Peter Firstbrook spent many months in Kenya researching the history of Barack Obama's family. It is a truly astonishing drama culminating in the inauguration of Barack Obama on 20 January 2009, watched by Obama's African family on a flickering television clustered under a group of trees in the twilight of Kobama village in Kenya.

Peter Firstbrook spent many months in Kenya researching the history of Barack Obama's family. This book establishes the early ancestry of the Obama family in the Alego region, telling the story of farmers and fishermen, of love and tribal warfare, of families lost and found. It traces the Obama roots from famous tribal warriors in the seventeenth century to the first encounters with the white man in the early 1900s; generation by generation we follow the family through colonial rule and the fight for Kenyan independence, including the Mau Mau and the relationship of Barack Obama's father with President Kenyatta.