Walking the World Stage

It is not too early to pronounce Barack Obama a political phenomenon unlike any previously seen on the American scene. He proved that last week in Kenya, where he was received in a manner more befitting a messiah than a junior senator bearing nothing more than opinions and good cheer. Obama began his two-week African odyssey in South Africa and ended it in Chad, but Kenya (the only country in which his wife and two young daughters accompanied him) was at its literal and emotional center. For it was in Kenya (in a village called Kogelo, Alego, in a district called Siaya), where paternal roots run unbreakably deep, that his father was born. The Luo tribesmen there claim Obama as one of their own; and as his motorcade passed through Kisumu en route to his ancestral village, thousands lined the path.

They wore Obama T shirts and Obama caps, and waved Obama flags. Many climbed trees to catch a glimpse. Others sang songs in his honor. "He's our brother. He's our son," said one man in the throng, and a multitude nodded in agreement. It was much the same in Nairobi the day before, where, during his visit to the memorial park erected at the site of the 1998 Qaeda bombing that destroyed the American Embassy, a rapturous crowd chanted, "Come to us, Obama."

Throughout it all Obama walked an exquisitely fine line. He graciously accepted the homage due a person of immense power while simultaneously making it clear that he essentially has none. As Kenyan adulation poured forth, he admitted--indeed, insisted--that his loyalties lay back home: "I'm the senator from Illinois, not the senator from Kogelo."

The delirium evoked memories of Bill Clinton's 12-day African visit in 1998. But while Clinton came offering apologies--for slavery, for genocide in Rwanda, for America's support of a motley crew of despots--Obama came armed with tough love. "I want to be a truth teller," he told me during a lengthy conversation in Nairobi. And he played that role to the hilt. In South Africa, he scoffed at Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang's home remedies for AIDS. He blasted Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, whose schemes have made a violent mess of his country. And he hit the government in Khartoum for the genocide in Sudan. But his most unrelenting critique was of Kenya. He took the government to task for violating freedom of the press, lectured its citizens on the folly of tribalism and slammed government corruption in a nationally televised speech: "While corruption is a problem we all share, here in Kenya it is a crisis."

Prominent visitors have criticized Kenyan corruption before. But hearing the message from Obama was different. For he was seen not only as a fellow Kenyan standing up to power, but also as a Luo standing up to a Kikuyo--the dominant ethnic group to which President Mwai Kibaki belongs and against which Luo resentment runs deep. And worse, in the government's eyes, at least, he was seen as siding with the opposition--in particular with Raila Odinga, a powerful kingmaker and Luo whose Orange Democratic Movement has been a painful thorn in Kibaki's side. "It is very clear that the senator has been used as a puppet to perpetuate opposition politics," sniffed Kibaki spokesperson Alfred Mutua.

That a man who had been to Kenya only two times previously--and had never been elsewhere on the continent--should stir up such a commotion is astounding; but, then, so has been everything else about Obama's political career. Obama himself seems bemused by the turns of events that have people comparing him with JFK: "I think about the fact that two years before I announced for the U.S. Senate, I got whipped by Bobby Rush in a congressional race." At the time he was dispirited and "flat broke," having suspended his law practice to run for office; his wife was none too happy with his choices. Friends suggested a trip to the 2000 Democratic National Convention as a way of cheering himself up. When he arrived at Los Angeles airport and tried to rent a car, the credit-card company initially refused to approve it. With no official status and no floor pass, he was relegated to the fringes of the convention. Recognizing he was serving "no useful purpose," he came home. "I think about that ... four years later," he said. "I'm not that much smarter. Maybe a little wiser; but not that much smarter ... This stuff is pretty fleeting, ultimately."