The voices of the continent unite in their welcome for the new president of the United States, tinged with realism

Power came to Nyangoma-Kogelo, Barack Obama’s grandmother’s village, within hours of her grandson’s victory speech. The Kenya Power and Lighting truck, with its men and their cables and electricity posts, were busy connecting the little village to the national grid as the crowds gathered and exulted at Mama Sarah’s front door – a prospect that, if at all it had been envisaged, had never been realistically expected during Mama Sarah’s lifetime.


Other strange things happened during that historic week in November: a battalion of Caterpillar earthmovers and tipper trucks graded the nine kilometer road leading to the house in four days, a record. There was talk that piped water would soon be installed and that the airport in Kisumu was going to be upgraded to international status. In those heady days of November 2008, in completely unprecedented fashion, the government was actually delivering ‘development’ to a people marginalized since independence. So hurriedly that it barely had time to examine the political implications. It seemed that a new era was dawning in which the new stature of Kogelo would accelerate progress. 


Certainly there will be parts of the African continent where Obama’s election will herald fast, concrete and visible changes, like Kogelo. More subtle and substantial changes could also be on the way for Africa – particularly in areas affected by the political spillover from a Middle East brought to boiling point by the previous administration. A more engaged US State Department, until now overshadowed by the Department of Defense, will also help unwind some of the more tangled US deployments in Mali and Algeria.

Losing its shine


But a sense of realism has gradually set in. For many people in his ancestral Nyanza Province and beyond, the disenchantment with the performance of the Kenyan coalition government has dampened Obama-mania. Almost a year into the coalition government, all that the Kenyan public has experienced is a rise in the cost of living and an increasingly draconian state. There is now less a feeling that the world will change as a result of Obama’s victory than there is one of pride that ‘one of their own’ sits on top of the world.


“I don’t think people are expecting much to change,” says Steve Sande, a Kisumu resident and a youth activist. “People here are very proud that one of our own is in the White House, but nobody is thinking that doors are suddenly going to open as a result. Obama will have a lot on his plate, including sorting out the mess in Gaza. He will have very little time to turn his attention to us.”


Poverty and possibilities


Nyanza Province in western Kenya, from where Obama’s father hailed, remains one of the most neglected parts of the country, with one of the highest levels of poverty in the country. Having produced a disproportionate share of Kenya’s dissidents during the eras of Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki, it was ‘denied’ development by successive Kenyan governments. 


Will a US economy in trouble have the political capital available to extend programmes like the African Growth and Opportunity Act? Can it deepen its trade links with the continent beyond oil imports, potentially at the expense of American jobs? Will the new president have much time to spare for the rest of the world, given the huge clear-up job he has been handed at home?


Ultimately the most important news may be a change of tone from the US and the importance of the president as a symbol. Children growing up today in Asia, the US, Europe and Africa will see a black man running the most powerful country in the world. Old prejudice will melt, self-confidence will be released – two powerful gifts to take forward. 


As one text message doing the rounds across Nigeria had it: “Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could march, Martin Luther King marched so that Obama could run and Obama ran so that our children could fly.”