Kogelo: visiting the village of Barack Obama's Kenyan family

Nyang'oma Kogelo is a village of maize fields, cassava, mango trees and tin roofs in Siaya County, an hour or so from Kisumu, where the father of an American president grew up. In 2008 it was briefly one of the most photographed villages on earth. What is there now is quieter, and more honest: a family homestead with graves, a secondary school, a sports center, and a community that has learned what fame does and does not bring.

Can you visit? Yes, with arrangement. The Obama homestead is a private family home, not a museum, and visits are made through local contacts and the family's own wishes, not by walking in. A day trip from Kisumu can combine Kogelo with the Luo sacred rock of Kit Mikayi and the shore of Lake Victoria, and for many Black American and Kenyan-American travelers it is one of the most meaningful days of a western Kenya trip. Our heritage travel page sets Kogelo in the wider story of Kenya and the U.S.; this page is about the village itself.

The Obama family in Kogelo

The family is Luo, the people of the Lake Victoria basin. Hussein Onyango Obama, the president's grandfather, settled in Kogelo, in the Alego area of Siaya. His son Barack Hussein Obama grew up there and went to school in the region, a gifted student who left for the University of Hawaii in 1959. He knew Tom Mboya's circle, and he is often described as an Airlift student, but he was not one of the students on the Airlift charter flights. In Hawaii he met Ann Dunham, and their son, the future president, was born in Honolulu in 1961.

Barack Obama Sr. studied economics at Harvard, returned to Kenya in 1964 and worked as a government economist. In 1965 he published a critique of the government's economic blueprint, Sessional Paper No. 10, in the East Africa Journal, under the title Problems Facing Our Socialism. His later career was troubled. He died in a car crash in Nairobi in 1982 and was buried in Kogelo, near his father.

The family member most visitors remember is Sarah Onyango Obama, Mama Sarah, Hussein Onyango's widow and the president's step-grandmother, who lived on the homestead for decades and welcomed thousands of visitors after 2008. She ran a foundation supporting orphans and girls' education. She died in March 2021, at 99, and was buried at the homestead the same day according to Muslim rites. The president wrote about his first visit, to his grandmother's compound in Alego in the late 1980s, in his memoir Dreams from My Father (1995).

2006, 2008 and after

In August 2006, as a U.S. senator, Obama visited Kogelo, and the local secondary school was renamed Senator Obama Secondary School in his honour. In Kisumu on the same trip, he and Michelle Obama took a public HIV test to encourage testing. When he won the presidency in November 2008, crowds celebrated through the night in Kogelo and Kisumu, and Kenya declared November 6, 2008 a public holiday. The government listed Kogelo as a heritage site, and there were plans for hotels and a cultural center.

Not everything that was promised arrived. Visitor numbers fell after the first rush, and some of the projects of those years were slow to finish or never opened. Journalists, including writers for Smithsonian magazine, reported on the village's disappointment years ago. In July 2015 Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Kenya, for a summit in Nairobi, where he met his Kenyan relatives, but he did not travel to Kogelo on that trip. In July 2018 he returned to the village to open a sports and vocational center built by the Sauti Kuu Foundation, founded by his half-sister Auma Obama, which works with young people in the area.

How to visit respectfully

• Arrange it in advance. We work through local contacts, ask what is possible and accept the family's answer; there are no walk-in visits to the homestead
• Think of it as visiting a family, not a site. If you are welcomed, follow your host's lead on where to go, where to sit and when to leave
• Ask before every photograph, especially of people and graves
• Dress modestly, as you would for a church or a funeral: shoulders and knees covered
• Support the community, not the myth. Buy lunch locally, use a local guide, and if you want to give, ask us about established local organisations rather than handing out cash
• Keep expectations honest. There is no visitor center or exhibition to tour; the meaning of the day is the place and the conversation

The Luo heritage around it

Kogelo makes most sense as part of a wider day in Luo country. Names here often tell the time or circumstances of birth: Onyango, the family name, is given to a boy born in the morning, and Barack comes from the word for blessing, baraka in Kiswahili. Lunch might be fried tilapia or a whole fish with ugali and greens, near the lake. Music means the nyatiti, an eight-stringed lyre, and the benga guitar style that came out of this region. Siaya is also the home of the Odinga family; their mausoleum at Kang'o ka Jaramogi in Bondo is less than an hour away.

A day from Kisumu

To get to Kisumu, fly from Nairobi in about 50 minutes or take the road through the Rift Valley and the tea country of Kericho in about six to seven hours. Two nights in Kisumu give you this day plus one on the lake. Rusinga Island, with Tom Mboya's mausoleum, makes a second day. All of it fits into our western Kenya routes and into heritage trips for church groups, alumni chapters and families.

Further reading

• Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father (1995), especially the Kenya chapters
• Auma Obama, And Then Life Happens (2012), a memoir by the president's half-sister
• Our Kenya and the U.S. heritage page, for the Airlift and the wider story