Kenya's defeated presidential challenger Raila Odinga has claimed to be a cousin of Barack Obama and said that they had discussed his country's post-election violence.
Mr Odinga, 63, said that the US senator's father, from western Kenya's Luo tribe, was his maternal uncle. Mr Odinga says that Senator Obama's late father was his uncle on his mother's side. "He has called me to talk about the destabilising constitutional crisis in this country, despite being in the middle of the very busy New Hampshire primary," Mr Odinga said yesterday.
Mr Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs confirmed that the senator spoke to the Kenyan opposition leader on Monday afternoon for about five minutes before going into a rally in New Hampshire, according to Associated Press. The Democrat would-be presidential candidate is also understood to have tried to speak to President Mwai Kibaki, whose victory in December 27 elections has been widely questioned. |