KOGELO, Kenya — There she was again, a small, slightly bent figure in a bright yellow dress, walking out of her house to greet one more group of strangers. President-elect Barack Obama’s Kenyan step-grandmother, who is 87 and has a bad knee, smiled and shook hands in the late afternoon.
Sarah Ogwel Onyango offered white plastic chairs to her unannounced guests — a group of young students, some Kenyan officials, some Baptists from Nairobi — and sat with them in the shade of an avocado tree, telling the visitors, as she has told thousands by now, how proud she is of her grandson, how she’s preparing for the inauguration, how fine she is doing.
“She seemed tired,” said one of the Baptists, Shem Okello, as he left the sprawling, grassy yard. “We told her not to worry about talking too much, but she pushed on. She said, ‘That’s why I’m here.’ ”
While the president-elect prepares to manage the high expectations of many Americans, members of his extended Kenyan family are busy managing a kind of international stardom conferred upon them by their famous, if distant, relative.
The routines of their lives have been replaced by the trappings and oddities of global fame: crowds, bodyguards, tabloid stories and the varied, at times mystical, expectations of an awe-struck public.
There is a particularly Kenyan dimension to the phenomenon: By tradition and tribal custom, families here expect their most successful members to share acquired largesse, a process that in theory should begin with Obama himself and eventually trickle down to even the most distant relatives.
In a society that is often polygamous, where elders can sometimes recite a web of relations dating to the 18th century, the expectations are vast.
About 50 miles from here at the turnoff to the tiny village of Kobama — where Obama’s grandfather lived before he moved to Kogelo — a newly erected sign makes the point. “Obama Opiyo,” it reads in big block letters, “Great . . . great . . . great grandfather of Barack Obama, Jr. (President, USA).”
Up the road, an array of Obama’s second and third cousins, nephews twice removed and distant half uncles and aunts eke out a living as peasant farmers while trying to assume their ambassadorial roles.
