This book, which appeared toward the end of Barack Obama’s second term as president of the United States, represents a laudable attempt to confront distorted and false depictions of Obama and the Kenyan past and present that have appeared since 2008 in scholarly and nonscholarly works. The authors, specialists in Kenyan history, set out to challenge stereotypes and correct misinformation relating to President Obama’s Kenyan heritage and Kenya’s history. In a book that will be useful in American university classrooms and now even more among the general public as Obama is succeeded as chief executive by a long-time purveyor of the “birther” myth, they effectively dismantle the many stereotypes and myths that have characterized writing about Obama and Kenya by right-wing ideologues outside Kenya.

The relatively short book is mostly a Kenya story that begins with a brief overview of its colonial history followed by an insightful chapter on Obama’s Luo heritage. These sections provide the reader with an account of the “politics of belonging” during the colonial and postcolonial periods that pays welcome attention to the social and political activities of the Luo Union. The account demonstrates African agency in creating an ethnic identity throughout the Luo diaspora in East Africa and beyond.

Part 2 of the book, on the other hand, begins by confronting the reactions of the American political right to Obama’s roots in Kenya. The authors powerfully deconstruct the misinterpretations in an all-too-short chapter. The analysis demonstrates the silliness found particularly in the writings of Jerome Corsi and Dinesh D’Souza. This is followed by a return of the book’s focus to Kenya in subsequent chapters. Here the reader is taken through electoral histories since the 1990s, in particular setting the 2007–2008 electoral violence and the 2013 election in the context of the “politics of belonging.” Here and later in the book, the authors demonstrate “how easily ideas of ‘belonging’ can be manipulated to serve political ends. . .” (156). Among the myths demolished are those that assert a familial or ideological link between Obama and the Kenyan political leaders Oginga and Raila Odinga and involvement of the president’s grandfather in the Mau Mau resistance in 1950s Kenya. The final chapter turns to examine “how Obama’s ascendency has affected Africa” in an examination of the Obama administration’s African policy. For many Kenyans, that policy proved disappointing in light of great expectations as U.S. concerns in eastern Africa continued to reflect security issues. Aid and other benefits did not flow to Kenya in abundance, nor did the president include Kenya among the stops on his African trips until 2015. An account of Obama’s 2015 visit to Kenya provides the book’s epilogue with the apt title of “Tuko pamoja–We are together.” Kenya’s geopolitical importance is explained in this context.

This easy-to-read book thus has much to recommend it to readers in Africa and the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the narrative is marked by seemingly avoidable weaknesses that will be apparent to specialists in Kenyan history. The latter will recognize the difficulty involved in writing a short chapter on Kenya’s colonial history, but the simplicity of the account opens the door to danger in the form of inaccuracies and tropes being seen as facts by nonspecialists. There are far too many errors with dates; for example Jomo Kenyatta did not become president in 1963 and Kenya did not become a colony and protectorate in 1905. The authors claim that “a by-election in 1969 made Kenya a de facto one-party state” (63), but the specifics provided indicate that the observation applies to the 1969 general election (technically a KANU primary). Nevertheless, these matters do not detract from the enlightening and stimulating analysis that forms the core of the book.