Nairobi| The Office of the Principal Register of the Nyanza Province, in Kenya, has finally released 11 exclusive documents concerning Barack Obama’s alleged birth and early childhood in the country. These official papers had been requested for years by the Tea Party Patriots, an American conservative organization, to no avail, but the Kenyan Supreme Court recently ordered authorities to release the documents, based on a law on “access to information. These files, if they turn out to be verifiable, could mean that Mr. Obama had no legal right to become the American president under the country’s law.

The papers released today suggest that Barack Obama was actually born on March 7 1960, in Lamu, Kenya, more than a year before his father moved to Hawaii, where he allegedly met his mother. This contradicts most of the documents presented by the presidential office over the last years, suggesting that either the American or the Kenyan papers are actually fakes.

The official version of Barack Obama’s birth presented by the White House in the past, was that he was born on August 4, 1961, at the Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now called the Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women & Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii. His parents were Ann Dunham, from Wichita, Kansas, and Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo in the Nyanza Province, in what was then the “Colony and Protectorate of Kenya”. Mr. Obama Senior was attending the University of Hawaii at the time, where he supposedly met Ms. Dunham.

A Kenyan publication, The Standard, had reported in 2004 that Obama was “Kenyan-Born”, but the lack of proof presented had led the rest of the mediatic world to dismiss the article has fake or unfounded. Jim Geraghty of the conservative website National Review Online may have sparked further speculation on June 9, 2008, when he asked Obama to release his birth certificate.Geraghty wrote that doing so could debunk several false rumors circulating on the Internet.

Such rumors were very numerous at the time, covering many topics. These included namely: that his middle name was originally Muhammad rather than Hussein; that his mother had originally named him “Barry” rather than “Barack”; and that Barack Obama, Sr. was not his biological father, as well as the rumor that Barack Obama was not a natural-born Citizen. Mr. Obama and the White House had given no answer whatsoever to that request, choosing to simply ignore the question, but had finally released some documents that were allegedly Mr. Obama’s birth certificate in two different forms. The release of these certificates had seemed to put an end to the rumors at the time, but it is to be expected that the “Kenyan documents” will fuel a whole new wave of rumors and conspiracy theories.