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. Elijah Ndungu is a 27-year-old taxi driver in Nairobi who did a mechanics course after leaving school and is lucky to have a job. He’s never been outside Kenya but this election on the other side of the world has changed the way he thinks about his homeland. This Kenyan-American gentleman is in charge of the most powerful country in the world, he says, and that gives him hope for the future of his country. Tourism has been slow. He’s had fewer passengers and made less money and, until Obama’s election, there was no indication that things would improve. But we can do anything, we Kenyan people, he tells me. Elijah has high hopes that maybe Obama will help them by lifting the travel advisory. We Kenyans, he says, we are waiting while he is still President to come visit us. We are expecting him to visit.

Kenyans who work in tourism blame many of the county’s current ills on the US-government travel advisory that has cut the number of visiting American safari-goers and beach bunnies to a trickle. The Australian government also advises a high degree of caution, with some suburbs in Nairobi earning a ‘reconsider your need to travel’ and regions to the north a flat-out ‘do not travel’. The US warning is even starker, with ‘indications of potential terrorist threats’ and ‘violent and sometimes fatal criminal attacks’ successfully deterring visitors. Tourism, Kenya’s second-highest source of foreign income, halved from 2007 to 2008. It’s Bush’s fault, the locals say. No tourist was harmed during last year’s ‘troubles’.

Perhaps not, but in the last decade foreigners have been fatally targeted by terrorists in Kenya. It was al Qaeda’s 1998 US embassy bombing in Nairobi that saw Osama bin Laden appear firmly in the FBI spotlight. Around 200 people were killed and up to 4000 injured in that attack; in 2002, a further thirteen Kenyans and Israelis were killed in the bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, a popular beach resort on the coast. Immediately following the explosions, frightened Israeli tourists leaving nearby Moi airport on a chartered 757 narrowly escaped being hit by two shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles. A Palestinian group later claimed responsibility.

In Nairobi today there’s not a hint of trouble. It’s a flat, dusty, bustling place that seems vaguely trapped in the sixties. There are up-market coffee chains that might be Starbucks except the coffee’s too good, conservatively well-dressed businesspeople everywhere and trendy restaurants and nightspots that might be back home except that here the door police let me in. Still, the luxury safari camps in the national parks to the south and north are half empty, as are the package-holiday resorts on the coast. The most recent ‘troubles’ the locals refer to were in December 2007 and January 2008, when Kenya erupted in violent ethnic riots after disputed election results returned President Mwai Kibaki. More than a thousand people were killed, many by neighbours wielding machetes. Thousands more were displaced and remain homeless more than a year later. They are forced to stay with relatives, increasing the ethnic and language-based divisions, further reducing regional diversity and connections between the tribes. A review of the election found widespread irregularities including bribery, vote-buying, intimidation and ballot-stuffing, yet Mwai Kibaki remains president.

Barack Obama’s father was born in a village called Kogelo, or sometimes Alego, on the shores of Lake Victoria in Nyanza province. In his bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama says his grandfather was ‘a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers’. His father, Barack senior, ‘grew up herding his father’s goats’ before winning a scholarship, first to study in Nairobi and then to become the first African student at the University of Hawaii, where he met and married the 18-year-old Ann Dunham, who didn’t know he’d left a son and pregnant wife back home in Kenya. Barack Obama II has visited Kenya only twice, but the country hopes for more from these blood ties, hopes the president will have a memory of Kenya in his veins. Others of us hope that blood counts for nothing: in 2007 Lynne Cheney announced that, while researching her husband Dick’s family history for a new book, she discovered Barack Obama and the vice-president were distant cousins through a common ancestor, a seventeenth-century immigrant from France. Being related to Barack Obama is all the rage in politics. Kenyan Opposition leader Odinga is also a cousin, apparently; Odinga has claimed that Obama’s father was his maternal uncle. We await an announcement from Canberra any day.

Kenyan pride in Obama transcends politics and tribalism. Many Kenyans stayed up all night to watch the election coverage. There was dancing in the streets, people tell me, and President Kibaki proclaimed the day after the US election victory a national holiday for the celebrating population; one step further than simply declaring any boss who sacks someone for not showing up ‘a bum’. In the lead-up to the inauguration everyone seemed to be planning a party: from simple family affairs to ‘White House warming parties’ thrown across Kenya. There were to be musicians, dancers, big screens to show the live proceedings and a football match at Kogelo primary school. They have much to celebrate. Bush has messed it up, one woman tells me. And now a black man must clean up the mess, just like always. The White House was built by black slaves, a man says. Now a son of Africa rules there.

From 1619, the year the first twenty African slaves were brought to Virginia and auctioned for food, to 1863, when Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery under the 13th Amendment, African slaves were vital to American culture and its economy. In 1789 the statesman and vice-presidential candidate General Charles Pinckney said: ‘This country is not capable of being cultivated by white men. Negroes are to this country what raw materials are to another country. No planter can cultivate his land without slaves.’ Thomas Jefferson, president from 1801 to 1809 and author of the Declaration of Independence, had 200 slaves himself as well as six unacknowledged children to his slave Sally Hemmings. This old history between the United States and Africa is as murky as they come: one continent bled of its bravest and strongest, another becoming the richest and most powerful continent on Earth. Yet Obama is not a descendant of slaves, although Michelle Obama is and Malia and Sasha are. For black Americans, the moment a son or daughter of slavery sits in the Oval Office might be the true moment of their deliverance and of their nation’s redemption. History might judge this step that now seems so huge to us watching from afar as still not far enough. But Obama is the African American we have now, and now we see with new eyes that the wealth of this wealthiest of nations, its advancement, the progress of its exploration, its people’s leisure and industry and crops and mansions were built on the lives and deaths of tribesmen and women with the face of this new president.

In Kenya, President Kibaki’s face is also ever-present, though it’s not nearly as popular as Obama’s. It’s not on the streets or buses or T-shirts but instead the smiling photo hangs, framed and glass-covered, behind the counter in ramshackle country shops and above the till in sparkling city restaurants. For a country enamoured with their president’s picture, it’s strangely difficult to find someone to speak well of Kibaki himself. In fact none of the Kenyans I spoke to had anything good to say about any of their elected representatives. The complaints are many: Kibaki doesn’t even have his clothes made in Kenya; he has a personal tailor in the Ivory Coast. He flies to London to go to the hospital. And there are too many ministers: forty at last count, and fifty-two assistant ministers, almost half the total of 222 MPs.

But the biggest complaint, the thing that makes so many people around the country so angry is not that politicians earn around A$15,000 a month of basic salary plus allowances (as compared with the average wage of around A$600 a year), or their health insurance, rural homes or club memberships. Or their secretaries, or their staff, or the dozens of security personnel and the two new cars for each minister and the fleet for the president. What infuriates Kenyans is that politicians pay tax on only a small proportion of their income, a gobsmacking arrogance which would, if adopted in Australia, drive even the most peace loving of us into the streets waving pitchforks and flaming torches.

Yet never let it be said that Kenyan politicians are incapable of bipartisan cooperation. In an unprecedented show of cross-party solidarity in a parliament usually divided by tribal and party lines, in June 2008 Kenya’s MPs voted down a proposal to tax their earnings. This move, together with the seven former MPs being sued by the Anti Corruption Commission for taking illegal allowances, shows that this is a country still a long way from democratic and safe elections, from freedom of the press, from justice for the poor. For all their flaws, Americans believe in the words of the Declaration of Independence when it’s said out loud. Americans have faith in their democracy and a genuine pride in their peaceful transition of power. Perhaps it’s the values of the American political system, not just its most recent outcome, that the people of Kenya so admire.

So what are Kenya’s chances of an Obama-led recovery? Will the tourists return? How many American pilgrims will take the new Kenya Presidential Heritage Safari, offered by one enterprising travel agent? And, if they come, how many will buy the T-shirts, medallions and clocks, and how many will drink the ‘Obama is the best’ cocktail? (It’s vodka based, in case you wondered.)

For the US–Kenya relationship, the only way is up. Improved relations with East Africa were a fair way down the foreign policy wish list for the Bush administration, so, notwithstanding a burst of recession-inspired protectionism, trade ties should increase. This may be due less to a declared Obama policy (after all, he’s got a lot on his to-do list), and more because Kenya is now on the minds of many Americans. But will this be enough to improve lives in a country of such abject poverty, where female genital mutilation is regularly practised, a country with 1.1 million AIDS orphans, a country where the life expectancy at birth is fifty-two years for a man, fifty-five for a woman? Here, hope must be more than a politician’s slogan. Like the Americans, Kenyans deserve better leaders and, also like the Americans, their country has a long road to travel.

— Toni Jordan