NAIROBI, KENYA–Thousands of pounds of used clothing pour into this east African country every year to be sold dirt cheap by hawkers and secondhand shops that are ubiquitous in the city’s commercial business district. Clothing from the United States is especially popular and Western tourists might be surprised to spot Kenyans wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the iconic images of Tupac or Biggie, replicas of Aaron Rodgers’ Green Bay Packers jersey and Kobe Bryant’s Lakers jerseys–both 8 and 24– or Bowdoin College Rowing Team sweatshirts.
Visitors might also be surprised by what they will not see here, which is any apparel that references former U.S. President Barack Obama, whose father was born in Kenya. There are no t-shirts from his historic campaign touting Hope and Change,” no hoodies proclaiming “Yes, We Can!” nor baseball caps bearing his name.
Said Michael Wambui, a 38-year-old social worker here:
“Those items are not in supply and even if they were, nobody would buy them.”
This Juneteenth, as the Obama Presidential Center opens to the public on Chicago’s South Side, his image is nowhere to be found in the markets of the country that gave the world his father.
“A Blessing From God”: The Euphoria of 2008
As it did among Blacks in the U.S., Obama’s 2008 election as the United States’ first Black president sparked euphoria here in this former British colony of 50 million people, where throngs of jubilant Kenyans took to the streets to celebrate his victory, cheering, singing, dancing and applauding their native son until daybreak. One Kenyan villager told National Public Radio on Election Night 18 years ago:
“This is just a blessing from God.”
In declaring the day after Election Day, November 5, a national holiday, Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki wrote in a letter to Obama:
“We the Kenyan people are immensely proud of your Kenyan roots. Your victory is not only an inspiration to millions of people all over the world, but it has special resonance with us here in Kenya.”
Kenyans would go on to name streets, babies, buses and cattle after Obama, and compose songs in tribute to him in anticipation of his 2015 official state visit, which one Kenyan financial analyst compared to President John F.Kennedy’s 1963 trip to Ireland. The New York Times described the visit thusly:
“At Safaricom Indoor Arena, where he delivered a speech to 4,500 people, the crowd chanted, ‘Obama! Obama! Obama!’ and the public address system played a song with the refrain, ‘I’m coming home.’”
The “Obama Bonus” That Never Arrived
Eleven years later, however, the bloom is off the rose, and it’s not entirely clear that Obama could get so much as a ham sandwich here in the land of his ancestors. In both casual conversations and formal interviews with nearly two dozen Kenyans from various walks of life over a period of three months, virtually everyone spoke of Obama as a bitter disappointment, if indeed they speak of him at all.
The reason is obvious. Similar to African Americans’ disillusionment with Obama after losing more wealth under his administration than at any time since the Freedmen’s Bank collapsed in 1874, the financial benefits, or “Obama bonus” that Kenyans anticipated failed to materialize. In fact, when adjusted for inflation, Kenya’s per capita income, or gross domestic product, was not impacted substantially to change the material conditions of most Kenyans, and half the population today subsists on $3-per-day. That is consistent with the experience of sub-Saharan Africa on the whole during the Obama years.
Said Benson Nyaga, 72, a physician and pastor here:
“Everyone still respects Obama because he is our brother and if he is attacked, we will defend him and say ‘this is our boy.’ But the truth is he did nothing for Africans or Kenya. In that sense he is more like a white man than a brother.”
“The excitement was certainly there when he was first elected,” 41-year-old Peninah Mwaura told the Kansas City Defender. “But we expected Obama would bring badly needed investment to Kenya and in terms of economic growth Kenyans don’t regard him that highly. As time went on, he showed himself to be more like his white mother than his African father. He made Kenya to be globally recognized and we are thankful for that but I don’t think you’ll find many Kenyans who have anything positive to say about him.”
Libya, AFRICOM, and a Militarized Continent
Mwaura and several others here said they found it unconscionable that Obama made no effort to address Kenya’s persistent poverty while showering Israel with $38 billion in military aid. Others cited his role in authorizing the 2011 military intervention in Libya that culminated in the torture and murder of that country’s longtime leader, Muammar al-Qadaffi, a tremendously popular figure on the continent who was known for his pan-African policies, including a guest worker program that allowed tens of thousands of migrants into the Arab country to work on farms and in the oil industry.
The Obama administration financed jihadist rebel militias that targeted the darker-skinned migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, resulting in open-air slave markets, and inflaming tensions between Arabs and Blacks across the continent.
Compounding matters was Obama’s dramatic expansion of the United States’ African Command, known as AFRICOM, purportedly to fight terrorism. But in increasing the number of military installations on the ground from 3 to 84, many Africans say that he provoked terrorism rather than curbing it, prompting the proliferation of violent Muslim extremist groups, like Boko Haram, in Nigeria. Terrorists now threaten to overrun Mozambique, the former Portuguese colony in southeast Africa, that previously reported no terrorist attacks.
And adding insult to injury were the remarks made by Obama’s Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, who famously said of Qadaffi’s murder, “We came, we saw, he died,” followed by an unnerving cackle.
“Why would Obama hire that horrible woman?” asked a barista at a Nairobi coffee shop, who asked that her name not be used to avoid antagonizing her employer. “That really made a lot of Kenyans think of Obama as more American than African, and more white than Black.”
Watching America Kill Its Own: Trayvon, Tamir, Charleston
Similarly, Kenyans watched with great interest the news coverage of the 2012 vigilante killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin; the 2014 police slayings of 18-year-old Michael Brown and 12-year-old Tamir Rice; and the 2015 massacre of nine Black parishioners at a South Carolina church by a white supremacist, and wondered aloud why Obama didn’t do anything to address terrorism against African Americans.
“That was an eye-opener for Kenyans,” Mwaura said. “We saw that if he wouldn’t help (African Americans), then he certainly wasn’t going to do anything to help us.”
As the Obama Presidential Center opens to the public today on Chicago’s South Side, it is not difficult to find African Americans who express similar feelings of disillusionment about the nation’s 44th head of state, and even displeasure about the design of the $850 billion library that some have compared to a mausoleum. Said one African American woman in a YouTube video as she stood in front of the towering structure
“Obama, before you come and cut that ribbon on this ugly building, come and apologize to the South Side of Chicago, to Chicago period. People stood behind you thinking that you was going to be about something and you wasn’t about nothing. You owe us an apology.”
The Lost Luo: A Son Who Never Came Home
A teacher and graduate student, Kevin Ochieng Wasonga, is from the same village as Obama’s father, Nyang’oma-Kogelo, in western Kenya, and is a member of the same tribe, the Luos. Obama first visited the village in the late 1980s to research his family heritage, and returned in 1992 with his fiancée, Michelle Robinson. But Wasongo said that he made no genuine efforts to connect to the culture. He told the Defender:
“I view him as a Luo because his father was a Luo but I view him as a lost Luo. He doesn’t speak the language, he didn’t marry a Luo woman, he doesn’t own any land here and his lifestyle is 100 percent American.”
Another person, 29-year-old Nairobi taxi driver Collins Okeno said “Obama used Kenyans as props to further his own political ambition,” “He cared nothing for Black people either here or in America. In that sense, he is truly Kenyan. I’m afraid that we have to concede that Obama is just another corrupt African politician.”
