Auma Obama, the half-sister of President Barack Obama, visited NBC’s Today show to promote her new memoir “And Then Life Happens.”
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Auma grew up in a remote village in Kenya and talked about her life and her relationship with her famous brother, who she met for the first time in the 1980s.
Auma told Ann Curry:
“When I met my brother, we had this instant connection. I was able to talk to him and he really understood the things that I was talking about. …It just clicked.”
In Obama’s memoir, he wrote of that encounter with Auma, “I knew at that moment somehow that I loved her, so naturally, so easily and fiercely.”
Auma works at CARE International in Nairobi and in her book described the time she met Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Presidential race:
“I had believed that I could easily deal with the media. After all, I thought, I had worked as a journalist myself when I lived in Germany. By providing my number, I had mainly wished to protect my grandmother, whom everyone called Mama Sarah, from all the media fuss. But I had not been prepared for such a flood of calls.
Because Mama Sarah was also Barack’s grandmother, everyone wanted to speak to her. They wanted her to tell them about his family, to bring to light the missing pieces of the puzzle that Barack Obama was for them. Who exactly was this black man and son of an African who had dared to aspire to the office of president of the most powerful nation in the world? Where were his roots? Who was his family?”
No word on whether or not Auma has a planned visit to the White House to see her brother.
