He is the dream come true. A destiny child whose emergence defies human predictions.

Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan immigrant and sufferer of a collapsed family, has brought to the world the change that has helped America put behind it years of racism that cast the pall on its democratic credentials, and a realisation of the phrase 'all men are born equal.'

The Obama Phenomenon was unthinkable some 40 something years ago. His win counts as something like a toehold on the proverbial mountaintop for which Martin Luther King so longed. A capstone for the civil rights movement King led alongside other marginalised blacks.

It was a frighteningly dark time. Nevertheless, these events - during which the black suffered great humiliation at the hands of the white - put political pressure on President Johnson Eisenhower, as well as on Congress, to sign and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, colour, religion and national origin.

There was also the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which struck down literacy tests, poll taxes and other barriers designed to disfranchise black citizens.

Then Johnson issued Executive Order Number 11246, which required that 'affirmative action' be taken to hire more minorities in all realms of public employment.

And in 1967, the last formal legal barrier fell - the case of Loving v. Virginia, which overturned the anti-miscegenation laws that had made it illegal for blacks and whites to marry one another in 16 states. That was six years after Obama was born of a 'strange' relationship between a white woman and a black man.

In the years since, various aspects of those foundational moments have been re-fought, in new settings, with differing facts and faces. As more blacks moved to the urban north, 'inner cities' became the battle ground.

As civil rights babies grew up, the fight to integrate schools expanded to become a broader movement for fair housing, equal pay, dignity and respect.

For black Americans, the election is a page turner, a blessing as the name Barrack implies, and a good tiding to the terrified world, as is understood by his middle name, Hussein.

Obama was born on August 4, 1961. He was until now the junior United States Senator from Illinois and Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2008 Presidential election.

Obama was born at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (a Luo from Nyang'oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya), and Ann Dunham, a white American from Wichita, Kansas.

His parents met while attending the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student. They separated when he was two years old and later divorced.

Obama's father returned to Kenya and saw his son only once more before dying in an automobile accident in 1982.

After her divorce, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Soetoro's home country of Indonesia in 1967, where Obama attended local schools in Jakarta until he was ten years old.

He then returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents while attending Punahou School from the fifth grade in 1971 until his graduation from high school in 1979.

Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972 for several years and then back to Indonesia to complete fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995.

As an adult Obama admitted that during high school he used marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol, which he described at the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency as his greatest moral failure.

Following high school, he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at Occidental College for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialisation in international relations.

Obama graduated with a B.A. degree from Columbia in 1983. At the start of the 1984 worked for a year at the Business International Corporation and then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

He was raised by his mother, Ann Dunham. After four years in New York City, he moved to Chicago, where he was hired as Director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organisation originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side, and worked there for three years from June 1985 to May 1988.

During his three years at the DCP, its staff grew from one to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training programme, a college preparatory tutoring programme, and a tenants' rights organisation in Altgeld Gardens.

Obama also worked as a Consultant and Instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organising institute.

In mid-1988, he travelled for the first time to Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his Kenyan relatives for the first time.

He entered Harvard Law School in late 1988. At the end of his first year, he was selected, based on his grades and a writing competition, as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

In February 1990, in his second year, he was elected President of the Law Review, a full-time volunteer position functioning as Editor-in-Chief and supervising the Law Review's staff of eighty editors.

Obama's election as the first black President of the Law Review was widely reported and followed by several long, detailed profiles.

During his summers, he returned to Chicago where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley & Austin in 1989, and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.

After graduating with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.

The publicity from his election as the first black President of the Harvard Law Review led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations.

In an effort to recruit him to their faculty, the University of Chicago Law School provided Obama with a fellowship and an office to work on his book.

Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate in January 2003.

After a primary victory in March 2004, Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004.

He was elected to the Senate in November 2004 with 70 percent of the vote.

He is married to Michele, and both are blessed with two daughters, Malia, aged 10, and Sasha, 6.