The African Instinct Speaks to Obama about Re-election

Barack Obama has always gone to Kenya at decisive moments in his life, when he sets out to begin a new chapter in his life. He traveled there in 1988, before he was about to broaden his studies at Harvard’s Law School, and after ending his time in the dynamic community in Chicago and about to embark on a voyage that would lead him to politics. In 1992, he traveled with his girlfriend Michelle, whom he would soon marry. In 2006, he went as a senator of the United States, with his wife and two daughters, a few months from starting his career in the White House.

“It’s as if he had to return to Kenya to ask for his ancestors’ blessings,” explains Michael Odera, a young Kenyan who is in Washington researching malaria for a couple of months.* His interpretation surprised a group of my colleagues in a recent conversation about Obama. As you return to the tribe to ask the elderly for permission — in relation to an upcoming marriage and starting a family or an important professional decision — Obama has gone to that corner next to Lake Victoria where his father’s lineage begins. Probably without knowing that the old voice of Africa was waiting …

The interpretation is suggestive and would indicate that the American president has more African in him than what he really thinks. Odera is Luo like Obama (so reveals a last name beginning with “O”), and was brought up in the same land where the paternal family of the Democratic leader still resides. Odera has provided access for some reporters to the town where Sarah Hussein Obama, the president’s grandmother (not the biological one, but one of his grandfather’s wives) lives.

Odera is convinced that Obama will go to Kenya with all the showiness of a tenant of the White House if he achieves a second term. “Doing it in the first one would have been too risky politically, because he would have emphasized his relationship with Kenya and he would have fed the controversy about his birthplace once more, something that wasn’t good in the face of re-election.”* Kenya was upset that Obama’s first trip to a sub-Saharan country was to Ghana instead, and that the first head of state to visit the Oval Office wasn’t a Kenyan, but the President of Tanzania. “But Kenya knows it’s only a matter of time,” says the young Lou.* Then, according to his theory, Obama will go there to receive the blessing for his departure from the White House and before his post-presidential projects.

If Africa’s voice is so powerful and Obama didn’t hear it in his first term, maybe that means that he has a second re-election secured.

* Editor’s Note: While accurately translated, these quotes could not be independently verified.