About 30 km north of Siaya town, the village of Kogelo holds the ancestral homestead of the Obama family. This is where Barack Obama Sr. — father of the 44th US president — grew up, and where his grandmother Sarah Obama lived until her death in 2021. The compound contains the graves of Barack Obama Sr. and his father Hussein Onyango Obama, a cook for the British colonial administration whose story features prominently in the president's memoir Dreams from My Father.
The site is managed as an informal heritage destination. You can walk the compound, pay respects at the graves, and speak with community members who remember the family. The Barack H. Obama Foundation Kenya has a small community centre in the village, and the Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School — named after Barack Obama while he was still a US Senator — sits just down the road, a concrete reminder of how the connection brought modest but real investment to an otherwise forgotten corner of western Kenya.
To get here from Siaya, take the road north toward Ngiya and then ask for Kogelo — locals will point you right. The road is rough but passable in most vehicles. There is no entrance fee and no formal ticketing, though a donation to the community centre is appropriate.