His mother was white, his father was Kenyan, they broke up when he was two and the young Barack later lived in Hawaii and Indonesia.

"One of the reasons that he is so cool and non-combative is that he learned to deal with this teasing culture," said Kay Ikranagara, who worked with Obama's mother in Jakarta and knew the family well.

In the New Nyanza provincial general hospital in Kisumu, the capital of the region which is home to Barack Obama's ancestral village, a woman gave birth to twins she named Obama and Michelle.