Residents of Yangon, Myanmar, also known as Burma, walk by a mural of President Barack Obama, whose arrival Monday will mark the first time a sitting U.S.
Residents of Yangon, Myanmar, also known as Burma, walk by a mural of President Barack Obama, whose arrival Monday will mark the first time a sitting U.S. president has visited the country. (Paula Bronstein, Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama lands in Yangon on Monday, he will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit the country now known as Myanmar. But he will not be the first Obama to visit.

The president's Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, spent part of World War II in what was then called Burma as a cook for a British army captain. Although details are sometimes debated, the elder Obama's Asian experience proved formative, just as his grandson's time growing up in Indonesia did decades later.

"(The president's) roots go through Burma," said Timothy Parsons, an African history professor at Washington University in St. Louis who wrote a book on the colonial East African military. "It is kind of an odd intersection of his life. It's like the three corners of the triangle come together — America, East Africa and Southeast Asia."

Thant Myint-U, a Burmese historian and author, said the president might be able to connect with the country in a way another U.S. leader might not.

"The Burma that the president will see will look amazingly similar to the Burma his grandfather saw in the 1940s," he said. "But what will not be readily visible are the effects of more than six decades of armed conflict, half a century of dictatorship and self-imposed isolation and 20 years of Western sanctions. It's a country that lacks the most basic institutions."

The president's grandfather, who went by Onyango, played a key role in the younger Obama's life even though the two never met. He was a central figure in Obama's voyage of self-discovery captured in his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," which describes the journey of a mixed-race American to Kenya to explore his roots.


Onyango Obama, thought to be born in 1895, was a member of the Luo tribe who worked for years as a servant for white colonialists in Kenya. His son, the first Barack Hussein Obama, was the future president's father. Onyango Obama was described as a strong-willed and stern man, abusive of the multiple women he would marry over his lifetime.

He took the Arabic name Hussein when he converted to Islam and married a Muslim woman while living on the island of Zanzibar. When World War II broke out, according to the stories that the younger Obama was told, Onyango Obama traveled to Burma, Ceylon and Arabia as a cook for a British captain in the King's African Rifles. The unit played a crucial role in the Burma campaign, according to scholars.

About 75,000 Kenyans served in Burma during the war, and many of them were transformed by their exposure to the outside world, according to scholars. Many met black soldiers and airmen from the United States, who despite the lingering segregation and discrimination back home, had far more independence and responsibility than the Kenyans serving the British.

Onyango Obama returned home with a picture of a Burmese woman he claimed to have married — "She looked like my mother," the future president wrote — and with a brewing disillusionment with colonial rule.

Having been part of the fight for freedom against the Japanese empire, he and other Burma veterans began to rise up for freedom for themselves in Africa. Like many of them, Onyango Obama was sympathetic to the Kenyan African Union movement that would later evolve into the more radical Mau Mau rebellion.

Burma was a place of awakening for Obama's grandfather, a place where larger possibilities first presented themselves. But whatever ambitions he began to harbor back then, he could hardly have imagined that seven decades later, his grandson would return to Burma aboard a blue-and-white 747 known as Air Force One.