How Barack Obama rode on his Kenyan heritage to most powerful seat

Even with all his political swagger, President Barack Obama's odds for becoming the President of the United States were lower than most Americans.

In fact, if at the beginning of the 21st century you had told someone that America would have a black President before the close of the first decade, your political intuition would have been dismissed as third rate.

But in 2008, America did indeed have a black President, a man whose key highlight in public service was his work as a community organiser, with little experience in politics. And he had a low profile than Washington insiders.

Write history

The improbability of Obama becoming president is something that he aptly captured in his description of himself as "a skinny kid with a funny name" but who defied predictions to write history and become one of the most talked about figures in the 21st century.

Obama first captured the world's imagination at the Democratic Party convention in Illinois in 2004 when he gave the speech that fired him into the limelight as a master orator and thrust him into the path of becoming one of the most accomplished politicians in modern times.

During this speech, Obama told his audience, comprising Democratic Party delegates, that he was the most unlikely person to be delivering that particular speech, and justified that sentiment by laying bare his heritage, including the fact that he was the son of as Kenyan immigrant, whose dream for education in America ended up in a marriage to a white woman in a foreign country.

"Tonight is a particular honour for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely," Obama said in his speech.

"My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin- roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

Larger dreams

"But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance, my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place, America, that's shown as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before him," he said at the convention.

It was out of this convention that people begun looking at Obama as a different kind of politician, but even then no one really thought he would attempt the presidency.

But Obama's story did not start with the famous Convention, nor did it start with his role as a community organiser in backwater Chicago.

In his famous memoir, Dreams From My father, Obama gave a riveting narrative of how, he, the son of a Kenyan immigrant, spent years searching for his own identity before finally embracing it and flying to where it is.

In the memoir, Obama embarks in a search for the meaning to his life as the son of a black immigrant and a white mother.

When he learns that his father – a man who is no more than a myth to him at that particular time – has been killed in a car accident, something in him jerks. He begins a journey to find his African roots that brings him to Kenya from which point he slowly confronts the bitter truth of his father's life.

Before the Obama phenomenon, America had never had a black President for over 200 years in a country with difficult race relations.

During one of his visits to Kenya in search of his identity, he rode in rickety vehicle owned by his sister Auma Obama.

And it was at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, during that visit that he for the first time felt a sense of identity, when he met a women who had known his father and who did not have to struggle to pronounce his name.

"This had never happened before, I realised; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A or in New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people's memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, "Oh, you are so and so's son." No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances, and grudges that I did not yet understand," Obama wrote in his memoir.

This was many years before he became the most powerful man in the world.