Auma Obama

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Auma Obama (2016)

Rita Auma Obama (* 1960 in Nairobi ) is a Kenyan Germanist , sociologist , journalist and author . She is the older half-sister of former US President Barack Obama .

Life

Auma Obama was born as the daughter of government official Barack Obama Sr. (1936–1982) and the housewife Kezia Obama. She has six siblings. Auma Obama received her school education at a boarding school for girls in Nairobi. She first lived with her mother and paternal grandparents, and later moved in with her father.

Due to her fascination for German authors like Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Borchert , whose works she read in English, she began studying German and sociology in Germany in 1980 with the help of a DAAD scholarship . Her studies took her to Saarbrücken , Heidelberg and Berlin , where she was enrolled at the German Film and Television Academy . In 1996 she received her doctorate from the University of Bayreuth . In her doctoral thesis, she compared the conception of work and the attitude to work in Germany and Kenya. She then worked for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in adult education. Thematically, she deals - also as a freelance journalist - with Africa and the Germans' image of Africa.

In 1996 Obama married Ian Manners from the UK; she has a daughter with him. The marriage ended in divorce after a short time. In the UK she did social work with young people. Auma Obama currently lives in Kenya. There she also worked for the aid organization CARE International for several years . Her tasks include coordinating the “Sports for social Change” initiative and sub-projects such as B. "Box Girls", an initiative to strengthen girls' self-confidence. From July 2010 to December 2012 she was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jacobs Foundation .

She became known to a wider public with appearances on German television such as Beckmann (2008 and 2010), the NDR Talk Show (2010), Maybrit Illner (2011), Kölner Treff (2014) and through newspaper interviews. In the fall of 2010, Obama published her autobiography Life Always In Between. Stations of a trip , exclusively in German.

Auma Obama is the initiator and chairwoman of the Auma Obama Foundation - Sauti Kuu . Sauti Kuu is Kiswahili and means “strong voices” in German. The foundation aims to give children in Africa the opportunity to determine their own lives. She is also a board member of the Kilimanjaro Initiative in Nairobi (Kenya), which organizes an event once a year in which disadvantaged young people climb Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain. Auma Obama has also been the patron of the international Storymoja Festival in Kenya since 2014.

Received the International TÜV Rheinland Global Compact Award

In July 2015, Obama became a member of the Board of Trustees of the Reading Foundation , but is no longer a member of this body. She was the host for 1,900 prominent guests when, on November 2, 2015 , committed young people in the Friedrichstadt-Palast were honored with the Act Now Youth Award for their voluntary work.

In 2017 it was awarded the fourth International TÜV Rheinland Global Compact Award in Cologne . At the award ceremony, she was presented with the bronze sculpture "Reaching for the Stars", specially made for the award by the artist Hannes Helmke .

In 2019 she was awarded the Hans Rosenthal Honorary Prize for the Sauti Kuu Foundation, among others.

Obama is a member of the World Future Council .

At the Vienna Opera Ball 2019 she was the guest box of the Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen .

Relationship with Barack Obama

Auma Obama first had contact with her half-brother Barack Obama, who was a social worker in Chicago at the time, at the age of 24. He wrote her a letter to Heidelberg, where she was studying at the time. In the same year she visited him in the USA. About his first meeting in 1984 with his older half-sister, Barack wrote in his 1995 book Dreams from My Father :

"I felt as if someone had turned my world upside down, as if I had woken up and a blue sun was standing in a yellow sky or as if I heard animals speak like people."

Both later traveled through Kenya together and worked on their family history. During the 2008 presidential campaign , Auma Obama was on her half-brother's campaign team and was the contact person for supporters.

Autobiography

Auma Obama signing her book after a panel discussion at the German Catholic Day 2012

documentary

Auma Obama's career was processed in 2011 by her former student colleague, the director Branwen Okpako, in a documentary entitled The Education of Auma Obama (German title: The story of Auma Obama ). Among other things, it deals with her relationship with her father and her half-brother Barack Obama as well as her education in Germany. The German TV first broadcast took place on February 7, 2012 on ZDF .

Web links

Commons : Auma Obama  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Auma Obama: Life always gets in the way. Stations of a journey . Lübbe, Cologne 2010, p. 105
  2. ↑ Information on Auma Obama's dissertation in the DNB database
  3. ↑ a b c Dr. Auma Obama sautikuufoundation.org
  4. ↑ About us sautikuufoundation.org
  5. ↑ Prominent support for the Reading Foundation stiftunglesen.de, July 28, 2015.
  6. ↑ Kuratorium stiftunglesen.de, accessed on January 8, 2019.
  7. ↑ Act Now Youth Award 2015 actnow-award.de
  8. ↑ Act Now Youth Award: This is how Obama sister Auma rocked the Friedrichstadt-Palast . In: Berliner Kurier , November 3, 2015, accessed on December 4, 2015
  9. ↑ Foundation prices | de | TÜV Rheinland. Retrieved March 2, 2018 .
  10. ↑ International TÜV Rheinland Global Compact Award at a glance. Retrieved March 2, 2018 .
  11. ↑ https://www.welt.de/regionales/rheinland-pfalz-saarland/article189872229/Auma-Obama-erhaelt-Hans-Rosenthal-Ehrenpreis-2019.html The award ceremony is scheduled for May 25, 2019 in Landau .
  12. ^ Council, Honorary Council & Ambassador worldfuturecouncil.org
  13. ↑ Van der Bellen received opera ball guest Auma Obama. Retrieved April 16, 2020 .
  14. ^ "Barack suffered from the fears of the outsider" welt.de, October 18, 2010.
  15. ↑ Information on the film The Education of Auma Obama trigon-film.org
  16. ↑ Family can demand a lot from you Review of the film The Story of Auma Obama on unique-online.de, January 25, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Obama, Auma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Kenyan Germanist, sociologist, journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Nairobi