Obama's a local hero in Kenyan villages
By Laurie Goering
Chicago Tribune
KOGELO, Kenya — The local beer is called Senator, but there is a new way of ordering one in the open-air bars of Kenya's lush western hill country.
"Give me an Obama," drinkers say, slapping down their shillings.
Barack Obama may be the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Illinois, but in Kenya — particularly the quiet villages near Lake Victoria where his father grew up — he is fast becoming a local hero.
Farmers who once called their oxen Kenyatta or Moi after Kenyan presidents are now naming them Obama. A new television ad for Kenya's national phone service features a local man bragging to a friend he has just called "my first cousin Obama" in Chicago.
The 43-year-old, heavily favored to win election over Republican Alan Keyes next month, is hardly a native son of eastern Africa. His father grew up in Kogelo but left to study in Hawaii, where he met Obama's American mother.
The marriage did not last, and Barack Obama Sr. returned to Kenya without his son and became a government economist. The younger Obama visited Kenya for the first time years after his father's death in a car crash in 1982.
LAURIE GOERING / CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Gilbert Olali, 11, front, stands with classmates at his school in Kogelo, Kenya, where Barack Obama's father grew up. Olali has been following news of Obama's U.S. Senate campaign by radio.
Obama's extended family in tiny rural Kogelo, however, never forgot the child they knew only from photos. He looked like them, with his protruding ears and lanky build, and they put his picture on the living-room wall next to other family photos.
"His mother sent a photo when she was pregnant, and we had one of him playing basketball in school," said his 83-year-old stepgrandmother, Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama, the family matriarch. "I was always longing to see him. But for a long time I did not."
The Obamas live nearly atop the equator, a few hours' drive from the Ugandan border and down a narrow dirt track that ends in a sloping plot of green tropical farmland.
Goats graze on weeds along the driveway, and neighbors push bicycles laden with trussed goats and green bananas to market. Mango and avocado trees flank the family home, a small brick structure with a faded green tin roof. Smoke from a cooking fire curls from a shed out back.
Barack's stepuncle, Said Hussein Obama, steps out of a plot of corn he is weeding to greet visitors.
He waves away apologies for the interruption, saying talking to journalists has been his primary occupation since his nephew announced his Senate run.
"I'm the public-relations officer on the Barry issue," he jokes, calling the candidate by a family nickname. He changes his shirt, chases a couple of chickens out of the living room and invites his callers to take a seat.
Life has not been the same for the Obama clan since their American relative got famous.
Said Obama, 38, a modest unemployed bottling-plant mechanic, now avoids using his last name in introductions because "immediately as I identify myself as Obama, the topic changes," he said. He finds himself invited to posh parties he once never would have attended simply because acquaintances want to drop a famous name.
"It's a kind of celebrity status," he says, smiling.
Barack's stepuncle and his family got a first look at their skinny American cousin in 1988, when Obama came to Kogelo to visit his father's grave and meet the Kenyan side of his family. When he said hello, "we heard the voice of Barack. It was exactly how his father spoke," Said Obama remembers.
On that trip, and a subsequent one in 1992 with his then-fiancée Michelle Robinson, Obama quickly fit in as a member of the family, his relatives remember. He carried baskets of vegetables to market for his stepgrandmother, while Robinson helped the women fetch water from a nearby stream. He devoured helpings of stewed collard greens, tried out a few words of Luo, the local language, and surprised the neighbors by rising early to go jogging along the red-earth footpaths of the village.
"What struck me most is he was very humble. That he came back to see where he was from is very moving," his stepgrandmother said, sipping tea under an avocado tree. She said she also was pleased that, following African tradition, he asked for the family's approval to marry Robinson.
When Obama Jr.'s African family looks at him — a child of a white mother, an African father and an Asian stepfather, raised in Kansas and Indonesia, a top law student at Harvard, a father of two, a state senator, from a family that includes Muslims and Christians — they see a man ready to bridge the world's divides and follow in the footsteps of his forefathers.
Obama's family — and most other Kogelo residents — tracks the progress of his Senate campaign by radio. An uncle with a car also drives to the nearby town of Siaya each day to fetch the Kenyan papers, which are following the race closely.
In Kenya, where a once-promising government anti-corruption drive has stalled, and joblessness and poverty seem intractable, nearly everyone is hoping for good news about a somewhat-native son.
"He gives us inspiration to work hard in everything we do," said Hussein Michael Obwayo, 37, an out-of-work printer hanging around Kogelo's small market square. "He has shown you can excel."
Others hope for more concrete benefits if Obama wins a Senate seat. People talk excitedly of new windows for the local school, pavement for the rutted dirt road to Kogelo, maybe even an influx of cash-flush tourists.
"If he gets the position, he's going to develop his constituency in Chicago, but I think he will also develop his constituency here," said Dismas Jania, 71, a bicycle repairman pounding bent wheels against a rusted engine block, his makeshift anvil. He is hoping Obama, following African tradition, will build a small cottage in Kogelo, a sign he plans to return often.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Obama's a local hero in Kenyan villages
