Republican US presidential candidate Ben Carson claims his ancestor was of the Turkana tribe. “I trace my roots back to the Turkana tribe which is a migratory tribe in Kenya,” he said on Thursday, July 2, 2015.
Barack Obama’s biological father is Kenyan. In fact, Obama still has close relatives who live in K’ogello, a village in western Kenya. While Obama become the first African- American, Carson is betting on his medical work and strong Christian beliefs to clinch the US presidency.
“Some people think I don’t know how horrible slavery was because I said the (President Barack Obama’s) Affordable Health Care Act was the worst thing since slavery,” he said in a July 2. “There is nothing that even slightly compares to slavery in this country. I said ‘since slavery’,” he clarified.
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Carson noted that two of his ancestors, a brother and sister, were sold as children to different slave owners. “The pain and the heartache associated with that era… There is nothing that compares to it,’ he said. “When people say Carson is comparing them, they are simply trying to create a wedge.”
Carson, a renowned neurosurgeon with no experience in the cutthroat world of Washington politics, is riding a surprising wave of support among conservatives that has placed him near the top of contenders for the Republican presidential nominee in 2016.
The soft-spoken 63-year-old, an African-American who only officially became a Republican last year, has found an opening in the wide-open race in which 13 candidates are running for the White House.
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