Obama and Kenya. Matthew Carotenuto

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Obama and Kenya - Matthew Carotenuto Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies

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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 extended far beyond colonial boundaries. Even a casual observer cannot help but notice evidence of Kenya’s long-standing global connections residing side by side with the vestiges of colonial rule from the saltwater shores of the Indian Ocean to the freshwater beaches of Lake Victoria.

      For example, visiting Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city and an urban center of note for more than a millennium, one is struck by the muezzin’s call to prayer, so familiar in the predominantly Muslim, Kiswahili-speaking areas of Kenya’s coast, echoing over the fortified walls of Fort Jesus, erected by the Portuguese in the late 1400s, and across a port where international cargo vessels and dhows, a type of lateen-sail vessel used in the region for a thousand years, both ply the waters. Unsurprisingly given the region’s deep cosmopolitan connections, inhabitants of the Kenyan coast, both past and present, have imagined their distinct “Swahili” religio-cultural identity as intimately linked with the experiences of other Indian Ocean communities from the Middle East to Indonesia.15 Yet, the Swahili Coast is not the only region of Kenya where identity has been imagined through webs of cultural and linguistic connections constituted by long-standing patterns of migration and trade.

      Heading west to the freshwater coast of Lake Victoria, where Kenya borders Tanzania and Uganda, one arrives in the port city of Kisumu. In the home of Kenya’s Luo community, the paternal kin of Barack Obama, one encounters traders from around the Lake Victoria basin mingling on the beaches, wolfing down grilled tilapia and ugali, a thick maize meal porridge, at long picnic tables while chatting in a mixed lingua franca of English, Kiswahili, and Luo as Swahili hip-hop from Tanzania competes with Congolese Lingala and local Benga and Ohangla beats. In this region, too, connectivity and a sense of distinct linguistic-cultural identity stretch deep beyond present-day commerce, back centuries to the migrations of people from along the Nile up to northern Uganda and down to South Sudan who belonged to groups related in language and practice to Kenya’s Luo community. Here in Barack Obama’s ancestral home, colloquially called “Luoland,” many Luo signal as much affinity for other Nilotic-speaking groups as they do for their fellow Kenyans nationwide.16

      In sum, the vignettes presented above point to the book’s key themes—the complex narratives that make up Kenya’s history and how the politics of belonging create sometimes competing notions between national and local identities. As Obama and Kenya shows, there is no one story of what it means to be Kenyan. Rather, identities are historical, flexible, multilayered, and crosscutting. As such, any claim to the existence of a definitive “Kenyan” identity or to a singular Kenyan history is fraught with inaccuracy and bias. Here we also want to caution readers about the politics of language broadly used in the debate about Obama and Kenya and direct them to pay close attention to the politics of one loaded term, “tribe,” which can have disparaging connotations, but is also widely employed by Africans themselves. In Western discourse, “tribe,” “tribal,” and “tribalism” have often been used to dismiss Africans as primitive, primordial. Such usage does not reflect how African communities figure their own identities along tribal lines.

      As much as this book is about unpacking the contested histories that Obama’s East African roots underscore, it is also an exploration into the local politics of belonging in Kenya. Many popular outside accounts frame the complex history of ethnic identity in Kenya with simplistic and static terms like “tribe” and use pejorative adjectives like tribal and tribalism to describe everything from cultural beliefs to political conflict. Like many students in our classes, we, too, agree that these words carry political weight in contemporary discourse that perpetuates understandings of African identities as “uncivilized,” “primitive,” and “timeless.” As the term “tribe” fails to capture the ways Kenyans have historically debated ethnicity as constantly changing, contingent, and negotiated, we reject the term in our own analysis and treat the Obama and Kenya connection as much more complicated than a simple story about the son of a “Luo tribesman” from Kenya hewing to his “tribal” heritage.17

      Given Kenya’s fascinating environmental and cultural diversity, it is not surprising that the country and its people have inspired the production of numerous historical narratives. However, these works often deliberately fail to embrace Kenya’s complexity, instead simplifying or skewing Kenya’s multifaceted past to fit with particular social and political agendas. Since the earliest days of British imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century, Western audiences have been bombarded by scenes of majestic wild landscapes where heroic beasts are pitted against noble yet “savage” Africans. Further, literary and cinematic representations of a glamorous colonial life of sundowner cocktails and lion hunts abound, and films like the Oscar-winning Out of Africa have long helped to perpetuate romanticized images of the colonial period with the civilizing zeal of the “white man’s burden” lurking as a dangerous subtext.

      While contemporary representations are perhaps more subtle than the popular accounts of the colonial era, Kenya’s past has long been narrated as the history of a wild environment brought into the “developed” world through colonial expansion targeted to serve European interests. For instance, when Frederick Lugard, a famous British colonial official and architect of imperial policy across much of the continent, wrote about The Rise of Our East African Empire, he cited the Earl of Rosebery’s now famous speech, delivered at the Royal Colonial Institute in 1893, which argued that the British were “engaged in ‘pegging out claims for the future.’ . . . We have to consider what countries must be developed either by ourselves or some other nation and we have to remember that it is part of our responsibility and heritage to take care that the world, as far as it can be moulded by us, shall receive the Anglo-Saxon and not another character.”18

      Written in an era of colonial expansion and violent repression of African resistance across the

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