Now, let's remember that one of the enduring riddles about Barack Obama is his relationship to Africa. After all, he never lived in Africa - and never visited until an adult and then only briefly on a journey to Kenya, his father's country. Yet as he demonstrated in his classic memoir, "Dreams From My Father," his tie to Africa is crucial to his self-definition. Raised by a white American mother and her Midwestern extended family, and a graduate of a Hawaii high school, Obama is not content to describe himself as merely an American and certainly not as a creolized, mixed-race American. His blood tie to Africa is decisive for establishing the veracity of his "black," or African American identity because, after all, his father was a black African and a Kenyan intellectual.

George Obama's claim on our attention is that he shares a father with President Obama. Literally, George's story is banal, even boring. His life is an African cliche (squandered endowments, downward mobility, brushes with immorality and the persistence of hope amid shattered dreams). Even after his setbacks, George Obama remains privileged, even charmed by Kenyan standards. Read as a fable, though, "Homeland" presents a fascinating what-if, a clever depiction of an alternative universe in which "our Obama," the president, somehow grew up in a highly unequal, idealism-killing, money-mad East African country.

Would even a person of Barack Obama's historic drive and vision have been ground into mediocrity in a Nairobi where nepotism and family wealth trump all?

Barack Obama is the ultimate success story of his American generation - and seemingly to some the evidence that Africans, but for an accident of birth location, also would make it big in America. I happened to be in Kenya on the very days Obama was elected and inaugurated. The excitement over Obama's achievements was partly about race: A black man in the White House seemed to repudiate the history of official racism in a single blow. Yet what really excited Kenyans about Obama was the validation it gave a compelling theory most Africans hold about how the world works. The theory is simple: Get me out of Africa, and into a "normal" society like the United States, and I will succeed far more than I ever will at home.

George Obama's story suggests that Barack's life in Kenya would not have a Hollywood ending. Like his famous half brother, George never knew his father. Though he came from an elite family, his mother struggled until she took a white male lover, which gives George a patina of appealing cosmopolitanism. Yet he's a wastrel, squandering his advantages. "I was the crazy guy, the one who would always be relied on for any drunken misadventures that might be in the offing."

Death and loss mark his youth. At 16, his favorite grandfather dies. Soon afterward, his mother breaks with her boyfriend, then leaves Kenya altogether. The loss of his muzungo stepfather hits him harder perhaps because, he writes, "like many a teenage boy, I craved the presence of a father figure." With no adult man in his life, George "felt angry and abandoned, and all twisted up inside."

George adopts one of Nairobi's infamous slums as his new family. A rare social rebel from a Kenyan elite family, he becomes a petty thief with a Robin Hood mentality. "I wanted to be a hard and angry badass gangster," he writes. His world becomes "a place of empty howling darkness" interrupted when he gets arrested and imprisoned. Jail forces him to change his ways, and when released, he returns to the slums, only now dedicating himself to helping poor people.

Through all his trials and minor triumphs, George never tries to leave Kenya for the America so hospitable to his half brother. In this sense, George is the anti-Obama, the anti-African, committed to a Sisyphean task that the more famous Obama was lucky enough to avoid.