‘Obama’s grandpa was born in Uganda’
Angelo Izama
Kampala
An organisation speaking for the Luo Community has said President-elect Barack Obama’s grandfather was born in Uganda.
They also urged the governments of the East African Community [including Burundi] to designate the day of his inauguration today as the first black president of America- a national holiday.
The statement signed by Nelson Umah Tete and sent to media houses yesterday said the facts about Obama’s ancestry are discussed in a book titled “The Luo” by George William Alenyo.
The book will also be launched today to coincide with Mr Obama’s inauguration.
The organisation, Luo Community [Ugandan Chapter], is however an unregistered entity whose real membership remains unknown.
“By 1926 when Obama’s grandfather Onyango Obama was born in Nyanza province [it] was still part of the Uganda protectorate whose boundary extended up to the Rift Valley in Nakuru” the statement said, adding that the boundaries were only altered in 1926.
Since his campaign for the White House began, Mr Obama’s East African roots have been a source of excitement in the region.
A beer has been named after him, in Kenya where his father was born and worked, as have been children born on the day he won the Presidency. DVD’s with his speeches are selling like blockbusters and his acceptance speech has been turned into a cellular phone ringtone.
While ‘Obamania’ has shown no signs of ebbing, it holds a special significance to ethnic Luo group.
The Luo, whose author is a Ugandan lawyer, will add to this controversial mix of aspects of Mr Obama’s life and history which have been mined by all and sundry for relevance.
The book’s main focus is to trace the origin of the Luo to Sudan and Egypt and profile the commonality between the Luo and the Jews of later- day Israel.
Interpreted liberally, the author is saying Barack Obama is a “black Jew” with origins in East Africa with its messianic connotations.
“To date, traditional religious practices of the Luo are judiac and jewish in origin” the author claims, adding that Luo names like Barak “spelt “Barack” means “blessed” in Hebrew.
Organisers say the book will be launched at the National Theatre Auditorium at midday today, just hours before Obama takes his oath as the 44th President of the United States of America.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Could Obama be Nigerian?
Does the President-elect of America, Barack Obama, have roots in Nigeria?
I say, does it really matter? Loooooooooool....well just read this....success does have many fathers doesnt it?
The Obama community in Rivers State says yes, claiming that the great-great-great grandfather of the next US President, who assumes office tomorrow, is their “kith and kin”.
The community, which is in present-day Bakana in Degema Local Government Area of Rivers State, said the name “Bakana” was a Portuguese creation as their real name is “Obama” which means “Oba’s kingdom” or “Oba’s town”. “Oba” means king.
THISDAY was informed that when Barack Obama became a Senator four years ago, the then monarch, King Kegan Igbanigbo Will-Braide, informed his chiefs that the African-American has his roots in Obama Kingdom in Rivers State.
It was also gathered that when the former Illinois Senator became a presidential aspirant the now deceased monarch wrote to the Federal Government, intimating them of this. A delegation of three chiefs from the kingdom dispatched to Abuja to meet with Foreign Affairs Minister, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, could not get audience with the Minister and was then forced to abort the mission.
Akasoba Zainab Duke, lawyer, political scientist and traditionalist, who first brought the existence of the Obama kingdom to the attention of THISDAY, said Will-Braide had intimated her that the US President-elect has roots in Nigeria as far back as 2004, when Obama won election as Senator.
Elders of Obama who spoke to THISDAY yesterday on the island, which is five nautical miles from Port Harcourt, claimed that the US President-elect’s great-great-great grandparents were from Obama Bakana Kingdom.
The story goes that following inter-tribal wars around 1776, the people of Obama began to disperse and that the US President-elect’s ancestor migrated up North to Kanem Bornu Empire. Obama’s great-great-great grandparents, out of sheer tiredness and not wanting bloodshed, moved up towards the Kanem Bornu area. The condition for the stay of Obama’s ancestors in Kanem Bornu empire was to convert to Islam, according to the story. The US President-elect’s father and great-grandfather were Muslims.
From Kanem Bornu the Obama ancestors were said to have migrated to the present Kenya. The father of the US President-elect hailed from Kogelo in Kenya.
“No one is saying by any stretch of imagination that if you go to Kenya, you will not see Obama’s father’s house; we are looking at his ancestry, at his roots. It is like Alex Haley, an American who traced his ancestor, Kunta Kinte, to Gambia,” Duke said.
Most of the elders in the Kingdom who spoke with THISDAY claimed that the founder of the Kingdom was a warrior who after defeating the Kalabaris at Iwofe blockaded the area from produce supplies.
The action was said to have angered the British colonial masters, who intervened and compelled him (the monarch) to sign a treaty that forced him out of the Iwofe front area into the present day Obama Kingdom.
After establishing the Obama Kingdom, which he named after his father, the monarch, who wielded great influence, was said to have even visited the Oba of Benin who allegedly recognized him as a fellow Oba.
“Obama Kingdom was founded around 1881 by King Igbanigbo Will-Braide after he migrated from the Iwofe area when he was forced by the colonial masters to leave the area.
“After fighting the Kalabaris at the Iwofe Front and defeating them, Will-Braide blockaded the food and produce supply route. He was later reported to the colonial masters who came with HMV Dido (gun boat) and forced him by a decretive order to leave the Iwofe area.
“He left and founded the Obama Kingdom which he named after his father. The name Bakana, which the Kingdom bears now, is a Portuguese coinage. After listening to Louis Armstrong, who used the word Bakana in his record, I went to the Portuguese Embassy and inquired from them the meaning of Bakana. They said it means beautiful flowery place.
“The original name of Bakana is Obama and that is why we have been naming every important landmark in the place Obama so that the name would not be lost. We have Obama Boys High School and Obama Community Bank in this place,” Chief Ibiekaribo S. Sogules told THISDAY. Sogules’ account was corroborated by Chief Costa Jim-Emine.
Reminded that there is another Obama town in Japan, Sogules was quick to point out that the other Obama town is made up of whites but that the US President-elect in spite of “his long stay in America and having a white mother still retains his black skin and other African features”.
The elders of the Obama community urged the US President-elect to “link up with his own people and contribute his quota to the development of where he is from.”
THISDAY observed that there exists in the kingdom a community bank named Obama Community Bank Nigeria Limited floated in the early 1990s and a secondary school, Obama Boys High School.
Duke said efforts should be made by historians and cartographers to establish the true ancestry of Barack Obama, as there exists now a Nigerian dimension to that. She said that the loss of historical documents and archival materials are largely responsible for why some of these controversies have not been resolved.
“I recall my grandmother crying because they lost a golden bird and a golden throne, which the Ashantihene had given to my great-great grandfather. It is not because it is gold or whatever, but artefacts, historical documents and things like this should be kept for future generations to know that at least there were inter-African friendships even among the kings. Recall what happened in the time of Cleopatra with the burning of the Alexandria Library. That is why Africans have not been able to fully recover. They lost so much historical artefacts and documents and archival materials, which would have shown them who they are or their roots and backgrounds,” she said.
She advised the youths of Obama Kingdom, which has become an enclave for militants to take a cue from Obama who has made peace an integral part of his vision for the US and the world.
From Paul Ibe in Abuja and Ahamefula Ogbu in Obama Kingdom, 01.19.2009
http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=133379
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Age is just a number :)
BEIJING (Reuters) – A 107-year-old Chinese woman who was afraid to marry when she was young has decided to look for her first husband and hopes to find a fellow centenarian so they will have something to talk about, a Chinese paper reported.
Wang Guiying is worried she is becoming a burden to her aging nieces and nephews since breaking her leg when she was 102 and had to stop doing chores like washing her clothes.
"I'm already 107 and I still haven't got married," the Chongqing Commercial Times quoted her saying. "What will happen if I don't hurry up and find a husband?"
Born in southern Guizhou province the child of a salt merchant, Wang grew up watching her uncles and other men scold and beat their wives and often found her aunt crying in the woodshed after an attack, the paper said.
"All the married people around there lived like that. Getting married was too frightening," she said of an era when Chinese women had few rights and low social standing.
Many also had their feet bound in an excruciating process aimed at making them look more dainty and marriageable.
After Wang's father, mother and older sister died, she still shied away from marriage. Instead she moved to the countryside and survived as a farmer until she was 74 years old and no longer strong enough to work in the fields, the report said.
Her nephew in the booming city of Chongqing then took Wang in, but she is worried he and her other nephews and nieces are too old to take care of her now even the youngest is 60.
"My nephews and nieces are getting older and their children are already tied up with their own families and I am becoming more and more of a burden," she said.
Local officials have said they are happy to help Wang search for a 100-year old groom, and suggested her family get in touch with old people's homes to find candidates, the paper said.
Wang Guiying is worried she is becoming a burden to her aging nieces and nephews since breaking her leg when she was 102 and had to stop doing chores like washing her clothes.
"I'm already 107 and I still haven't got married," the Chongqing Commercial Times quoted her saying. "What will happen if I don't hurry up and find a husband?"
Born in southern Guizhou province the child of a salt merchant, Wang grew up watching her uncles and other men scold and beat their wives and often found her aunt crying in the woodshed after an attack, the paper said.
"All the married people around there lived like that. Getting married was too frightening," she said of an era when Chinese women had few rights and low social standing.
Many also had their feet bound in an excruciating process aimed at making them look more dainty and marriageable.
After Wang's father, mother and older sister died, she still shied away from marriage. Instead she moved to the countryside and survived as a farmer until she was 74 years old and no longer strong enough to work in the fields, the report said.
Her nephew in the booming city of Chongqing then took Wang in, but she is worried he and her other nephews and nieces are too old to take care of her now even the youngest is 60.
"My nephews and nieces are getting older and their children are already tied up with their own families and I am becoming more and more of a burden," she said.
Local officials have said they are happy to help Wang search for a 100-year old groom, and suggested her family get in touch with old people's homes to find candidates, the paper said.
Broken record
"Remember the saying, “You sound like a broken record”? You used it when you wanted to shut someone up who was saying the same thing over and over again. Its origin, of course, is from the (first) days of vinyl: When the stylus encountered a crack, a scratch or a piece of dirt, it would get knocked into the previous groove, so the same little bit of music would play forever. Today, of course, that would be considered an artistic choice, but in the days when the preferred mode of music playback was strictly linear, it was highly annoying".
Paul Lehrman
Its a new year...well its the 13th day of 2009 but it is still the beginning of the year. What plans do you have this year? Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired of having broken records? Stuff that just keeps recurring in your life...an old habit you have been trying to kick for long but you have seemingly resigned to fate. Have you been putting off a decision that you should have made much earlier but you didnt because you're scared? Somebody once said that certain things stay in your life with your permission; Im a firm believer in destiny but I also know that destiny is not a matter of chance but a matter of choice. So take charge..just thought I would give you something to think about as you go through the year. Plan your life...plan it, it may not work the way you want it to, but plan. Have a sense of direction, write your stuff down so that your turntable doesnt continue playing the same ol broken records.
Have a great year!
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Just a second.....
Tick tock ... tick: Extra second added to 2008
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Those eager to put 2008 behind them will have to hold their good-byes for just a moment this New Year's Eve.
The world's official timekeepers have added a "leap second" to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth's slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.
The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon's master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world's atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.
That corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. EST (23:59:59 GMT), when an extra second will tick by -- the 24th to be added to UTC since 1972, when the practice began.
UTC is the time scale kept by highly precise atomic clocks around the world, accurate to about a billionth of a second per day, the Naval Observatory says. For those with a need for precision timing, it has replaced Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT.
The decision to add or remove a second is the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, based on its monitoring of the Earth's rotation.
The goal is to make sure clocks vary from the Earth's rotational time by no more than 0.9 seconds before an adjustment. That keeps UTC in sync with the position of the sun above the Earth.
Mechanisms such as the Internet-based Network Time Protocol and the satellite-based Global Positioning System depend on precision timing.
The first leap second was introduced into UTC on June 30, 1972. The last was added on December 31, 2005.
They have been added at intervals ranging from six months to seven years, Daniel Gambis, head of the IERS Earth Orientation Center at the Observatoire de Paris, wrote in an explanatory piece this month (http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/).
Among the reasons for Earth's slowing whirl on its axis are the braking action of tides, snow or the lack of it at the polar ice caps, solar wind, space dust and magnetic storms, according to the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, another timekeeper.
By contrast, a leap day, February 29, occurs once every four years because a complete turn around the sun -- our year with all its seasons -- takes about 365 days and six hours.
In 1970, an international agreement established two time scales: one based on the Earth's rotation and another on highly accurate atomic clocks.
The U.S. Naval Observatory's master clock is based on a system that now includes 50 atomic clocks, 36 based on the element cesium and 14 known as hydrogen masers.
With the Earth's rotation gradually slowing, the periodic insertion of a leap second into the atomic time scale is needed to keep the two systems within a second of each other.
(Reporting by Jim Wolf; Editing by Peter Cooney)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Those eager to put 2008 behind them will have to hold their good-byes for just a moment this New Year's Eve.
The world's official timekeepers have added a "leap second" to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth's slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.
The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon's master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world's atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.
That corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. EST (23:59:59 GMT), when an extra second will tick by -- the 24th to be added to UTC since 1972, when the practice began.
UTC is the time scale kept by highly precise atomic clocks around the world, accurate to about a billionth of a second per day, the Naval Observatory says. For those with a need for precision timing, it has replaced Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT.
The decision to add or remove a second is the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, based on its monitoring of the Earth's rotation.
The goal is to make sure clocks vary from the Earth's rotational time by no more than 0.9 seconds before an adjustment. That keeps UTC in sync with the position of the sun above the Earth.
Mechanisms such as the Internet-based Network Time Protocol and the satellite-based Global Positioning System depend on precision timing.
The first leap second was introduced into UTC on June 30, 1972. The last was added on December 31, 2005.
They have been added at intervals ranging from six months to seven years, Daniel Gambis, head of the IERS Earth Orientation Center at the Observatoire de Paris, wrote in an explanatory piece this month (http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/).
Among the reasons for Earth's slowing whirl on its axis are the braking action of tides, snow or the lack of it at the polar ice caps, solar wind, space dust and magnetic storms, according to the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, another timekeeper.
By contrast, a leap day, February 29, occurs once every four years because a complete turn around the sun -- our year with all its seasons -- takes about 365 days and six hours.
In 1970, an international agreement established two time scales: one based on the Earth's rotation and another on highly accurate atomic clocks.
The U.S. Naval Observatory's master clock is based on a system that now includes 50 atomic clocks, 36 based on the element cesium and 14 known as hydrogen masers.
With the Earth's rotation gradually slowing, the periodic insertion of a leap second into the atomic time scale is needed to keep the two systems within a second of each other.
(Reporting by Jim Wolf; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Sunday, December 28, 2008
I'm back!!
It's been a long time since I blogged, in fact I didn't think I would ever blog again. After my last post, I felt the need to "retire" from this; well I must admit, I started getting bored then secondly, I was emotionally, physically and spiritually drained, I needed to retreat and put a lot of things into perspective. So what happened while I was away?
First I celebrated my birthday on November 20th, there was no fun fare as is usually the case, all I did was share cake and drinks at work, and that was it. As I grow older, I find it difficult to fuss about some of these things, especially when I have to pick the bills.
Secondly, I got very good recommendations at work, got a raise and promotion to go with it. Am I really happy? I'm not sure...I have dreams to fulfill, been living most of my life helping other people achieve their own dreams. Of course I have gained from it all but I think its time for me to start focusing on my purpose irrespective of the cost. So will I be moving on? Perhaps, just watch this space.
First I celebrated my birthday on November 20th, there was no fun fare as is usually the case, all I did was share cake and drinks at work, and that was it. As I grow older, I find it difficult to fuss about some of these things, especially when I have to pick the bills.
Secondly, I got very good recommendations at work, got a raise and promotion to go with it. Am I really happy? I'm not sure...I have dreams to fulfill, been living most of my life helping other people achieve their own dreams. Of course I have gained from it all but I think its time for me to start focusing on my purpose irrespective of the cost. So will I be moving on? Perhaps, just watch this space.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
What in the world?!
I believe that every human being has got strengths and weaknesses; no matter how good we are, the harsh reality is that our goodness is as filthy as the rags but should that deter us from speaking up when things are going wrong? Absolutely not. Something is terribly wrong and Im kind of lost for words, here's why....
US talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has bought $100,000 of TV airtime to back gay marriage.
The 50-year-old will urge Californians to vote to save the right to gay marriage during the state ballot in November, campaign organisers said.
Same-sex unions were legalised in May, but Proposition 8 seeks to define marriage as between a man and a woman only under the state constitution.
DeGeneres married her partner, actress Portia de Rossi, in August.
'Compassion' her TV advert will be screened in the run-up to the state ballot on 4 November.
DeGeneres will tell viewers that opponents of gay marriage are "twisting the truth", and will appeal to people to vote for "compassion and fairness".
Recent opinion polls have shown a swing in the number of Californians who oppose same-sex marriage.
Opponents of the advert have stepped up their own TV advertising campaign, warning that children will be taught about gay marriage in primary schools.
Gay marriage supporters have called that argument misleading.
DeGeneres made broadcasting history in 1997 when her TV alter ego came out of the closet on her self-titled sitcom Ellen, becoming the first openly gay lead character on US prime-time network TV.
Source; BBC Entertainment
Do you have anything to say because I don't?!
US talk show host Ellen DeGeneres has bought $100,000 of TV airtime to back gay marriage. The 50-year-old will urge Californians to vote to save the right to gay marriage during the state ballot in November, campaign organisers said.
Same-sex unions were legalised in May, but Proposition 8 seeks to define marriage as between a man and a woman only under the state constitution.
DeGeneres married her partner, actress Portia de Rossi, in August.
'Compassion' her TV advert will be screened in the run-up to the state ballot on 4 November.
DeGeneres will tell viewers that opponents of gay marriage are "twisting the truth", and will appeal to people to vote for "compassion and fairness".
Recent opinion polls have shown a swing in the number of Californians who oppose same-sex marriage.
Opponents of the advert have stepped up their own TV advertising campaign, warning that children will be taught about gay marriage in primary schools.
Gay marriage supporters have called that argument misleading.
DeGeneres made broadcasting history in 1997 when her TV alter ego came out of the closet on her self-titled sitcom Ellen, becoming the first openly gay lead character on US prime-time network TV.
Source; BBC Entertainment
Do you have anything to say because I don't?!
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