Obama and Kenya. Matthew Carotenuto

and months, we watched closely as a steady stream of politicized popular discourse, occurring informally in Kenyan homes and workplaces and on the pages of the local press, about the connection between Obama and Kenya generally, and Obama and the Luo particularly, began to flow. Indeed, over the weeks and months that followed his election, Senator Barack Obama was publicly celebrated as a “son of the soil” of Kenya in public discourse, but in other debates at home and abroad, his Kenyan roots were firmly being replanted in Kenya’s western regions, casting him first and foremost as a member of the minority Luo community, who make up just over 10 percent of the population.⁶ “Obamamania,” as Kenyans came to refer to the celebration of Obama’s rise, began to grip the nation in late 2004. T-shirts and commemorative songs written about the junior senator from Illinois began to be seen and heard on the streets of Nairobi and in the Western Kenyan city of Kisumu even before Obama gained widespread national appeal in the United States.⁷

      Obamamania reached a fever pitch four years later with the next round of American presidential elections in 2008. Importantly, what we came to glean over several years of research sparked by the ambassador’s enthusiastic congratulations offered to Raila was how the story of Barack Obama Jr. and his Kenyan heritage has been used by numerous political actors in Kenya and abroad to frame narratives of Kenya’s history that have both perpetuated common Western stereotypes about Africa and helped to reinforce the contentious politics of ethnicity rooted in Kenya’s colonial history. These narratives of Kenya’s past engendered by the Obama-Kenya connection have held world historical significance, contributing to the shape of contemporary electoral politics both in the United States and in Kenya. For political actors in both Africa and the United States, the Kenyan roots of an American president (read and complicated through the lens of identity politics in two very different contexts) have offered ample resources with which to envisage their own localized concerns and to market narratives of Africa’s past to distinct audiences. Further, viewed through the prisms of race and ethnicity and refracted through politicized understandings of Kenya’s past, the story of Obama and Kenya has been interpreted not simply as an American political story but as an event of national political import in Kenya and a historical moment of global significance. For political actors and audiences in Kenya, the United States, and an array of places and spaces around the world, the targeted telling of the Obama and Kenya story has transformed the Kenyan past into a sort of political currency, a situation that, as Dane Kennedy argues, “highlights the polemical power of history and the complex array of politically and morally freighted meanings that inform its practice.”⁸

      As historians of Kenya, we trace the impact and meaning of these interwoven histories of Kenya and the Obama family after more than a decade of historical and political entrepreneurship aiming to capitalize on the Obama-Kenya connection. Depictions of this connection, found in productions as diverse as best-selling political biographies and amateur histories, have influenced the ways in which multiple publics around the world conceive Kenya’s past and present, and also point to the increasingly digital methods and means through which local and global histories are both produced and consumed. Indeed, Obama’s political ascendancy created a unique space in which African history was debated in real time by global audiences who read, wrote, blogged, chatted, and tweeted about the significance of the Obama family’s place in the history of Kenya, and the place of Africa in world history more generally.

      Throughout this book we identify and break down the dominant narratives about Kenya’s colonial past and postcolonial present in order to dispel some of the stereotypes of and misunderstandings about Kenya’s history that the Obama story has rekindled and fanned. Using a variety of sources, from archival records and oral interviews to the popular press and amateur histories, we analyze how Obama’s Kenyan roots, and the histories associated with them, have been interpreted by and for a range of local and international audiences. From Obama’s political supporters in East Africa to his opponents abroad, examining the ways in which local and global audiences have interpreted Obama’s connection to Kenya can tell us not only about how Kenya’s past and present (and Africa and its place in the world more generally) have been represented since the early twentieth century, but also about the social, political, and material significance of these representations.

       Placing Obama and His Kin in the Contested Story of Kenya

      Constructing a history of Kenya through the story of an American president’s paternal heritage is certainly not an easy task, and it is one we take on with great caution and with the goals of clarification and correction. Kenya is a large country, bigger than France and nearly the size of Texas.⁹ Spanning the equator, its landscape represents many points across the environmental spectrum. A thin, tropical band runs along the Indian Ocean, while vast savanna grasslands with variable and often unreliable rainfall patterns dominate more than 70 percent of the country’s interior. Much of the northern region of Kenya, extending to the borders with Somalia, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, consists of sparsely populated terrain suitable mainly for pastoralism due to the semiarid climate and history of underdevelopment in the area. In fact, when traveling from the capital city to northern towns like Garissa, Wajir, Marsabit, or Lodwar, one is often greeted with the wry question “How is Kenya?”—a query reflecting both the sharp physical divide between the dry, sparsely peopled North and the more fertile, more densely populated regions of the country, and the historical divide in development created by policies dating back to the colonial era that have favored the rest of the country to the expense of the North.¹⁰

      Over much of the last century, the southern-central and western regions of Kenya have been most intensely marked by colonialism and its legacies and have dominated colonial and postcolonial politics. From Mombasa to Kisumu, the stories of the Obama family and Kenya span these regions, revealing the broader history of Kenya’s colonial past and illustrating the postcolonial political and socioeconomic challenges that have shaped Kenya since it gained independence from Britain in 1963. Rising to an average of more than five thousand feet in many places, the temperate and densely populated regions of Central Kenya form the economic engine of the country’s largely agriculturally based economy, in which tea, coffee, sugarcane, and other cash crops are grown alongside subsistence staples like maize and wheat throughout rural areas. Cutting a swath through the center of the country is the Great Rift Valley, flanked by magnificent escarpments, volcanic massifs, and the snowcapped highest peaks of Africa, Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro. To the west, the country is bounded by the craggy beaches of Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile River and the historical home of Kenya’s Luo-speaking populations and of Obama’s kin and ancestors.¹¹

      Figure 1.1. Famed Kenyan critique of Obamamania from renowned East African cartoonist GADO (Godfrey Mwampembwa). Daily Nation, June 10, 2008.

      While the flora and fauna of Kenya’s countryside have long fascinated visitors, the demographic history of Kenya reflects dramatic changes similar to those of neighboring countries in regard to migration patterns and to the related economic prospects of the wananchi. With a population of just over eight million in 1960, by 2013 Kenya had swelled to more than forty million citizens, a quarter of whom now reside in urban environments.¹² In fact, the Kenyan government projects that by 2030 its population will exceed sixty million, with more than half of the wananchi making the move from the countryside to the city.¹³ Even the casual visitor to Nairobi cannot miss the effects of this change as a construction boom involving large-scale infrastructure projects dominates both the high-rise cityscape of downtown Nairobi and the sprawling suburbs of the greater capital’s three million–plus residents.

      Just as the map of Kenya reflects a great deal of environmental and demographic variability, its cultural landscape is equally diverse. With a fast-growing population speaking more than forty different languages, no one linguistic or cultural group represents a majority of the population.¹⁴ Like most African countries, Kenya’s history as a nation-state does not start with the founding of an ancient African kingdom or empire, but instead begins with the story of how late nineteenth-century British imperialism and African resistance to it carved out the borders of the Kenya Colony from among people whose cultures, connections, and histories