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Out of Africa

June 30

Earlier this year, Toni Jordan (Addition), visited Kenya in the wild and hopeful aftermath of Barack Obama’s election. At the time when a ‘Kenyan-American gentleman’ had just been made leader of the most powerful country in the world, the streets were brimming with energy, pride and joy, yet beneath all this were also deep currents of violence and sadness – political unrest, poverty, racial tensions and a broken economy. Obama’s election, while cause for celebration, had also brought to the forefront the long-standing wounds between the US and Africa – from the very beginnings of slavery to the harsh effects of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

The essay is available in full on our editions page. Below you can read a brief extract:

Barack Obama’s face is everywhere in Kenya. It’s on T-shirts and caps, the covers of magazines, stickers on the back of cars and buses. There are dozens of different Baracks: groovy Barack in sunglasses, presidential Barack in sober suit with red striped tie, smiling in front of US flags. There’s a rasta-esque Barack, looking a bit stoned—more like a Barry (as he is known in Indonesia) or even a Bazza. There are crude fan-painted images on canvases and screen-printed fabric hanging on markets stalls and Banksy-style stencils on walls and pavements, but however the face appears, in this foreign country it fits right in. In the United States, only 12 per cent of the population identify themselves as African-American. In Kenya black comes in endless shades and Obama’s image seems at home.

Obama might look like a typical Kenyan but here there’s no such thing. The handsome Maasai with the wildly stretched earlobes who charges US$20 for each tourist photo is culturally and geographically miles away from the Swahili fisherman on the coast or the Rendille camel farmer in the north-east. Kenya has somewhere between forty and seventy tribes depending on how you count and divide up the languages; it’s an artificial country, like so many in Africa and the Middle East, made from lines drawn in the sand by colonial administrators with no consideration for either the people’s nomadic lifestyles or the centuries-old feuds between the proud tribes. It’s even said that the unusual kink in the Southern border with Tanzania, formerly the German colony Tanganyika, is due to the generous Queen Victoria gifting her relative Kaiser Wilhelm Mount Kilimanjaro when he complained that she had two mountains in her country and he had none.

Here in the land of his father, Obama is also from a minority group. Barack Senior was a Luo tribesman, as is Kenya’s Opposition leader Raila Odinga. Luos make up 13 per cent of the population in Kenya and are the third-largest tribal tribe, but many Luos feel discriminated against by the ruling, wealthier Kikuyus. Before the US election, the Luo community told a sad joke: there’s more chance of the United States electing a Luo than Kenya doing the same.

On the street, though, it doesn’t matter what tribe Obama comes from. Pilots, waiters, guides, shop assistants: the sentiment is always the same. We are so proud, they say...


 

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