![]() I told myself that should Barack come back to Kogelo, he will find the Luo businessman that he met in D.C. You are a businessman.’” Most members of the local Luo tribe, Rajula asserted, are “lazy people, not good at business. Capitol, and he patted my back and said, ‘Cousin, I am proud of you. Furthermore, Rajula claimed, “Barack inspired me. senator,” said Rajula, a textbook distributor who built his hotel, as his brochure boasts, “only 200 meters away from Mama Sarah Obama’s home” (a reference to the president’s step-grandmother). ![]() “I visited Barack three times in Washington when he was a U.S. Now, five years later, the Kenyan entrepreneur is back in the Obama business. Obama’s campaign officials disputed his family connections, and Rajula lost the election. Calling himself a distant cousin, Rajula ran for a seat in the Kenyan Parliament. Rajula stirred controversy here in 2007, shortly after he helped organize a tour of western Kenya for the junior senator from Illinois. Owner Nicholas Rajula, a big man with a booming voice, was sitting beneath a canopy on the parched front lawn answering a pair of cellphones when I drove through the gate. Kogelo Village Resort, a 40-bed hotel and conference center that opened last November, is the latest manifestation of the worldwide fascination with the U.S. The new asphalt highway to Barack Obama’s ancestral village winds past maize fields and thatched-roof mud huts for several miles before terminating at a startling sight: a row of lime-green cottages with pink pagoda-style roofs, flanked by two whitewashed, four-story villas.
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