A man is the son of his father, so we say out here in Africa. But how much of Barack Obama Senior is in his son, the Democratic nominee for US president? Or just how Kenyan is Sen Obama?
First, he is unequivocally American by birth and upbringing. But his writing, speeches and mannerisms have left little doubt that the Illinois senator is proud of his Kenyan roots.
Why else does he feel compelled to mention it in his major speeches?
In that first famous address at the Democratic national convention that catapulted him onto the national stage, he spoke about his Kenyan father for an entire four minutes.
He has done so at every significant event he has to introduce himself: at the first primary victory in Iowa, at his victory over Hillary Clinton in Minnesota, at his nomination acceptance speech in Colorado and at the first presidential debate with John McCain in Mississippi.
It is evident that Obama is acutely conscious of and comfortable with his Kenyan roots. The search for his identity began in his teenage, he writes in Dreams from My Father, when it suddenly occurred to him that everybody around him was either white or with a “proper” American name.
It was in college that he decided that he should be called Barack or Obama, not Barry. By this time the impact of an absent father who had long divorced his mother and returned to a tragically unhappy life in Kenya was at its peak. His father’s letters that firmly instructed him to “know his people” tugged at his heart.
The intensity with which Obama tells the story of his first meeting with Auma, his Kenyan half-sister, is startling. Her plane from Germany was about to land in Chicago.
“I pulled into the airport parking lot … and ran to the terminal as fast as I could. Panting for breath, I spun around several times, my eyes scanning the crowds… Damn! I knew I should have left earlier. …
“What if she had walked right past me and I hadn’t even known it? I looked down at the photograph in my hand … smudged now from too much handling. Then I looked up, and the picture came to life… I lifted my sister off the ground as we embraced… I picked up her bags and we began to walk … and she slipped her arm through mine. And I knew at that moment that I loved her, so naturally, so easily and fiercely…”
It was Obama’s first encounter with his own flesh and blood from Alego, Kenya. The next telling moment is when he landed at the Nairobi airport for the first time in 1986. A woman at the British Airways desk looked at his passport and asked if he was related to “Dr Obama.”
That had never happened before, Obama writes. “For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide… how people might nod and say: ‘Oh, you are so and so’s son.’ No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name… My name belonged and so I belonged.”
The next day while with Auma at a kiosk near Koja Mosque, he writes, an old woman pointed at him and said in Kiswahili that he looked like an American. Obama, beating his chest, promptly instructed his sister, “Tell her I’m Luo!”
Obama’s narration of his Kenyan experience in the subsequent weeks reveals an impressive understanding of his father’s land: the first supper at aunt Jane’s house at Kariakor; his visit to the Mathare slum with aunt Sarah; his night out with brother Roy at Garden Square; his travel by matatu to Alego and Kendu Bay — his great grandfather’s place where uncles insisted he taste the local brew chang’aa; his diarrhoea attack that his grandfather’s sister insisted to treat with local herbs and bitter roots.
Most poignant in Obama’s narrative is the scene at his father’s grave at Kogelo, Alego. When at 21 his aunt Jane had phoned him in New York to tell him that his father was dead, he had just sat down on the couch, stared at cracks in his college apartment and tried to measure the loss of a father he hardly knew.
Four years later, he now sat between the graves of his grandfather and his father, under the mango tree behind his grandmother’s house.
“For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept,” he writes. “When my tears were finally spent … I felt the circle finally close. I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation…
“I saw that my life in America — the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope in Chicago — all of it was connected with this piece of earth an ocean away ...
“The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brother’s questions. Their struggle, my birthright.”
Sen Obama is his father’s son. It is said that Obama Sr had a driving intellect and ambition; two traits that Auma worries may drive his brother too far.
But as the Boston Globe wrote recently, if someone had said to Obama Sr: “You know, your son might be president,” he would have said: ‘Well, of course. He’s my son.’”
The writer is a lecturer of journalism at the United States International University, Nairobi.
kodi@kodibarth.com
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Opinion
Will the ‘Bradley Effect’ decide outcome of poll?
By GITAU WARIGIPosted Saturday, October 18 2008 at 16:51
http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Opinion/-/440808/481566/-/3mesar/-/index.ht...
In Summary
Some whites had told American pollsters that they would vote for Bradley only to vote Deukmejian instead
For years, there was something embarrassing that was taken as a given in Kenya.
There was this ingrained belief that a certain community could never get any of its members elected president, perhaps due to cultural reasons.
One of the most important outcomes of the December election was the way this myth was directly confronted. Even though Raila Odinga narrowly missed being elected president, there is no question that this myth was finally exploded.
Something similar is unravelling in America, but with far more potentially momentous consequences.
Ignore the talk about economic turmoil or about Republicans and Democrats and all that. The central issue there, or call it the elephant in the room, is race.
Can an African-American be elected to the White House, only a mere generation or so after the 1965 Voting Rights Act guaranteed black Americans their right to vote?
IN MY ESTIMATION, THE MOST momentous speech Barack Obama has ever given is one he delivered on March 18 this year on the question of race in America.
The venue he chose, Constitution Hall in Philadelphia where the country’s founders debated the framing of the US constitution, was symbolic.
He was forced to speak out at a time when his campaign was threatened with destruction by the controversy over the Rev Jeremiah White.
But rather than just respond to the pastor’s rhetoric in the manner politicians usually do, he did something startling by placing the matter of race in its wider context as something that was a specific problem for America and whose resolution required deep soul-searching.
Obama’s speech may not have finished off the bigots, but it raised the bar on the conversation of race higher than probably any other mainstream American politician has ever placed it.
Prejudice is something that works in subtle, corrosive ways.
Once upon a time, in 1982 to be precise, a black man called Tom Bradley, who had been mayor of Los Angeles, decided to run for governor of the state of California. By all accounts, he was a good and capable man.
His opponent was a white Armenian-American called George Deukmejian. All the polls indicated Bradley was way ahead of Deukmejian as election day approached. But when voting was over, Deukmejian had beaten Bradley.
Ever since, this phenomenon -- where white voters tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate when in reality they won’t -- has come to be known as the Bradley Effect.
Could this Bradley Effect ultimately undo Obama? We will soon know in November.
All the polls in the US say Obama is way ahead of John McCain. But people have a tendency to lie to pollsters.
Nobody likes being called a racist, or a tribalist for that matter. Rather than risk being called that, some whites in America are almost certainly telling the pollsters they will vote for Obama when their real intention is to vote for McCain.
Many voters who had already cast their vote for Deukmejian in California told exit polls they had voted for Bradley.
Then there is a fairly large and troubling group calling themselves “Undecideds,” meaning that they have not quite made up their minds for whom to vote.
But surely, could anyone not yet have made up their mind with election day less than three weeks away?
There is a tendency in Kenya, which is overwhelming among African-Americans, to denigrate McCain as some old coot, maybe even a bigot himself. That would be unfair.
Not many people perhaps know that, from the outset, McCain strictly forbade any of his campaign team members from ever bringing up or in anyway exploiting the Jeremiah Wright-Obama connection.
An even more unfortunate by-product of the American election campaign is the manner in which African-Americans came to despise Bill Clinton because of the bitter primary battle for the Democratic Party nomination between Obama and Hillary Clinton.
THIS RIFT IS ONLY NOW BEING repaired after African-Americans realised Obama stood no chance on November 4 unless the Clintons helped out. No doubt some racial innuendoes had been peddled from the Clinton machine.
Nonetheless the fury of the African-American reaction was completely out of proportion.
In his appointments and even his social habits, Bill Clinton, when he was president, was someone who showed real empathy with African-Americans in a way no other American president had done before.
* * * *
The Waki report has finally buried the myth peddled by certain guilty politicians that the Rift Valley killings were “spontaneous.”
The importance of constituting a tribunal to deal with these little Satans cannot be over-emphasised.
By KODI BARTHPosted Saturday, October 18 2008 at 18:23
http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/-/1066/481624/-/148ayskz/-/index.htm...
