Obama Arrives in Kenya, on Personal and Official Journey
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/world/africa/obama-arrives-in-kenya-on-personal-and-official-journey.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&rref=world/africa&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Africa&pgtype=article
In Nairobi, Kenya, on an official trip to Africa, President Obama dined with his half sister and his step-grandmother on Friday. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
NAIROBI, Kenya — President Obama arrived on Friday in Kenya, his father’s home country, for the start of a four-day swing through East Africa, combining a personal journey with a geopolitical mission that reinforces a shared campaign against Islamist extremism while wrestling with tough messages about democracy and gay rights.
Mr. Obama, the first sitting American president to visit Kenya, arrived on Air Force One after dark to a deliberately low-key, even anticlimactic, reception, with none of the pomp that is being saved for daylight on Saturday. He was greeted on the tarmac by President Uhuru Kenyatta and an 8-year-old girl who handed him flowers. He then shook hands with dignitaries along a red carpet and signed a guest book before getting into his armored car.
His motorcade ride into the city was eerily quiet, without the sort of throngs often lining the route when an American president visits a country in Africa or elsewhere for the first time. Concerned about security, the Kenyan authorities closed major highways at 2 p.m., and the business district was deserted for much of the day. Those who did wait along the route in clutches of several hundred at a time recorded the moment of history on cellphone cameras.
But that did not mean Kenyans were not excited about the arrival of a major world figure they consider their own. Roads have been cleaned and repaved, flowers planted and lights fixed along every route that Mr. Obama will travel. American flags are flying and being sold across Nairobi, the capital. T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Obama’s face are being sold at stores and wooden roadside stalls.
“Son of a Kenyan Student Who Changed the World,” screamed the headline of the newspaper The Daily Nation this week. Another major newspaper, The Standard, ran a 128-page issue on Friday about “the son of a Kenyan father who rose from obscurity to rule the world.” On his ride into the city, Mr. Obama passed a billboard that said, “Karibu POTUS,” using the Swahili word for welcome to greet the president of the United States.
“He’s a man I admire for his humble background,” said Wilfred Olali, 35, a human-rights activist. “Rising from a community organizer to president. That’s in itself really inspirational.”
Mr. Obama emphasized his ties to Kenya shortly after his arrival when he had dinner at his hotel with about three dozen members of his extended family, including his half sister Auma and his step-grandmother, known as Mama Sarah.
The powerful symbolism masked the daunting challenges as Mr. Obama tries to use the visit to Kenya and then Ethiopia to deepen trade ties, encourage economic development and bolster efforts to combat the Shabab, a ruthless affiliate of Al Qaeda based in Somalia, while nudging both countries away from the repression of dissent that has characterized recent years.
Mr. Obama will face several awkward moments. In Nairobi, where he will address the Global Entrepreneurship Summit meeting, he will be honored at a state dinner by Mr. Kenyatta, who was charged with crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court, where he was accused of helping to instigate violence that killed more than 1,000 people after disputed elections in 2007. The case against Mr. Kenyatta was dropped last December for lack of evidence, but his deputy president, William Ruto, still faces similar charges and will be on hand for the visit.
At his next stop, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mr. Obama will be the guest of an authoritarian government that some human rights activists have called “Africa’s largest jailer of journalists” and that just last month orchestrated elections in which the governing party and its allies claimed 100 percent of the seats in Parliament. Mr. Obama will meet with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, hold a news conference with him and attend a state dinner.
Mr. Obama defended his decision to visit the two countries. “What we found is that when we combined blunt talk with engagement, that gives us the best opportunity to influence and open up space for civil society,” he told the BBC before leaving Washington. He compared the trip to visiting Russia and China. “Even when we know that there are significant human rights violations taking place, we want to make sure that we’re there so that we can have this conversation and point them in a better direction.”
Mr. Obama brings to the task enormous popularity in Africa. In Kenya, 80 percent of those surveyed in the spring have confidence in him to do the right thing, while 65 percent of those in Ethiopia agree, according to the Pew Research Center.
“There’s huge, runaway expectations in Kenya about this trip,” said Jennifer G. Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There was a lot of disappointment when he went to Ghana that he did not make his first trip to Kenya.”
In choosing Kenya and Ethiopia for his fourth visit to sub-Saharan Africa, though, Mr. Obama opted to go where no president has gone before. In a continent rife with corruption and autocracy, visiting American presidents usually stick to a handful of what one analyst called “safe-bet countries” with largely functioning civil societies, like Ghana, South Africa, Senegal and Tanzania. They stayed away from places like Kenya and Ethiopia.
“That’s why this visit is so important, because he’s sort of breaking out of that mold, and I think that’s an important step,” said Witney Schneidman, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Africa Growth Initiative.
The Shabab have carried out horrific attacks, killing at least 67 people at Westgate Shopping Mall in 2013 and nearly 150 at Garissa University College just three months ago. Three autonomous Shabab units in northeast Kenya and on the coast operate in close-knit, secret and highly mobile cells that take over whole villages for hours or even days before being forced out, according to E.J. Hogendoorn, deputy Africa program director for the International Crisis Group.
But in responding to the threat, Kenya has cracked down on those seen as disloyal. Advocacy groups like Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First cite unlawful killings, disappearances, torture, excessive force and interethnic violence. Two advocacy groups, Haki Africa and Muslims for Human Rights, or Muhuri, were placed on a list of entities suspected of ties to the Shabab. Although a court ruled that they do not belong on the list, their bank accounts remain frozen.
Ethiopia, the second-most-populous state in sub-Saharan Africa, has an impressive record of economic development, averaging 10 percent growth over the last decade. But it too has shrunk the space for dissent. The government recently released a half-dozen journalists and bloggers whose arrests had generated international protests, but others remain locked up.
Mr. Obama might not have gone to Ethiopia except that it is the home of the African Union, which he will address. The United States has relied on Ethiopia’s military as a bulwark against the Shabab in Somalia, where an African Union force with both Ethiopian and Kenyan troops has succeeded in sweeping militants out of the capital and other towns.
Terrence Lyons, an associate professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University, said Mr. Obama’s visit gives him influence. “This is a big, big deal in Ethiopia,” he said. “And therefore to me, the question is how has that leverage been used in ways that can advance U.S. interests in democracy and human rights? And I think at least to date the answer — there hasn’t been much to show for it.”
http://www.nation.co.ke
What Kenya really means to the American president
http://www.nation.co.ke/news/What-Kenya-really-means-to-the-American-president/-/1056/2808918/-/h7df5i/-/index.html
President Obama’s visit to the land of his father’s birth has been one of the most eagerly anticipated trips of his time in the White House — for good reason.
It is easy to see why the American President was determined, as he told university students on his last trip to South Africa, to ensure he returned to Kenya before concluding his time in office.
He felt a release, he writes, akin to “a drunk coming out of a long, painful binge” and nowhere more so than during the time he spent crying at his father’s grave-site in the climactic scene of his book.
You must come home, son. Even if it is only for a few days. This is where you belong.
President Barack Obama’s father was famously absent from his life, visiting him only fleetingly when he was a 10-year-old pupil in junior school.
But this fact only seems to have deepened the young Obama’s curiosity about his father and fed a long search for rootedness which dominated his early years.
Where did he belong? He was neither black nor white. He was an American citizen by birth. But what did it mean that his paternal roots were tens of thousands of kilometres away?
This confusion and desire for self-discovery led Obama to write a letter to his father during his college years. In his note, he passed greetings to the family and informed his dad that he planned to travel to Kenya. Barack Obama Sr. replied urging his son to come where he belongs.
“You will be pleased to know that all your brothers here are fine, and send their greetings. Like me, they approve of your decision to come home after graduation.
When you come, we shall, together, decide on how long you may wish to stay. Barry, even if it is for a few days, the important thing is that you know your people, and also that you know where you belong.”
GOOD REASON
President Obama’s visit to the land of his father’s birth has been one of the most eagerly anticipated trips of his time in the White House — for good reason.
As he narrates in his memoirs, Dreams from my Father, much of his early life was dominated by a search for identity and the confusion of his multi-layered lineage, a “personal, interior journey” which led him to Kenya and which he describes in riveting terms in the book.
When, in 1959, Stanley Ann Dunham, a young social science student met a dashing Kenyan man studying at the University of Hawaii, it was illegal for a black man to date a white woman in half of the states in America.
The civil rights movement was in full swing with figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. fighting to reverse the colossal injustices of slavery and white supremacists battling back ferociously.
Laws like those forbidding any relationships between the races were part of the arsenal of those who sought to prevent progressive change, and Obama notes that his mother was quite brave to defy the societal norms and expectations of that age.
“In many parts of the South, my father could have been strung from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the most sophisticated northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother’s predicament into a back-alley abortion – or at the very least to a distant convent that could arrange for adoption.”
His parents divorced early in Obama’s life and his dad went on to Harvard and returned to Kenya. His mom did a sterling job of raising him, the young Obama notes, but still he was torn.
Who was he? Where did he truly belong? Early on, he decided to stop telling people his mother’s race because, he writes in the foreword of the second edition of his book, “at the age of twelve or thirteen... I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites”.
To concentrate on his studies, he set aside the swirling thoughts on identity in his mind, concluding wryly, that he had written himself off as a “tragic mulatto” (slang for a person of mixed black and white ancestry).
FATHER'S EYES
Still, Kenya loomed large and he saw himself above all through the lens of his father’s eyes.
“It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself...My father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!”
Fear of what he would discover upon going to Kenya held him back. A turning point was a conversation with a fiery African-American counsellor at a Chicago high school named Asante Moran who, between furious denunciations of the American public school system and the underfunding of schools in black areas, spoke of being enchanted by a visit to Kenya 15 years earlier.
He expressed astonishment that Obama had never visited the land of his fathers and said:
“You know that’s where I went on my first trip to the continent. Kenya — I remember that trip like it was yesterday — changed my life forever. The people were so welcoming. And the land – I’d never seen anything so beautiful. It really felt like I had come home.”
The friend who had accompanied Obama into the meeting with Asante asked Obama why he had never been to Kenya.
He replied, simply: “I don’t know. Maybe I am scared of what I will find there.”
Obama concluded he needed to go back home soon but one of the most crushing moments of his young life came a short while later when he received a call, on a scratchy line in his apartment in New York, with devastating news:
CAR CRASH
It was his aunt, Jane Obama. “Listen, Barry, your father is dead. He is killed in a car accident. Hello? Can you hear me? I say, your father is dead. Barry, please call your uncle in Boston and tell him. I can’t talk now, okay Barry. I will try to call you again...”
Obama would still go home to the land of his father, only that he would not meet the absent man who had dominated his life.
It is easy to see why the American President was determined, as he told university students on his last trip to South Africa, to ensure he returned to Kenya before concluding his time in office.
The time he spent in the country on his visit in 1987 helped him feel a comfort and sense of identity that had eluded him all his years.
He passed through a few European cities including London before travelling to Kenya but was uneasy all the time.
“All through my stay in Europe (I felt) edgy, defensive, hesitant with strangers...and by the end of the first week or so, I realised I had made a mistake. It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything is just I’d imagined it. It just wasn’t mine.
“I felt as if I were living someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.”
He hastened on to Kenya and the first words he heard, on getting off the plane, were from his aunt Zeituni, who was at the airport with his half-sister, Auma. “Welcome home.”
Obama narrates many stories about his time in Kenya — the trip to a bar in downtown Nairobi where a big brawl broke out, the excursion to Maasai Mara, the adventures in the city starting with the loss of his luggage along the journey to Kenya. But the undoubted highlight was his visit to K’Ogelo, his meeting with his step-grandmother Mama Sarah Obama and his long, short walk to visit his father’s grave. At last, Obama felt, he had found “the comfort, the firmness of identity.”
“It’s obvious if you read his books, if you listen to what he’s said about his own biography,” Bill Burton, a former Obama aide told the New York Times, “Kenya plays a very big role in how he thinks about the world and how he thinks about his relationship with other Americans.”
STRATEGIC TIES
Much of the coverage of the American president’s visit focuses on the strategic ties between Kenya and the US, on the entrepreneurship summit he is attending, on the debate over whether he could have been more engaged with Africa than he has been.
The reality may be that for Obama, Kenya carries a meaning beyond what can be deduced from the arid examination of trade data and the intricacies of diplomatic relations.
All those things are undoubtedly important. But to Obama, Kenya is the land where “through Africa’s red soil” he found himself.
He felt a release, he writes, akin to “a drunk coming out of a long, painful binge” and nowhere more so than during the time he spent crying at his father’s grave-site in the climactic scene of his book.
“When my tears were finally spent, I felt a calmness wash over me. 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, no longer a construct of words.
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 I’d witnessed in Chicago — all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the colour of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”
http://www.standardmedia.co.ke
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http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/thecounties/article/2000170425/excitement-song-and-ululation-in-nyanza-over-obama-visit
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http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/ktn/video/watch/2000095962/rare-moments-us-president-barack-obama-and-his-kenyan-family
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=307-nN5Jcko
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2yZKRdUMb4
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