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Kenya deports US author of anti-Obama book

(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-10-08 11:01

NAIROBI, Kenya -- The American author of a controversial book accusing Barack Obama of seething with "black rage" and of being unfit for the US presidency has been kicked out of Kenya.

A copy of 'The Obama Nation' by author Jerome Corsi is displayed on a book store shelf in New York August 15, 2008. [Agencies]

The deportation of Jerome Corsi on Tuesday came just hours before he was to launch his book in a country where the US Democratic candidate for president is wildly popular.

Corsi, who wrote "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," was detained at immigration headquarters in Nairobi for not having a work permit before being ordered to leave Kenya, said Joseph Mumira, head of criminal investigations at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

Corsi was scheduled to leave on an evening flight to London, Mumira said. Airport officials would not allow journalists access to Corsi at the airport and a message left on his mobile phone was not returned.

A spokesman for Obama said the campaign had no comment on the deportation. Obama's Kenyan uncle, Said Obama, said he was unaware of Corsi's detention and had no comment. A government spokesman did not return calls for comment.

In the past, the Obama campaign has called Corsi a bigot peddling rehashed lies to hurt Obama in the US presidential race against Republican Sen. John McCain.

Obama's late father, whom he barely knew, was a Kenyan economist and the candidate is considered by many here as a "son of the soil." Obama's last trip to Kenya, in 2006, drew thousands of Kenyans who thronged every stop of his tour.

Ahead of the November 4 election in the US, minibuses here are emblazoned with Obama's picture and vendors sell T-shirts bearing his image.

But Obama was born in Hawaii, where he spent most of his childhood raised by his mother, a white American from Kansas.

Corsi's best-selling book, released earlier in the US, claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president and includes innuendoes and false rumors, that he was raised a Muslim and attended a radical black church.

Obama is a Christian who attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and his campaign picks apart the book's claims on the Web site FightTheSmears.com.

The campaign's rebuttal is titled "Unfit For Publication," a play on the book Corsi co-authored against 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's military service called "Unfit For Command."