Newton's Optic:The race to trace Senator Barack Obama's family tree is heating up, reports Newton Emerson.
Senator Barack Obama has Irish roots on his father's side, according to research from the Doolin Genealogy and Knitwear Centre, Co Clare.
The senator's paternal great-great-great-grandfather, Patrick O'Bamagh, left Galway during the disastrous but largely forgotten turnip famine of 1803 and sailed to the west coast of Africa, where he soon found employment in the compulsory human resources trade.
When this trade went into sharp decline a few years later, Mr O'Bamagh took a camel train across the Sahara desert, where it is believed that he became a Muslim, establishing a long family tradition of converting on the hoof.
Arriving in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, Mr O'Bamagh secured a job as a turnip guard with the Portuguese garrison.
Whilst there he met and married a cook from the barracks who gave birth to a son, Barrack O'Bamagh, in 1814. Mr O'Bamagh snr spent the rest of his days in Mombasa's thriving Islamic Quarter, where he earned the honorific title "Al-Haram", meaning "He who still eats bacon".
For some years he wrote regularly to relatives in Ireland requesting money, until his relatives wrote back to remind him that it was supposed to work the other way around.
Shortly before his death in 1837 Mr O'Bamagh snr reverted to Christianity to ensure that his remains would be cremated.
This is thought to be the origin of the family motto: "Fired up! Ready to go!"
Barrack O'Bamagh, who was the senator's great-great grandfather, remained fiercely proud of his Irish heritage until 12:47pm on August 18th, 1841, when he suddenly forgot all about it after being struck on the head by a turnip. This was particularly tragic because turnips are a root vegetable. As a result, the family eventually Africanised its surname and settled into a life of respectable provincial obscurity.
From time to time over subsequent generations the Obamas were surprised by the birth of a child with ginger hair. However, these "devil-children" were readily despatched to the nearby island of Zanzibar, where the compulsory human resources trade continued to flourish. The Obamas were known to be stubbornly unhappy during the colonial "Happy Valley" period, but no member of the family took part in the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, although intelligence indicates that they were strangely ambivalent about all violence north of Nairobi.
In his memoirs, Senator Obama also recalls that his father was shocked to see white people in Kenya after independence.
"For some reason he thought that when Britain pulled out, everyone would just change colour overnight," the senator wrote. "Lord or Allah knows where he got that dumb idea from."
Senator Obama's paternal Irish lineage was discovered immediately after last week's Iowa caucus, complementing the discovery of his maternal Irish lineage immediately after he announced his bid for the presidency.
"It is often said that we are the blacks of Europe," observed a spokesman for the Doolin Genealogy and Knitwear Centre. "I am confident that we can say this to a powerful African-American without sounding self-obsessed, self-pitying, patronising, condescending or stupid."
Last night a spokesperson for Senator Obama said: "According to research in the Rift Valley, everyone on earth is actually descended from a Kenyan."