President-elect Barack Obama has won another contest: He’s been named Time magazine‘s “Person of the Year” for 2008.

Barack Obama is the president-elect of the United States. A Democratic U.S. senator from Illinois since 2005, he was elected president on 4 November 2008 and will take office on 20 January 2009. Obama has spoken often of his multicultural background: his father was from Kenya, his mother from Kansas, and they met at the University of Hawaii. After his parents divorced and his father returned to Africa, Obama stayed with his mother and was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. He earned an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1983 and a law degree from Harvard in 1991. He then joined the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland, which specialized in civil rights legislation. He also lectured at the University of Chicago.

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, and then to the U.S. Senate in 2004. As the Ibo of Nigeria say,” It is little by little that a bird builds its nest.”