Africa
Kenya glimpses a new kind of hero
Published 11 September 2006
In the eyes of most Africans, Barack Obama doesn't even rate as black. "Which one is he?" asked a Kenyan friend, peering at my newspaper, which showed the pale-skinned US senator standing next to a white bodyguard. "That one?" he said incredulously, as I pointed him out. "Ach, he's just a mzungu."
Yet the awkward fact that Obama looks nothing like a home boy did nothing to dent the excitement that greeted America's only black senator on the Kenyan leg of his African tour at the end of August. Had the Messiah himself got off a commercial flight in Nairobi, applied for his $50 entry visa and walked through customs performing the odd miracle, it would barely have created a greater stir.
Laying a wreath at the site of the 1998 US embassy bombing, Obama found himself in the eye of a hurricane of hands, held out in the hope of a touch. Driving through Kisumu, heading for the Luo village whence his father hailed, his motorcade struggled to make headway through the crowd. His speech at the University of Nairobi was the talking point of the week, and days after he left, the local newspapers were still running pages of analysis.
This furore is not the result of media over-kill. If anything, the Kenyan press, which often adopts a certain loftiness towards its readers, has been sceptical to the point of dismissive. "We tried to ignore his visit, we really did," an editor at the Daily Nation, Kenya's biggest newspaper, assured me. "We tried burying his arrival in a paragraph on page three. But our distribution people kept coming back and saying, 'Give this story more prominence.'"
No, this rock-star reception has come from the grass roots. And it has left Kenyan pundits wondering what on earth is going on in their country. Sure, Obama is photogenic and well-spoken and possesses an instinctive understanding of how to bond with a crowd. But while it's logical that those elements should work Democratic Party supporters in the US into a lather, why on earth should Kenyans get so excited?
One reason is the concept of what one could term "diaspora duty". Africans are familiar with a prodigal-son pattern Obama seemed to be following, although in his case it stretches across more than one generation, embracing both father and son. The pattern runs like this: village bands together to sponsor bright local boy. Local boy leaves village and heads west. Boy becomes man, wins success, forgets roots. Man returns repentant, wearing suit, weeps in mother's arms, builds local school, throws huge party, doles out gifts. The son of the soil has found himself again, and in the process repaid his debt to the community. So ingrained is this pattern in the African psyche, that local newspapers felt duty-bound to warn Kenyans repeatedly not to expect concrete benefits from the visit. Obama himself was careful to stress at every public appearance that, as senator for Illinois, his primary duty was to his American constituents. But the fact remains that Africa's rural poor expect to be rescued by the ones who got away. And the higher the individual rises - and Obama, after all, has been touted as a potential presidential candidate of the world's only superpower - the greater the anticipation.
Yet while that "What can he do for me?" approach might lie behind some of the hysteria in his father's Luoland, it fails to explain why Kenyans of other tribal affiliations shared so freely in the enthusiasm.
That national response points to something deeper and very poignant: a strength of emotion that should make Kenya's leadership - and leaderships across Africa - sit up and take notice.
The truth is that Kenyans, like so many other Africans, are desperate for heroes, thirsting for moral direction. Few nations followed the democratic formula urged on the continent by foreign donors more faithfully than Kenya, and in the process it learned the meaning of cynicism. In 2002, voters believed they had brought about a historic change, rejecting the ruling party in favour of an opposition coalition that promised an end to tribal politics and official graft. Instead, they got more top-level graft and a new bout of political bickering along ethnic lines.
No doubt back in the United States Obama is a wily and ambitious political player; were he not, it is unlikely he would have risen this far. Here in Kenya, however, he was perched gloriously above the political fray, shorn by dint of his US nationality of ethnic obligations, untainted by revelations of sleaze. As he lambasted the government for corruption and called on Kenyans to put nationality first and ethnicity second, the audience drank in every word. "Kenyans have now seen just what an effective leader looks like and sounds like," wrote the columnist Sunny Bindra in the Sunday Nation. "We have seen exactly what a combination of education, vision, courage and application can deliver."
That what was essentially a statement of the obvious should seem so fresh, so invigorating, so inspiring to his listeners, makes one wonder what public energy lies waiting to be tapped under a layer of disillusionment, and what could happen in this country, and so many of its neighbours, were a leader with some of Barack Obama's qualities to emerge. His visit was less a tribute to the senator than a revealing indictment of domestic leadership.
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