The Son of an African Who Wants to be the First Black President
Published in El Clarin
(Argentina) on June 2, 2008
by Silvina Heguy (link to original)
(Argentina) on June 2, 2008
by Silvina Heguy (link to original)
Translated from
by Caroline Stern.
Edited by .
The 46 year old democratic candidate won the nomination in five months of campaigning.
Barack Hussein Obama Jr. needed five months to beat Hillary Clinton and enter history as the first black candidate to the presidency of the United States. He did it with the help of a political lineage which he divided between the "the president who chose the moon as the new frontier" and "the king who brought us to a mountain top and signaled the path to the promised land."
Under the memory of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, two of the most legendary personalities of U.S. politics, Obama convinced the democrats that change was possible and much better than the entrenched experience of his rival, Hillary Clinton, for a country which immerses herself slowly in a recession that taints the future with despair.
It was with a simple "yes we can" for which the 46-year old politician was awarded the titles of "charismatic orator" and "political phenomenon" in a speech in New Hampshire last January. During the months that followed, and led up to yesterday's victory, the Harvard and Colombia graduate, married and with two daughters, demonstrated that he also held the rights to the titles necessary to survive--and to escape unscathed--the attacks of a tough primary competition.
In these five months the "Obama Phenomenon" infected the apathetic youth of university campuses with the desire to make politics. The expansive wave even reached a lost village in Kenya. There, his grandmother "Mama Sara," became one of the press' most coveted characters. Obama Jr. visited her house in Nyangoma-Kogelo in 1987 as a 26-year old law student and came to understand that in his absent father's story lay also his own.
Barack--whose name means "the fortunate one"--is the only son of the first black man to attend Hawai University and who married an 18-year old texan woman who was "white as milk." Barack was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, from this couple which lasted until the young African left home to follow his studies, and until life led him to other marriages, to other children, and to return to his native Kenya with a frustration he drowned in alcohol and ended with a 1982 car accident.
On African soil, Obama is remembered by those who stand immobile, silent for hours before his father's tomb. They say he buried the disgust for his past in the letters of his autobiography, where he spoke of his drug consumption so that no one could present it later as an obstacle in his path to realize his dream of becoming the first black president of the United States.
He wrote these memories when he had just finished his legal studies at Harvard in 1991. Afterwards, with the ghosts of his past well tamed, he threw himself into his political career. It has been too short of an itinerary, according to some critics. In 2004 he was elected senator and in 2007--in the same building in which Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery--said he would be the first African-American president. Yesterday, he came a little closer to the realisation of this dream.
Barack Hussein Obama Jr. needed five months to beat Hillary Clinton and enter history as the first black candidate to the presidency of the United States. He did it with the help of a political lineage which he divided between the "the president who chose the moon as the new frontier" and "the king who brought us to a mountain top and signaled the path to the promised land."
Under the memory of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, two of the most legendary personalities of U.S. politics, Obama convinced the democrats that change was possible and much better than the entrenched experience of his rival, Hillary Clinton, for a country which immerses herself slowly in a recession that taints the future with despair.
It was with a simple "yes we can" for which the 46-year old politician was awarded the titles of "charismatic orator" and "political phenomenon" in a speech in New Hampshire last January. During the months that followed, and led up to yesterday's victory, the Harvard and Colombia graduate, married and with two daughters, demonstrated that he also held the rights to the titles necessary to survive--and to escape unscathed--the attacks of a tough primary competition.
In these five months the "Obama Phenomenon" infected the apathetic youth of university campuses with the desire to make politics. The expansive wave even reached a lost village in Kenya. There, his grandmother "Mama Sara," became one of the press' most coveted characters. Obama Jr. visited her house in Nyangoma-Kogelo in 1987 as a 26-year old law student and came to understand that in his absent father's story lay also his own.
Barack--whose name means "the fortunate one"--is the only son of the first black man to attend Hawai University and who married an 18-year old texan woman who was "white as milk." Barack was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, from this couple which lasted until the young African left home to follow his studies, and until life led him to other marriages, to other children, and to return to his native Kenya with a frustration he drowned in alcohol and ended with a 1982 car accident.
On African soil, Obama is remembered by those who stand immobile, silent for hours before his father's tomb. They say he buried the disgust for his past in the letters of his autobiography, where he spoke of his drug consumption so that no one could present it later as an obstacle in his path to realize his dream of becoming the first black president of the United States.
He wrote these memories when he had just finished his legal studies at Harvard in 1991. Afterwards, with the ghosts of his past well tamed, he threw himself into his political career. It has been too short of an itinerary, according to some critics. In 2004 he was elected senator and in 2007--in the same building in which Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery--said he would be the first African-American president. Yesterday, he came a little closer to the realisation of this dream.