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Nairobi: Kenya's defeated presidential challenger, Raila Odinga, has claimed to be a cousin of Barack Obama and said they had discussed his country's post-election violence.
Odinga, 63, said that the US senator's father, from western Kenya's Luo tribe, was his maternal uncle.
"He has called me to talk about the constitutional crisis in this country despite being in the middle of the very busy New Hampshire primary," Odinga said.
Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs, confirmed that the senator spoke to the Kenyan opposition leader on Monday afternoon for about five minutes before going into a rally in New Hampshire.
The Democrat presidential hopeful is also understood to have spoken to President Mwai Kibaki, whose victory in the December 27 election has been widely questioned.
Obama's father, also named Barack Obama, won a scholarship to a university in Hawaii, where he met and married Obama's American mother. The two separated and Obama's father returned to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist until he died in a car crash in 1982.
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