The son of a Kenyan man, Barack Obama Senior, and a white woman, Ann Dunham, from Kansas, Mr Obama was born on 4 August 1961 in Hawaii.

When Mr Obama was a young child, his father had the chance to study at Harvard but there was no money for the family to accompany him. Mr Obama Senior later returned to Kenya alone, where he worked as a government economist, and the couple divorced.

When Mr Obama was six, his mother married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian, and the family moved to Jakarta.

Eventually Mr Obama moved back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attend school. He went on to study political science at Columbia University in New York, and then moved to Chicago where he spent three years as a community organiser.