 Kenyan MP James Orengo |
A Kenyan lawmaker told the nation’s parliament last month that Barack Obama was born in Africa and is therefore “not even a native American.”
During debate over the draft of a new Kenyan constitution, James Orengo, the country’s minister of lands and a member of parliament for the Ugenya constituency, cited America’s election of a Kenyan-born president as an example of what can be accomplished when diverse peoples unite:
“If America was living in a situation where they feared ethnicity and did not see itself as a multiparty state or nation,” Orengo posited, “how could a young man born here in Kenya, who is not even a native American, become the president of America?”
Orengo held up the U.S. as a country no longer “living in the past,” since Americans elected a Kenyan-born president without regard to “ethnic consideration and objectives.”
Debate is then recorded in the Kenyan government’s official March 25, 2010, hansard – a traditional name for printed transcripts of a parliamentary debate – as continuing with no other MPs mentioning or attempting to correct Orengo’s comments about Obama.
