A spokesman for Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga yesterday poured scorn on attempts by right-wing activists to discredit US presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama through his Kenyan heritage.
Celeste and Loren Davis, American Christian missionaries active in Africa, have been circulating a chain mail claiming that Odinga and Obama are cousins, that Odinga is a socialist “trained in East Germany” and that Obama is a Muslim.
“These are bizarre accusations that lack credibility,” Odinga’s spokesman, Salim Lone, told Kenyan newspaper the Sunday Nation. “The allegations that the prime minister has socialist and pro-Muslim leanings were discussed and discredited in the last [Kenyan election] campaigns.”
Obama’s father, the late Barack Obama Sr, was from the village of Nyangoma-Kogelo in western Kenya. Many of Senator Obama’s relatives, including his grandmother and uncle, still live there.
Odinga and the Obama family are Luo, one of the largest tribes in Kenya, and Lone said that Barack Obama’s mother came from a clan to which Odinga’s mother also belonged.
However, the men are not cousins in the Western sense.
In Luo culture, members of the parents’ clan — which often number in the tens of thousands — are considered cousins of the child.
Odinga, of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement, was sworn in as prime minister last month after a compromise deal created a coalition cabinet with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity.
The deal ended months of tension and violence that left more than 1,000 dead and 350,000 displaced after elections Odinga claimed Kibaki stole from him.
The missionaries claim that Obama and Odinga speak daily and that the US presidential hopeful will copy the Kenyan prime minister, “crying rigged election if he doesn’t win, and possibly cause a race war in America.”
Obama is in pole position to win the Democratic nomination ahead of Senator Hilary Clinton.
Previous attempts have been made to paint Obama as a Muslim, with pictures of him in traditional Somali robes being released on the Web and a claim made that he attended a radical Islamic school in Indonesia — an allegation that was largely discredited.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS