Photo by Kari Lipschutz

What Kenyans Really Think of Barack Obama

By Kari Lipschutz

NAIROBI, Kenya — With the dollar continuing to weaken and the global community wavering in its feelings toward the United States, traveling abroad can be daunting for any U.S. citizen. So you’ll probably understand my reservations about responding to a young Kenyan woman working at Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi when she practically screamed, “Are you American?!” upon seeing my passport.

Reluctantly, I said yes, half wincing at what her reaction might be: Would she hammer me with a barrage of complaints about the Bush administration or the bad behavior of American tourists? No. Instead, she asked, beaming: “Will you vote for Barack Obama?”

Many residents of this East African nation — where the Illinois senator’s father was born and where many of his relatives still reside — are standing up and claiming the Hawaii-born politician as a native son. But surprisingly, the relationship between the presidential hopeful and the citizens of Kenya is far more complicated than one might expect. And although much news coverage has been devoted to Obama’s popularity in Europe, relatively few stories have focused in on the feelings of those who live here in the African-American politician’s ancestral home.

To find out what just a few of this nation’s 38 million people think about the Democratic Party’s first black presidential nominee, I put together a written questionnaire and surveyed several respondents in different locations. The results are intriguing.

“Do you relate to Barack Obama?” I asked in the survey. “No!” exclaimed James Udhimbu, 24, of Nyanza province, in his half-print, half-cursive handwriting. (His response seems to come as no surprise. After all, it would be hard to imagine that Udhimbu could relate to Obama. Beyond their common connection to Nyanza, where the senator’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was born, they live worlds apart; Obama, a successful American public figure, and Udhimbu, an employee of a produce company in Nairobi.)

But just because Udhimbu can’t relate to the politician doesn’t mean he’s not excited about the prospect of a half-Kenyan as the president of the United States.

“The excitement in Kenya is [that we are] also capable to give birth to the top world heroes,” he wrote in somewhat stilted English. And Udhimbu isn’t alone in his enthusiasm for the junior senator’s chances at the White House. In fact, Obama’s candidacy has an entire nation tuning in to hear about the latest political news from the U.S.

“The fascination is that he is a presidential candidate of Kenyan background, much as people in other foreign countries would pay attention to a presidential candidate with origins from their county,” said Robert Y. Shapiro, acting director of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy.
“Africa is very unusual racially and ethnically in this unprecedented situation.”

Obama’s feelings toward Kenya, however, seem to be more ambivalent. During a trip to the country in 1988, Obama said he felt an immediate connection to a home he never knew. “For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide,” he wrote in his book Dreams From My Father. “No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue.”

But Obama’s father and mother were separated when the future politician was still a child, leaving the young boy to grow up without a father and without a sense of his African heritage. Obama expressed his feelings about a man he barely knew: “Later, I’d become troubled by questions,” he wrote. “Why didn’t my father return? But at the age of five or six, I was satisfied to leave these distant mysteries intact.”

As a young boy struggling to find his own identity, Obama struggled with reality and imagination. “When I was ten, my father came back from Africa to visit us for Christmas,” he wrote. “After a week of my father in the flesh, I decided that I preferred his more distant image, an image I could alter on a whim or ignore when convenient. If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening.”

Yet Kenyans also express more mixed feelings when reminded that Obama doesn’t speak Swahili, nor does he visit his father’s relatives regularly. (He’s only been to Kenya three times in his life.) So what exactly are they expecting from him? “This is his motherland, and he can’t afford to give a deaf ear and a blind eye to the unsettlement of the Kenyan citizens,” wrote Johnson Mutunga, 27, from Makueni. “He’s a leader with a bright future. [His candidacy] matters most because America is a state that can influence a lot in the whole world.”

“The excitement would be so great for Obama is a grandson to a Kenyan,” added Ivulu Peter Mutisya, a 27-year-old woman from Matiliku.

But regardless of the promise that Kenyans identify in Obama, many are finding it difficult to pinpoint anything specific that they think he would accomplish as president. Most point to his youth or his ability to move a crowd with words, but few are clear on exactly why he is an exciting candidate beyond his Kenyan roots. One exception is Simon Wairegi, 25 — originally from Nairobi but currently living in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He wrote: “Obama’s real impact to a country like Kenya and its people would be from inspiring the next generation of Kenyan leaders to look beyond these old tribal divisions and strive for meaningful change that seeks to end decades of corruption, disease, economic stagnation, and poverty.” His comment comes in the context of last year’s post-election violence, in which at least 1,500 Kenyans died in political and tribal conflicts exacerbated by fears of voting fraud.

But Senator Obama’s foreign policy does not reflect a man preoccupied with Kenya’s current state. His campaign platform does address other issues on the African continent: the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the genocide in Darfur, and bringing former Liberian President Charles Taylor to justice are all on his agenda. But that is as far as it goes. Though his platform doesn’t address Kenya directly, Obama does have a plan for global poverty, and the CIA estimated that 50% of Kenyans were living below the poverty line in the year 2000 — more recent numbers were not available from the agency.

“Obama will embrace the Millennium Development Goal of cutting extreme poverty around the world in half by 2015, and he will double our foreign assistance to $50 billion to achieve that goal,” his campaign website says. “He will help the world’s weakest states to build healthy and educated communities, reduce poverty, develop markets, and generate wealth.”

Beyond Obama’s above-stated initiatives, some Kenyans also think traveling to the States will be easier with Obama in the White House. “When Barack Obama is president, I will be able to finally visit the United States,” one Kenyan man told me.

But some outsiders, such as Columbia University’s Shapiro, are skeptical. “I doubt that would be peculiar to Kenya,” the professor said, “though immigration and travel policies might be more liberal under his administration.”

Regardless of the incentive, there is an undeniable buzz in Kenya surrounding Obama’s possible ascension to the White House. “If he does in fact win, I will be keenly observing his administration, the policies he enacts, his approach to the broader international community, and his general impact as a president,” said Wairegi, whose Tanzanian girlfriend proudly sports a heather-blue T-shirt emblazoned “Obama for yo Mama.” “I am contemplating traveling to the U.S to watch the election first-hand,” he added.

Mutisya added that if the Illinois senator wins, she “will be very joyous and pray for him to do better than the sitting president.”