Homeland

George Hussein Obama, youngest brother of President Barack Obama, is one of the leading movers and shakers in the Huruma Centre Youth Group. George lives in the Huruma slum, and has done so for the last ten years or so.

He works to improve the life of the ghetto-dwellers via youth group activities, and is particularly involved in getting young ghetto kids in to playing football, and onto the professional circuit where possible. George shares the same father as Barack Obama, and the two have met on several occasions,

George tells his life story in a newly published book - Homeland. It is an extraordinary story of hope and survival from Africa's rebel heart, and the closing chapters of the book speak of his work within the Huruma, Mathare and other slums in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Promise of Hope / Slaying The Shame

By George Hussein Obama

I live in one of Africa's biggest slums, in Nairobi, Kenya. There are some 4.5 million of us slum-dwellers, although no one knows for certain as counting us isn't easy. We have little or no access to healthcare, no welfare or benefits, and no free schooling. The average income is less than 5 dollars a day - that's for those who can find work as servants for the rich, or taxi drivers or garbage collectors. For the rest there is hopelessness and there is crime.

Life is never easy, yet I choose to live in the slum. And you could argue that I don't need to be there - for I'm the youngest brother of the American President, Barack Obama. We share the same father, Barack Obama Senior, and my mother was the last of our father's four wives.

For the first sixteen years of my life I lived in relative privilege, going to some of Kenya's best private schools. But I drifted into the Huruma slum in my teens, when my life went off the rails due to personal trauma at home. Like many desperate slum-dwellers, I ended up breaking the law to survive. I resorted to petty crime, and to muggings, to gain money to live. Finally, in my early twenties, I spent a year in a Nairobi prison, arraigned on charges of robbery.

Nairobi's Industrial Are prison is notorious as being one of the ten worst prisons in the world. It earned that reputation deservedly. My year in those hellish conditions - a starvation diet; 24/7 lockdowns in hopelessly overcrowded and baking, airless cells - turned my life around. A year in that Nairobi prison would either kill you, or change you forever. I came out of prison a different man, one who vowed to turn my back on the life of crime and find a different path.

I decided to try to do some good working for the people of the slums - those who had taken me in at my lowest point and given me a community and a home. Hand-in-hand with the desperate poverty of the slums comes an incredible generosity of spirit and brotherhood, one that I had learned to love and to appreciate. I wanted to give something back - especially for the young boys and men in the slums, who, bereft of education or any opportunities, so often resort to crime.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, are shot dead each year, in a shoot-to-kill policy instigated by the Kenyan police in a drive to reduce crime. No one knows the numbers killed in this way, for there are no statistics. And being that its only slum-dwelling criminals who are gunned down - the unwanted ghetto underclass - no one particularly cares, either.

Together with some fellow Huruma slum-dwellers, we set up the Huruma Centre Youth Group. 'Huruma' is actually the Swahili word for 'mercy', and we wanted the group to shine the light of mercy and hope into the darkest corners of the slums. The aim of the group was to use micro-projects - garbage collection, handicrafts, dance and theatre, sports - to provide a little income for the ghetto youth, and the chance to reclaim just a little of their self-respect.

My passion was the sports programmes, and especially the ghetto football team. At my privileged private schools I'd ended up playing rugby, but I was always good at football too. And for most Africans - including the ghetto youth - football is a sport to be followed with a religious-like passion. Many of those young boys had real talent, but no opportunities to get out of the ghetto and to get noticed on the professional football circuit. If we could just change that, maybe we could get some of them into a dream career - that of a salaried football star.

The problem as ever was money. When we first set up the Huruma Centre Football Club, none of those kids had so much as a pair of football boots, let alone any uniform. Some were so hungry when they turned up for matches that they had no energy to play. At other times the entire team had to trek for miles across Nairobi to play the match, as we couldn't afford any transport.

In spite of all that, we started winning. Our players had an undying passion to win and to succeed and to get ahead - something that epitomises the hunger for a future worth living of so many ghetto-dwellers. And then came the Obama connection. As my elder brother's profile grew and grew in American, and on the world stage, so the world's media made the connections and came looking for his wider, African, family.

Obama isn't such an unusual surname in Kenya, and many Obama's are no relations at all to the US President. But the press found me out in my slum. The exposure had a positive side: with my raised profile I managed to pull in some funds from philanthropists to support the work of the Youth Group. I raised enough money to buy them a gold and green team uniform, each with their own number on the back; then, joy-of-joys, brand new football boots for every player!

Things were on the up, for 'Obama's Champs', as the team had become known. In the fall of 2009, Obama's Champs won the Nairobi Super League - a feat that just a couple of years back would have been unthinkable for a team from the slums. We're now competing on a national level. With the little sponsorship I've attracted to the team via the Obama connection, we can afford to bus the team all over Kenya to matches, and to feed and house them whilst doing so.

Just a little, little help goes such a long way in the Kenyan slums. It's a rare promise of hope. I've written a book telling my life story, and that of the Nairobi slum dwellers, called Homeland. It tells of how we're trying to slay the shame that so many slum-dwellers feel about their desperate and hopeless lives.