Hussein Onyango Obama. The word mzee (meaning "elder") is a Kenyan honorific. To this day the Obama family in Kenya is divided between Seventh-day Adventists and Muslims.

George Hussein Onyango Obama

Youngest half-brother of Barack Obama, born c. May 1982, son of Barack Obama Sr. and Jael Otieno. (She has since moved to Atlanta, Georgia as a full-time resident.) George was six months old when his father died in an automobile accident, after which he was raised in Nairobi by his mother and a French stepfather. His mother took him to South Korea for two years while she was working there. Returning to Kenya, George Obama "slept rough for several years", until his aunt gave him a six-by-eight foot corrugated metal shack in the Nairobi slum of Huruma Flats.As of August 2008, George Obama was studying to become a mechanic. He received little attention until featured in an article in the Italian-language edition of Vanity Fair in August 2008 during the US presidential campaign. This portrayed him as living in poverty, shame, and obscurity. The article quoted George Obama as saying that he lived "on less than a dollar a month" and said that he "does not mention his famous half-brother in conversation" out of shame at his own poverty. In later interviews, George contradicted this account. In an interview with The Times, he "said that he was furious at subsequent reports that he had been abandoned by the Obama family and that he was filled with shame about living in a slum".

He told The Times, "Life in Huruma is good." George Obama said that he expects no favors, that he was supported by relatives, and that reports he lived on a dollar a month were "all lies by people who don't want my brother to win". He told The Telegraph that he was inspired by his half-brother. According to Time, George "has repeatedly denied ... that he feels abandoned by Obama". CNN quoted him as saying, "I was brought up well. I live well even now. The magazines, they have exaggerated everything – I think I kind of like it here. There are some challenges, but maybe it is just like where you come from, there are the same challenges." George Obama and the British journalist Damien Lewis published George's story in a 2011 book called Homeland. George also appeared in the 2012 film, 2016: Obama's America, an anti-Obama documentary.

Omar Okech Obama

At times using a variation of the name of his father, Onyango Obama, Omar Okech Obama is a half-uncle of Barack Obama. Born on June 3, 1944, in Nyang'oma Kogelo, he is the eldest son of Onyango and his third wife, Sarah Obama. He moved to the United States in October 1963 when he was 17 years old as part of Kenya president Tom Mboya's Airlift Africa project, to send promising Kenyan students to the US for education, particularly undergraduate and graduate school. Once he arrived in the country, his half-brother, Barack Obama Sr., found him a place at a boys' school then known as Browne & Nichols, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He later dropped out of school and changed his name to O. Onyango Obama. He has operated a liquor store in Framingham, where he resided as of March 2011. Barack Obama lived with Onyango in the 1980s while a student at Harvard Law School in Cambridge.

Omar Okech Obama was subject to a deportation order in 1989. After an unsuccessful appeal, he was given a new deportation order in 1992. He was arrested on August 24, 2011, for driving under the influence, or DUI, and was held in jail until September 9, 2011, on a federal immigration warrant. The Boston Herald reported in August 2011 that Obama had had a valid Social Security card "for at least 19 years". On November 30, 2012, the Board of Immigration Appeals remanded the immigration case to the Executive Office for Immigration Review for reconsideration of the original order of deportation, which was issued in 1986 and re-issued in 1992.

An immigration judge ruled on January 30, 2013, that Onyango Obama would receive a deportation hearing. Onyango's attorneys said that his defense at the December 3, 2013, deportation hearing would be a reliance on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, because Onyango had resided in the U.S. since before January 1, 1972, the cutoff date of the 1986 amnesty. At the hearing, Immigration Judge Leonard I. Shapiro ruled that Onyango was eligible for permanent residence and would receive a green card.

George Hussein Onyango Obama

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Immediate family

Michelle Obama

Malia Obama and Sasha Obama

Marian Robinson

Maternal relations

Ann Dunham (1942–1995)

Stanley Armour Dunham (1918–1992)

Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham (1922–2008)

Charles Thomas Payne (1925–2014)

Ralph Dunham (1916–2012)

Eleanor Belle Dunham Berkebile (1932–2003)

Margaret Arlene Payne (1927–2014)

Leona McCurry (1897–1968)

Ruth Lucille Armour (1900–1926)

Fulmoth Kearney (c. 1829–1878)

Lolo Soetoro (1936–1987)

Maya Soetoro-Ng (b. 1970)

Konrad Ng (b. 1974)

Robert Wolfley (1835–1895)

John Punch

Jonathan Singletary Dunham (1640–1724)

Paternal relations

Hussein Onyango Obama (c. 1895–1975)

Habiba Akumu Obama (c. 1918–2006)

Sarah Obama (b. 1933)

Barack Obama Sr. (1934–1982)

Hawa Auma Hussein

Sarah Onyango Obama (1922–2021)

Kezia Obama (1940–2021)

Malik Obama

Auma Obama

Abo and Bernard Obama

Ruth (Baker) Ndesandjo

Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo

David Ndesandjo (c. 1967–c. 1987)

George Hussein Onyango Obama

Omar Okech Obama

Zeituni Onyango (1952–2014)

Michelle Obama's extended family

Jim Robinson

Melvinia Shields (1844–1938)

Marian Lois Robinson (1937–2024)

Fraser C. Robinson III (1935–1991)

Craig Robinson

Fraser Robinson Jr. (1912–1996)

LaVaughn Dolores Johnson (1915–2002)

Robbie Shields Terry (1908–1983)

Capers Funnye

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