Former President Barack Obama quietly arrived Sunday in Kenya, where he will meet local leaders before opening a sports and vocational center run by his half-sister.
Obama’s two-day visit is his first to Kenya since leaving office. He visited Kenya just once as president, in 2015.
The former president’s father, an economist also named Barack Obama, was raised in Kenya before meeting the future president’s mother, a white American from Kansas, in the U.S.
Obama, who has at least five half-siblings, was born in Hawaii in 1961, but a popular conspiracy theory contended he was Kenyan. Large numbers of poll respondents said Obama was born in Kenya, or that he was secretly Muslim — his father’s childhood religion.
Obama first visited Kenya in 1988, at age 27, before returning in 1992 with his fiance, the future first lady Michelle Obama. He visited again in 2006 after winning election to the U.S. Senate.
The ex-president will meet in the Kenyan capital Nairobi with President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga, the Associated Press reports, before flying to the western Kenyan city of Kisumu and then driving about 40 miles to his father’s home village of Kogelo, where he will open the center built by his half-sister Auma Obama’s foundation.
Obama will then depart Kenya for South Africa, where he will be joined by Oprah Winfrey at an event celebrating the 100th anniversary of anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela’s birth. He also will meet 200 young Africans in the Obama Foundation’s leadership program, the AP reports.
