It’s not just God we praise, but Obama too.
—ELDERLY KENYAN WOMEN CHANTING TO OBAMA
This was Obama’s third trip to the small rural compound of his father’s family. He visited just after college in 1983 and then again after Harvard Law in 1991 in order to research his Dreams memoir. The family farm was located near a town called Kogelo in the Siaya District of Nyanza Province. This western province sat on the edge of Lake Victoria, the world’s second-largest freshwater lake, which is about the size of Ireland. Siaya was home to various modest farming and trading villages and its residents were largely poor, with more than half living on less than a dollar a day. The district’s largest city was Kisumu, which, at roughly a quarter of a million residents, was Kenya’s third most populous town. The region was inhabited almost exclusively by Luo, the tribe that Obama was astonished to learn as a child lived in mud huts and subsisted by farming their own land. Kisumu was about a hundred and seventy-five miles east of Nairobi, which could be a drive of seven or eight hours through the wickedly difficult terrain separating the remote villages and towns in western Kenya. The traveling press and Obama took separate flights on commercial airlines to Kisumu. We then joined a caravan of vehicles that somehow would navigate the crater-marred, red-dirt roads that extend into the far rural reaches of Siaya.
The atmosphere surrounding Obama’s previous visit to the family compound had been vastly different from that of this CODEL. Back then, Obama had boarded a train in Nairobi and ridden it through the night and the morning across the mountainous Rift Valley. When he arrived in Kisumu, he had walked half a mile to a bus station by himself. With his older half sister, Auma, as his primary guide, he had been greeted by a handful of relatives at the station. “Obviously there’s been a big shift in terms of my travel accommodations,” Obama told reporters in Kenya. “The last time I arrived in my grandmother’s village, there was a goat in my lap and some chickens.” He dropped into Kisumu this time by way of a forty-minute morning plane ride aboard an East African Airways jet.
The Kenya Airways flight carrying the press gaggle landed at the Kisumu airport before Obama’s plane. The airport was actually a one-runway airstrip, with flights landing and departing hourly. Separated from the runway by only a group of thin trees and a sidewalk, a squat, dirty yellow building held the cramped, cluttered offices of three commercial airlines. I was surprised to find only a few interested onlookers, given that Kisumu was one of Kenya’s largest urban areas and given the crowds we had seen in Nairobi. But when Obama’s flight landed, a mass of people seemed to materialize from thin air. Obama was dressed as he would have been for any number of campaign swings through Illinois—dark blue blazer, white shirt, beige pleated plants, casual leather shoes. As he and Michelle stepped down from the plane, the media descended on them, with half a dozen boom microphones magically appearing over their heads. The enthusiastic crowd of a couple of hundred turned out to consist mostly of Peace Corps workers from the United States. Obama strode up to the airport building as media members pushed against one another to gain the best possible footing. “How’s everybody doin’?” Obama asked in his elegantly cool manner. But when the media kept pace with him as he entered a holding room labeled Government and VIP Lounge, Gibbs was forced to intervene and give Obama some breathing room to chat with local officials. First Gibbs shouted for everyone to leave the room. Then he began yanking them out one by one. “This is a prelude to a big mess,” said one of the documentary filmmakers. “Lord, help me,” Gibbs mumbled under his breath as he escorted one camera crew after another out of the room.
Obama’s public day was not yet ten minutes old, and Gibbs was already fighting it.
Obama was loaded into an SUV and the traveling press was herded into two small rickety buses, affectionately named Samson and Delilah by their owner, a local man, and his son, who eked out a living by ferrying tourists around Kisumu and Lake Victoria. With these buses, appearances did not lie. A few minutes into the trip through Kisumu, our bus sputtered and lost power. As it glided into a gas station, its passengers groaned, mostly out of fear of losing the caravan and missing out on Obama’s main event at the family farm. Had we traveled all this way only to miss the final act? Jennifer Barnes, the U.S. Embassy official riding with us, was livid. “Why would you show up for a daylong trip with no petrol!” she shouted at the driver. (This, in fact, was the second time a vehicle carrying the press contingent had run out of gas. A taxi in Pretoria met the same fate after dinner one night, albeit that was in a much better neighborhood than this.) The driver seemed to take forever filling up the tank, prompting an exasperated Gibbs to exclaim, “Fill this fucking thing up!” Once it moved again and we caught up to the motorcade, Gibbs commanded, “Jesus, now don’t lose him!”
We wended through town after town toward the New Nyanza Provincial General Hospital, where Obama and Michelle were to take their AIDS tests. It was Saturday, and along the sides of these roads were makeshift markets selling everything from fruit to American T-shirts to Air Jordan basketball shoes. Every Kisumu street was lined with waving, hollering and overjoyed people, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Obama motorcade. Again—there were thousands of them. I noticed that some of these Kenyans, desperate for any item of American culture, were wearing our hand-me-downs. One boy walking near a railroad track wore a T-shirt that displayed the 2006 Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks. But Seattle lost that game to the Pittsburgh Steelers. The shirt obviously had little value in the United States and was shipped to Africa.
Arriving at the hospital, we encountered managed bedlam. Thousands upon thousands had turned out to see Obama. And to our dismay, the senator’s car had disappeared into the sea of people ahead of us. He was to be dropped off close to the hospital while our decrepit Samson and Delilah parked a couple of football fields away. Reporters scurried out and began marching toward the hospital in high gear, again worried about missing a key moment of the day.
The closer we got to the hospital and its surrounding park area, the thicker the crowd became. Soon, people seemed to occupy every square inch of land. They stood on rooftops of the hospital buildings, sat along balconies and incredibly had climbed into trees and dangled from the limbs. Most reporters were separated trying to make their way through the dense throngs. A couple of journalists were pick-pocketed of recording devices and other gear. The Kenyans were simply rapturous, chanting rhythmic verses and screaming for their hero, Obama. Some wore T-shirts bearing Obama’s name or image. Others held aloft pictures of him or waved flags adorned with his name or face. Nearly everyone in this remote part of Kenya spoke or sang in Luo, and we American reporters had to ask Kenyan media members to translate for us. One chant was taken from a 2002 election when former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi lost power in the reform movement. The verse went: “Everything is possible without Moi.” But on this occasion, it had been altered to “Everything is possible with Obama.” A row of four older women, their eyes rolling back into their heads, looked almost possessed as they writhed and shimmied to an indigenous African rhythm.
As on the day before in the streets of Nairobi, an invisible barrier had been formed by authorities carrying billy clubs and assault rifles. This opened a wide safe zone in the park area for an AIDS trailer and the dozens of media members. Obama and Michelle made their entrance in a cluster of people and headed for a mobile clinic operated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take their AIDS tests. Though on a far smaller scale than in South Africa, this part of Kenya nevertheless had the highest incidence of AIDS in the country, with about one in seven people infected. Gibbs and Obama said they were told that his public AIDS test could spur hundreds of thousands of Kenyans to take a test themselves. Obama and Michelle disappeared inside the mobile unit to thunderous applause. After the husband and wife were pricked in their fingertips and blood samples drawn, Obama stepped outside and stood atop the trailer steps to address the enthused audience.
He took a microphone in his left hand and held aloft his right arm to speak and subdue the crowd. Instead, the frenzied masses drowned him out and began to push ahead. Police, apparently worried that people would be trampled or smothered, allowed the surge to move forward a bit. Obama urged calm. “Stop pushing, no pushing,” he implored through the microphone and loudspeaker. His words went unheeded and Obama pulled the microphone away from his mouth. “This is intensity,” he said calmly to himself. “I am going to take a seat.” Obama sat down on the top step and his eyes caught mine. I smiled and said, “Wow. This is way beyond LeBron, baby.” Obama returned a slight smile. “This is . . . ,” he said, pausing to find just the right word—an innocuous word, a cautious word. He finally settled on “interesting.” “This is interesting,” he said again.
AFTER THE BLOODLETTING FOR THE SAKE OF THE AIDS CRISIS, THE Obama caravan rumbled off to another of Obama’s causes—a multimillion-dollar CARE Kenya project in Central Ugenya that benefits orphans. Obama partially financed the project, which was geared toward empowering older women who care for orphans. The project provided them with financing to buy such things as sewing machines. To reach the event, the convoy navigated the uneven and unpaved roads into what seemed like one of the most remote parts of the world. We chugged by collection after collection of tiny green farms marked by thatch huts with mud or tin roofs. Dust floated everywhere, partially swept up by the long brigade of vehicles and partially lifted up naturally from the occasional barren field in the verdant and hilly terrain. Driving through this obstacle course of far-flung red-clay roadways took a special talent. It was also not for the faint of heart. The roads were barely wide enough for two oncoming vehicles to pass each other. The final half-dozen feet on either side of the road fell into a steep grade that would make Samson and Delilah lean so far to one side that we seemed to be almost parallel to the ground. Drivers hurtled their machinery toward oncoming traffic at unbelievably fast speeds considering the treacherous road conditions. It was a classic game of chicken as to which vehicle would give ground, and it was assured that this maneuver would take place at the last instant before a possible collision. Seemingly in defiance of the laws of gravity, our buses managed not to tip over on the journey. After dozens of miles of this rough, white-knuckle travel, it was easy to see how Obama’s father, a poor driver who was a heavy drinker, died in an auto accident while navigating this dangerous terrain.
When our buses finally arrived at the CARE Kenya project, it was clear that we were in the far reaches of Africa, a place largely bereft of clean running water and electricity. The event was set amid a deep green thicket of trees and dust. About a hundred and fifty rural Kenyans, many in traditional African garb, gathered to partake in what can best be described as a spiritual ceremony in Obama’s honor. Nearly all of those in attendance were women and children, just as most of the people back in downtown Kisumu were men. The women generally remain in the rural regions, tending to family farms and child rearing, while the men travel to town for urban jobs and send money back home. The ceremony resembled a religious experience. A handful of the older women danced and pranced in song, at one point showering Obama with these words in Luo: “It’s not just God we praise, but Obama too.” Obama danced with the native women and addressed those assembled through a jerry-rigged loudspeaker system powered by a car battery hidden behind a thick tree. In a short speech, he called this “a wonderful homecoming.” He looked as relaxed in this atmosphere as he does anywhere.
As Obama played politician, I couldn’t help but notice Michelle, who was sitting behind him with a bored-looking Malia and a fidgety Sasha leaning up against either side of her. Michelle’s facial expression registered somewhere between a scowl and a frown. She was unmistakably trying to process how exactly she had found herself and her family being feted as some kind of deity in the middle of remote Kenya. When the spotlight landed on her, however, she brightened and, as usual, played the good wife of a senator. She even stood up and danced in a circle with the native Luo women. But Michelle was still trying to adjust to this new world of Obama glorification. When the event concluded, the Tribune’s Zeleny and I asked her how she was coping with this strange new environment. “I haven’t digested it all yet. It’s all a bit overwhelming,” she confessed. “It’s hard to interpret what all of this means and what it means to us as a family.” When a few more reporters gathered around, Michelle realized she was beginning to sound impolitic, and she changed gears. “This doesn’t really make me think of Barack Obama and his fame and fortune,” she said, seemingly searching for some larger meaning behind this odd trip. “It makes you think of what you can do to help here. . . . The spectacle is interesting, but in the end, this has to be all about more than Barack Obama.”
BACK IN THE CARAVAN, WE WERE OFF TO THE MAIN EVENT OF THE day—and perhaps the entire trip: Obama’s visit to his father’s farming compound, the specific physical roots of his paternal African heritage. Unbeknownst to Obama’s trip planners or staff, presidential candidate Raila Odinga had assembled thousands of Luo for a political festival in Obama’s honor. For Odinga, Obama’s visit was a political gift. For the entire trip, Odinga endeavored to gain as much publicity for himself as he could by cozying up to this beloved figure from the United States who happened to have a Luo heritage. Odinga even had T-shirts printed with the image of him and Obama and the humble declaration AFRICA’S GREATEST SONS.
In an effort to remain above Kenyan tribal politics, Obama’s staff had been coy about revealing the senator’s schedule to Odinga. Still, the time of his visit to the family compound was widely known to locals. Kisumu, in fact, had been in a carnival atmosphere for several days, with nightclubs celebrating Obama’s trip in raucous fashion. So there was no way to get around the orchestrated political assembly, which had all the trappings of the same kind of event in the United States. Local officials and their minions, who most likely had some connection to political patronage of the Luo, gathered at Odinga’s request to see Obama. A group of uniformed schoolchildren had also amassed outside the schoolhouse named in Obama’s honor. They stood in a long row, swaying their hips and waving their arms rhythmically to a song composed specifically to honor their American visitor. The lead voice was a boy about twelve years old who crooned in a beautifully melodious manner as the other children harmonized behind him. To the melody of the American song “This Land Is Your Land,” the children had supplanted American geographic points of interest with Kenyan spots: “This land is your land, this land is my land, from Lake Victoria to the Coastal Province, from Nairobi to the Rift Valley, this land is my land alone.” They stood amid buildings of the primitive-looking Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School. From the financial donations of Obama, the school had purchased chalkboards and wooden desks and various types of science equipment. The problem is, the science experiments would undoubtedly require running water, and the schoolhouse appeared to have none. The school featured just three small buildings, with one classroom each, on the edge of a big hill overlooking a small green-brown valley. The classrooms were less than inviting, just concrete floors and worn wooden tables and chairs. Most unfurnished basements in the United States look more modern and better equipped for schooling. “Hopefully, I can provide some assistance in the future to this school and all that it can be,” Obama said at a quick dedication ceremony, careful to lend support but not to overpromise.
The magnitude of the upcoming political ceremony caught Obama and his small staff off guard. The large turnout would have outdone most such gatherings on the South Side of Chicago in the heat of election season. The vibe, however, was strangely similar. America might be an ocean away from Africa, but in a democracy, politics is still politics. A reporter asked Gibbs facetiously, “Does this meet or does it wildly exceed your expectations?” Gibbs only chuckled in response. Wearing brightly colored robes over their Western-style suits and ties, the Luo Council of Elders sat in white lawn chairs underneath a long row of canvas tents set up to shield them from the hot sun and ubiquitous dust. Aside from their colorful garb, they looked like any group of American politicians waiting their turn to speak. Standing with his slender brown arms folded was Michael Adara, a thirty-five-year-old information technology worker in Nairobi. He said he had made the excursion from the big city to this rural outpost to see the senator in the flesh. “The thing that attracts me and other people to Obama is that he traced his roots to right here,” Adara told me. “It lets us feel that we can all trace our roots and find our real home.” Adara wore a black T-shirt with an image of Obama’s face and the words THE SENATOR, THE DIPLOMAT, THE POLITICIAN, THE LUO.
Speaking in Luo, Odinga, the presidential candidate, opened the festivity with a wordy talk about the meaning of Obama’s visit and what one surmises was a stump speech. As a member of the challenging Luo tribe, he called for an end to government corruption, a sentiment that drew sustained applause. It was then Obama’s turn. He stepped onto a wooden table, grabbed the microphone and, sensing the political rally atmosphere, dropped into an extemporaneous variation of his own campaign speeches from back in his Senate race. The theme, once again, was the interconnectedness of all people and the unifying nature of the human condition. But in adjusting to the crowd here in Kogelo, Kenya, instead of talking about his own life, he substituted his father’s life story. Speaking plainly in his midwestern drawl, Obama said:
As I was driving up here, I thought about my father. Some of you may be aware, I didn’t know him that well. He actually did come back here to Kenya. I was the one who stayed back, stayed back home, stayed back in the United States. We corresponded. We spoke. But I did not grow up with him. It wasn’t until as an adult that I came to visit this area. I remember the first time that I came, I thought to myself that even though I grew up on the other side of the world and even though I had not had a day-to-day connection, when I came here I felt the spirit among the people that told me I belonged. Everybody was so warm and so gracious and so friendly and hospitable. One of the things that you realize about this area is that even though a lot of times people don’t have a lot, they are willing to give you what they have.
There is a generosity of spirit in this community, which is extraordinary. As I traveled through here, one of the things I realized is how remarkable it was the journey my father had traveled. He grew up around here. He was taking care of goats for my grandfather. And maybe sometimes he would go to a school not so different from Senator Barack Obama’s school, except maybe it was smaller and they had even less in terms of equipment and books. And teachers were paid even less and sometimes there wasn’t enough money to go to school full time. Yet despite all that, because of the health of the community, the community lifted him up and gave him the opportunity to go to secondary school and then go to a university in America and then get a Ph.D. from Harvard and then come back here and work with many of the individuals who are here today. It’s a story of what’s possible when a community comes together and supports its children.
After Obama concluded, the moment of the day was at hand. He was off to visit his father’s compound and his grandmother just a few hundred yards from the school site. The only problem: how exactly to get there. Obama tried to shake some hands at the political function, but as usual, the staff hustled him into an SUV. Reporters, meanwhile, broke into two camps. One group headed for Samson and Delilah. As for me, I kept my eye on Gibbs, who advised that we should just walk rather than board a bus that would fight crowds to travel less than a mile. Gibbs made a small attempt at organizing the reporting crew. But suffering from the same fatigue that we all felt as the day wore on, he quickly gave up. “It’s like herding cats,” he said in frustration. “They’ll find their way, I hope.”
After about a fifteen-minute walk, we arrived at the small farming compound. There were several small clay buildings with tin roofs amid a spread of grass, weeds and dirt. Chickens and goats wandered here and there, as if they were the tenants of the community taking a stroll around the grounds. Small farming fields of rice were on either side of the compound. Most people living in this part of the world subsisted daily on the food they produced at home—rice, eggs, cabbage. A clutch of Kenyan reporters and other international press were already assembled awaiting Obama’s arrival. A few dozen relatives of the Obama clan were there as well. One thin elderly man who was dressed all in white—cotton shirt, pants and matching hat—displayed a blue-and-white “Obama, Democrat for Senate” button on his chest. He leaned on a wooden cane and looked around in bemusement at the bizarre scene: media crews carrying modern boom microphones and digital cameras to a place where televisions and computers did not exist. Most of Obama’s relatives had donned their best dresses and suits. They were, after all, gathered for a weekend family function, although one covered by scores of reporting crews, many from another continent. The “spectacle” that Obama had mentioned was in full display.
Obama’s caravan arrived at the compound, but Samson and Delilah and most of the American reporting gaggle had not. When Obama exited the vehicle to greet his grandmother, media and relatives swarmed around the two. (His grandmother is not actually a blood relative. She is the woman who raised his father. The circumstances surrounding his blood grandmother’s disappearance from the family are murky.) Obama embraced “Granny,” as she is known, while reporters and photographers and security and other official staff pushed and shoved each other, either to protect Obama or to document the moment, depending on the job they held. Kenyan photographers were particularly aggressive. They threw elbows to open a clear shot at Obama and his grandmother.
Amid the frenzy, Obama and his grandmother strode slowly up a slight grade toward the main house, which had a new tin roof and fresh coats of blue and white paint, thanks to Obama’s recent financial help from afar. About halfway up the small hill, Obama stopped in midstride and recognized that he was missing his own companions. “Where are my wife and children?” he asked plaintively. They had fallen behind the mass of marchers surrounding him. Sasha then appeared before him and he scooped her into his arms. With chaos all around, she looked frightened and grabbed her father tightly around the shoulders and neck. “I have you, Sasha,” her father said soothingly. Obama started walking again and I noticed that Pete Souza, the Chicago Tribune photographer, had finally made it to the compound. Souza had missed Obama’s arrival because the media buses were fighting the crowds, just as Gibbs predicted, and he was exasperated. “This is out of control! Just absolutely out of control!” he observed. “I mean, I barely got one shot.” As for myself, I was busily taking notes and endeavoring, once again, not to get trampled by the pack.
Reaching the main house, Obama and his grandmother disappeared inside for their first visit in nearly fourteen years. The family reunion was initially scheduled to last nearly two and a half hours, after which Obama was to get some time alone at his father’s and grandfather’s gravesite, located on the compound. But because of the unforeseen events and chaotic atmosphere, after about forty minutes Obama emerged from the house and stood, arm in arm, between his eighty-three-year-old grandmother, Sarah Hussein Obama, and Auma. They all fielded questions from the press. He said the family had eaten porridge and chicken. Asked if his grandmother had given him any words of wisdom, Obama answered without hesitation: “Watch out for reporters.” When the questions were over, an American television correspondent based in Africa asked Obama to autograph his copy of Dreams. This drew disapproving stares from print journalists, who considered such a request to reveal a severe lack of objectivity.
Obama was then supposed to visit his father’s grave, the site of his emotional climax in his Dreams memoir. But such a private moment was unattainable in this atmosphere. Instead, aides pulled him away from the press and guided him into the SUV for the trip back to the Kisumu airport and then Nairobi. A U.S. military liaison, who was part of Obama’s traveling entourage, surveyed the madness and shook his head. “It’s a fucking circus,” he said. “I feel bad for Obama.”
CHAOS WOULD FOLLOW OBAMA INTO THE NEXT DAY, WHEN THE CODEL would take us to one of the bleakest places on the planet.
Kibera (pronounced Kee-bear-a) is recognized as the largest single slum in all of Africa, and thus in all the world. Between seven hundred thousand and a million impoverished souls are packed into a tract of urban land that is just two-and-a-half square kilometers. Situated in the southwest quadrant of Nairobi, Kibera was first settled extensively in the 1920s when British colonizers allowed a group of soldiers from what is now Sudan to establish homes on a wooded hillside on the outer reaches of Nairobi. The ethnic group, called Nubians, had fought for the Allies in World War I as part of the King’s African Rifles. Even though the British allowed the Nubians to live on the land, the English never gave the group official title to the territory. The Nubians established a community that they called Kibra, meaning “jungle” or “bushes.” Nevertheless, with no legal claim to the territory, they were essentially squatters.
This lack of recognition of Kibera followed through the entire twentieth century. Even after independence from Britain in the 1960s, the Kenyan government never officially recognized the community. No title deeds were issued. No sewage or water lines were constructed. No real power was bestowed upon the poor, who despite their privation swelled the population of Kibera. Most residents moved there from rural villages to seek better schooling in Nairobi or find jobs in the large city. Even as the population surged, however, the community remained in the shadows of Nairobi. Much like poor neighborhoods in the United States, Kibera was rarely visited by Kenyan politicians save for election time when they are seeking votes from all constituencies. Interestingly enough, Illinois’s senior U.S. senator, Dick Durbin, had toured Kibera several months before. Durbin’s visit, however, attracted none of the fanfare that Obama would, even though Durbin at the time held much greater power in the Senate as assistant minority leader. When I mentioned to a Kenyan journalist that Durbin had recently visited Kibera, he said that Durbin’s visit had garnered virtually no media attention.
Kibera was every bit as distressed as it had been billed. Many residents lacked basic services, such as clean running water and plumbing. Sewage and garbage were dumped into the open; dwellings were made of canvas and tin with corrugated roofing; and some children appeared less than fully nourished. The inhabitants, however, were positively gleeful at Obama’s visit. And like elsewhere, they turned out in droves. The motorcade could only move at a snail’s pace through the densely populated community because people had filled the streets and swarmed around the vehicles. A colorful mural painted on a wall on the village outskirts paid homage to Obama. It featured a man sitting on a barstool at an “Obama joint.”
Accompanied by Michelle, Obama attended two organized events in the slum: one that discussed a program involving microfinancing of small businesses in Kibera and a second that outlined a program to educate young people about HIV/AIDS prevention. But it was outside the events where Obama made the biggest media impact. Crowds had flooded around the small tin-roofed building housing the first event, and authorities had to push open a walking path for Obama and his wife to reach their motorcade afterward. As he stepped outside onto a dirt path leading to his SUV, Obama grabbed a bullhorn and raised it to his mouth, but the overzealous crowd drowned him out. He looked down, smiled and began again. “Hello!” he screamed in Luo. “Everybody in Kibera needs the same opportunities to go to school, to start businesses, to have enough to eat, to have decent clothes,” he told the residents, who madly cheered his words. “I love all of you, my brothers, all of you, my sisters. I want to make sure everybody in America knows Kibera. . . . Everyone here is my brother! Everyone here is my sister! I love Kibera!”
Obama’s next morning opened with a tree-planting ceremony for the sake of the environment. Shovels in hand, Obama, his wife and his daughters dropped an African olive tree and surrounding dirt into the middle of Freedom Park, a wide-open downtown Nairobi green space. Throughout the short event, a handful of photographers edged in front of their peers, jockeying for position, drawing the ire of Obama’s two-man security crew from the U.S. government because the photographers initially resisted moving back. As the disagreement subsided, one security man complained to the other, “Fuckin’ asshole journalists, man.” His partner nodded in agreement. The park had been cordoned off to outsiders, and another crowd of about five hundred Kenyans had amassed outside the fencing to see Obama. He grabbed another bullhorn and gave them a quick hello before ducking back into his dark SUV and being whisked back to the Serena Hotel for lunch. A fatigued-looking Gibbs shrugged. He turned to a few reporters and said, “Let’s walk back to the hotel. You know, you never see the real streets of a country when you go on these kinds of things. I’d like to feel the real streets of Kenya for ten seconds.” The moral here: Even ruthless political operatives have a softer side and want to experience the real world on occasion.
That afternoon, after all the spectacle of the trip—the staged events, the press-the-flesh moments, the trite banter with reporters—Obama stepped into perhaps his most comfortable environment, a situation that almost always inspires him. He gave a speech at a college. Obama’s address before a crowd of about a thousand students and academics at the University of Nairobi was carried live on the country’s largest television network and rebroadcast twice. The setting was a large, rather prosaically designed campus auditorium that Souza, the Tribune’s photographer, immediately saw as having limited artistic potential. Instead, Souza left the room and captured images of students who had stopped whatever they were doing to listen in rapt attention to Obama. Loudspeakers carried Obama’s words into courtyards and cafeterias and study rooms, where students appeared transfixed by the American senator. As for Obama, his timing was perfect, his voice was as rich as ever and thus his performance was at peak level. It was hard not to witness this kind of speech by Obama and not envision a presidential run. His presence, confidence and moral clarity filled the room.
His address was a call for Kenyans—in particular, young Kenyans—to work toward ending the country’s culture of corruption and ethnic politics. He asserted that positive change is almost always brought about by idealistic youths rather than older adults who have internally reconciled society’s injustices. In calling for an end to corruption, Obama spoke in generalities about who was responsible for this ill, and he sidestepped assigning specific blame to a political party or leader. “Here in Kenya, it is a crisis, a crisis that is robbing an honest people of the opportunities they have fought for, the opportunity they deserve,” he said. “Corruption has a way of magnifying the very worst twists of fate. It makes it impossible to respond effectively to crisis, whether it’s the HIV/AIDS pandemic or malaria or crippling drought.”
The senator received warm and occasionally enthusiastic applause during the speech. But this audience of Nairobi’s most well-educated youth was clearly more discerning about Obama than the roaring crowds in the streets. Some students with whom I spoke after the address said they could sense a definite charisma about Obama, but they were disappointed by his lack of specific remedies for Kenya’s endemic problems. They wanted him to take a harder line on the current political leadership. “There are people here with so much hatred toward the government that they wanted a direct attack,” said Dennis Onyango, a senior writer for the East African Standard. “They wanted him to name names.” But Obama was diplomatic about the source of the country’s corruption problems, which was on message in his mission for the trip. He strove to voice a strong anticorruption stance, and yet he did not want to point fingers and be dragged into local tribal politics. This is ground he has trod before in the United States—providing an overarching voice of moral authority without stepping into the fray and choosing sides. “He sounded very much like a politician,” one student told me. “He was eloquent, but it was a politician’s talk.”
This, effectively, was the end of my African excursion with Obama. For the next two days, Obama and his family went on safari in the Masai Mara region of Kenya, again with the American media entourage in tow. Obama’s staff had initially tried to keep the safari a private family outing, either to protect the image of Obama as continually working on the trip, or to give him some downtime with family. But as Obama was discovering more each day, the press was not going to let go of him anytime soon, so he relented and, despite occasional discomfort with the prying media, he even showed a bit of mercy for the weary American journalists. “Barack figured the reporters had traveled all this way and they were entitled to some relaxation and fun, too,” Auma said.
After the safari, Obama was off to Chad to speak with refugees of the horrific civil war in bordering Sudan. He had tried to visit Sudan itself, but he has always been outspoken about the atrocities occurring there, and the Sudanese government would not grant him a visa. At that point, more than two hundred thousand people had been killed in the Darfur region and two million more had been dislocated in the fighting between rebels and the government.
Beyond the sheer human misery before him, Obama would find the visit to the refugee camp wholly disheartening. One traveling journalist said Obama was “furious” with his aides because he had been allotted only ninety minutes to speak to the refugees. The refugees’ stories were translated from Arabic to French to English, consuming a great deal of time and making it difficult for reporters to hear. Obama, who had studied the Darfur situation intensely, learned only so much from the interviews. While the event most likely produced good television and newspaper copy, it did little to advance Obama’s knowledge about the conflict—and this was what apparently infuriated him. In his days as a community organizer, he was accustomed to listening to poor South Side residents pour out their troubles for hours on end. But here, he didn’t even receive the Cliffs Notes version. In a post-Africa interview, Obama told me that he found the entire African journey both “wonderful” and, in characteristically diplomatic terms, “a little bit frustrating”:
It was a little bit frustrating that, you know, now that rather than taking trips, I have to take CODELs, which means a lot of official business, a lot of pomp and circumstance, a lot of press. Which, you know, means that I can’t sort of wander off and explore these countries in the way that sometimes are the best ways to learn. But, you know, obviously, the Kenya portion of the trip, in particular, evoked a response that I hadn’t expected, to that magnitude. But on the other hand, it spoke maybe to, you know, the influence that I can exercise. That’s gratifying, in the sense that, like, when Michelle and I took that AIDS test, you know, the CDC said maybe half a million people might now take an AIDS test as a consequence of you taking it. When I gave the speech on corruption, you know, it was broadcast nationally, I think two or three times. I think I changed the debate inside Kenya for weeks after my visit. And so, you know, it was, I think, gratifying to feel as if I had used my bully pulpit effectively while I was there.
In the end, Obama’s trip to Africa was a learning experience for him—and for his family. It was yet another example of just how pervasive and intrusive the media will be in the life of a politician who maintains a profile of this stature. It was also yet another lesson in the enormous expectations of devoted followers not only in the United States but in Kenya. It brought to light that America remained the focal point of the world for many nations like Kenya. But even though Obama had risen to great heights in American politics as a senator, his power to “leave the world a better place” was still limited.
Upon her return to Chicago, Michelle admitted that she was “overwhelmed” by the “magnitude of everything.” She and Obama tried to leaven the enormous outpouring on their behalf with humor. “Barack and I joked the whole way that we have an armed escort now, and when we went in before, we just walked around from shop to shop. To have it elevated like this was kind of surreal. . . . There is part of you that is embarrassed by the scene of it. Part of you just wants to say, ‘Can we tame this down a little bit? Does it have to be all this? This is out of hand.’ That is my instinct and I know that is his instinct too—do we really need all this?”
For Auma, now a social services worker outside London, the madness of the trip and the intense idol worship from the Kenyans raised great concern. She still fears that her brother might be headed down a path littered with all the same land mines that contributed to her father’s premature death. To her, the restless life journeys of father and son have eerie parallels. After receiving an elite American education, her father returned to Kenya with incredible expectations thrust on him by his family and the Luo tribe. Ultimately, Barack Sr. could not satisfy all these intense desires and was overwhelmed by them. Obama certainly has studied his father’s life in depth and he appears to have learned from that story, Auma told me. But she is still concerned. “My father tried to live up to all of those expectations and I think Barack needs to learn from my father’s mistakes,” Auma said. “I think he is learning, but he just needs to set realistic goals for himself and set out to achieve them. Barack is like my father in that he is driven to perfection with regards to his work and he just needs to give himself a little slack. I am proud of Barack and I love him. But I worry about him.”