It is rare for a politician to be so feted in Africa. Young, good-looking and articulate, the rising political star whose name means ‘blessed’ in Swahili has become a symbol of hope for the continent.Yet he is not an African. Barack Obama, whose father is Kenyan, is in fact running for election in America where he is favourite to become the country’s only African-American senator in November.
His autobiography, Dreams From My Father, an account of his search for his African roots, is set to soar up the bestseller lists when it is published in the United States on Tuesday.
In Africa, however, he is already becoming a political superstar. Obama is hero-worshipped in Kenya, partly because of disillusionment with the ruling elite in a country where politics is synonymous with corruption and tribal feuding.
His dazzling speech to the Democratic party convention in Boston last month, in which he cited his African roots as proof that America was ‘a magical place’ for hard-working immigrants, struck a chord here.
He may have been thinking of Kenya when he listed among America’s ‘small miracles’ the fact that ‘we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe; that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution’.
Obama (42) who is fighting for election in Illinois, told the convention: ‘My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father was a cook, a servant to the British.’
In the village of Kogelo, in western Kenya, where his father is buried and his paternal grandmother still lives in a two-room house with a chicken coop outside, local people dream that an Obama victory will end their poverty.
The dream is not confined to Kogelo. ‘People believe he will come to Kenya and build schools, build Aids orphanages,’ said Njeri Rugene, chief parliamentary reporter for Kenya’s Nation newspaper.
‘We have had so many letters from people asking our politicians to emulate him – saying he is a sign of hope.’
Kenyans were promised a new dawn 18 months ago when the regime of Daniel arap Moi — so notorious for plundering public coffers that the International Monetary Fund suspended aid to the country — was swept from power by a rainbow coalition.
Despite delivering a popular pledge to bring in free primary education, the new government of President Mwai Kibaki has lost momentum and become mired in a sleaze scandal over contracts for a passport computer system.
Against that backdrop, Obama’s style and rhetoric is inspirational. While politics in Kenya is still driven by tribal loyalties, his oratory emphasised embracing fellow Americans across political, religious and class divides.
By referring to his immigrant roots, Obama identified himself with ‘the larger American story’, but his speech struck a chord with Africans who dream of a new life in the US.
In his book, Obama writes of a journey to the graves of his father and grandfather in Kenya’s Nyanza province, a region of lush sugar cane fields which dip down to the shores of Lake Victoria.
Obama’s father, also named Barack Obama, went to the US as a student and met Obama’s mother, Ann, who had moved from Kansas to Hawaii with her parents.
Obama Senior won a scholarship to Harvard, left his family while his son was a toddler and eventually returned to Kenya, where he became a government economist and a prominent figure in the tight-knit ruling elite.
Aside from one brief visit, Obama never saw his father again. He died in a car accident in 1982.
Obama Senior had a reputation for intellectual brilliance, but a weakness for drink, which his son found out about while tracing family history in Kenya.
His father’s home province has the highest rate of HIV-Aids infection in Kenya and its capital, Kisumu, a once-thriving lakeside port, has dwindled with the decline of trade across the lake.
As elsewhere in Africa, society and politics in western Kenya is dominated by conservative older men. Obama ‘is young, and we do not have young leaders who express themselves like he does,’ said Dr Wangare Mwai, a cultural researcher at Maseno University in Nyanza. ‘They leave it to the older generations. He is an example we would wish everybody to follow.’
Africans hope a half-Kenyan senator will encourage US policymakers to pay closer attention to the continent. A powerful domestic motivation underlying US concern over the slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan has been the desire to appeal to African-American voters in an election year.
Black US churchgoers take an interest in Sudan because of the civil war in the south, in which a predominantly Arab and Muslim government has been fighting black Christian or animist rebels.
African-American politicians were key in getting Congress to declare the Darfur violence to be genocide.
Africans would see Obama’s election as a step as big as fellow African Kofi Annan becoming secretary-general of the United Nations. ‘It will show America is not racist,’ said Wangare Mwai. – Guardian Unlimited Â