That same Obama is now more famously known as the uncle of President Obama. He is an enigmatic presidential relative who rocketed into the news in August when he was arrested on charges of drunken driving in Framingham, and told the booking officer, “I think I will call the White House.’’ As immigration officials consider whether to deport him, Obama, 67, finds his life in the United States the subject of intense curiosity not just by government officials and the media but among some family members and his old Cambridge classmates as well.
That spotlight has found him in the twilight of a meager life, nearly 50 years after he joined his older half-brother, Barack Obama Sr., the president’s late father, in Cambridge to seek an education. Notwithstanding the now-famous surname, his life here has mirrored that of countless others who have immigrated legally, but then simply stayed on, barely making do at the margins of American life.
Obama, who assumed his father’s name, Onyango, when he was a young man, seemed destined for much more. One of a hand-picked group of young Kenyans dispatched to the United States at the time their country achieved independence, Obama had the potential to be a key player in his country’s unfolding story. But when their homeland became riven by political infighting in the late 1960s and the great promise of independence appeared to founder, some Kenyans grew bitter. Like Obama, more than a few of those who left to further their education never returned home.
As the decades passed, Obama gradually lost contact with many of his childhood friends and family members. For the past twenty years, he has ignored a deportation order, living quietly under the radar until he allegedly ran a stop sign in front of a Framingham police officer. Obama, who works in a Framingham liquor store, now faces the possibility of an abrupt return to the country he left as a teenager, a place radically altered in most every respect. It is something he distinctly does not want.
