Full Coverage: President Obama and Kenya

NAIROBI, Kenya — President Obama reached deep into his personal history on Sunday to urge this East African nation to reject the “dark corners” of its past and chart a “path to progress” befitting the 21st century.

Esther Nduta dreamed of finishing school and starting a business, but her parents took her out of school when she was 14 because they couldn’t afford the fees.

When President Obama called young Kenyans with great ideas “the spark of prosperity,” Kenyan small-businessman Delbert Mageto was inspired — and frustrated.

It was a brief moment of tension in an otherwise exuberant visit by President Obama to Kenya, but it exposed the gulf between the American president and his father’s homeland.

Fulfilling the hopes of millions of Kenyans, Barack Obama returned to his father’s homeland Friday for the first time as U.S. president, a long sought visit by a country that considers him a local son.

When news broke in Kenya that President Obama wouldn’t be visiting his father’s village during his Kenyan tour, some saw it as strange, even a little outlandish.

President Obama arrived Friday at an overseas destination he has avoided throughout his presidency: Kenya, homeland of his father and cradle of conspiracy theories about the American president’s personal identity.

On a roadside, women bent double planting new grass, just a few blades at a time, into newly dumped red earth.

Maybe having a favorite son in the White House isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

During an emotion-packed visit to his father’s homeland in 2006, Sen.

He’s from the same family that produced President-elect Barack Obama.

Whether they found hope, inspiration or just a reason to party, Kenyans celebrated today as they awoke to learn that a man seen here as a native son would be the next U.S. president.

For years farmers here complained about the broken dirt road through their village, so bumpy that taxi and bus drivers refused to take it.