WASHINGTON — The first time Barack Obama visited Kenya,
the land of his father, he was hoping to fill “a great emptiness” he
felt inside, to figure out who he was and where he fit in the world.
He
was met at the airport by a half sister and an aunt. “Welcome home,”
the aunt told him. The three squeezed into an old Volkswagen Beetle,
whose muffler fell off during the drive into Nairobi. As the aunt got
out to go to work, she admonished Mr. Obama not to “get lost again.”
Twenty-eight
years later, he leaves on Thursday to return to Kenya as the president
of the United States with an entourage of hundreds and a long motorcade
that includes an armored car with a working muffler. Any question of
where he fits in the world has long since been answered. But how Kenya
fits into his own identity remains one of the enduring questions of his
presidency.
Through
more than six years in office for Mr. Obama, Kenya has been a
complicated part of his political persona. Known for a youthful memoir
exploring his Kenyan roots, Mr. Obama has been celebrated as a son of
Africa who reached the pinnacle of power. But he also found himself
besieged by a conspiracy theory that he had actually been born in Kenya
and was therefore ineligible to be president — a theory he felt
compelled to dispel by marching into the White House briefing room in 2011 with his a birth certificate from Hawaii.
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Mr. Obama considered the “birther” movement,
now largely defunct, a distraction and a cynical ploy by opponents like
Donald J. Trump, but he stayed away from Kenya until now, unwilling to
provoke the obvious political circus that would have ensued. During his
first term, he spent about 24 hours in sub-Saharan Africa, and on the
other side of the continent from his father’s home. Some critics said
that the first president with African roots was doing less for the
continent than the white president he succeeded.
With
re-election behind him, Mr. Obama has shown renewed interest in Africa.
He hosted a summit meeting in Washington for African leaders last year
and just pushed a renewal of an African trade preference program through
Congress.
This
week’s visit to Kenya, followed by a stop in Ethiopia, will be his
fourth trip to sub-Saharan Africa as president, more than any of his
predecessors made. He will be the first sitting president to visit
either Kenya or Ethiopia, and he hopes to reinforce efforts to bring
electricity, security and democracy to Africa.
“President
Obama’s record on Africa will not only match that of his predecessors
but, I will predict with confidence, will exceed it,” Susan E. Rice, his
national security adviser, said Wednesday, citing his Power Africa
electrification program and his Feed the Future effort to make sure
Africans have enough to eat.
The
trip will have its trials dealing with two countries that have not been
models of democracy lately. In Kenya, he will meet with President Uhuru
Kenyatta, who had been charged with crimes against humanity for
instigating ethnic violence until the case was dropped last December. In
Ethiopia, he will meet with Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn just a
month after the governing party and its allies won 100 percent of the
seats in Parliament.
His
initiatives have had their own troubles. Power Africa, which Mr. Obama
kicked off during a 2013 visit to the continent, has so far not
delivered the kind of electricity it promised. Ms. Rice said the program
had been slow to get off the ground but was now “building up strength
and capacity,” adding, “This is going to take time.”
But as much as the policy issues will present challenges for the traveling president, so will the emotional and symbolic ones.
“Obviously,
Kenya holds a special place for him, and it was central to that first
book and, I think, central to his self-exploration,” said David Axelrod,
Mr. Obama’s former White House senior adviser. “And I think he also
knows what he represents there.”
Bill
Burton, another former aide, said Kenya had shaped Mr. Obama’s identity
as an African-American. “It’s obvious if you read his books, if you
listen to what he’s said about his own biography, Kenya plays a very big
role in how he thinks about the world and how he thinks about his
relationship with other Americans,” Mr. Burton said.
In
his first book, “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his
upbringing in Hawaii as the son of a black university student from
Kenya, Barack Obama Sr., and a white anthropologist originally from
Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham. He never really knew his father, whom he met
only once, when he was 10, but he felt a connection that eventually
took him to Kenya in 1987.
He
spent several weeks sleeping on the living room sofa of his half
sister, Auma, who taught at the University of Nairobi, and meeting the
many relatives of the various wings of the family. He traveled to his
father’s home village — “there was a goat in my lap,” he recalled — and
met his grandfather’s last wife, known as Mama Sarah, whom he called
Granny even though there was no blood tie. In the book, he wrote that
for the first time, he enjoyed “the comfort, the firmness of identity.”
But
it was not as simple as that, according to David Maraniss, author of
“Barack Obama: The Story,” a biography of the president as a youth that
ends with the trip to Kenya. Mr. Obama learned about the divisions in
his own family, among the Luo and Kikuyu tribes and between Africans and
Asians.
“His
young life had been a struggle to integrate the disparate parts of his
history in a way that would make him feel whole,” Mr. Maraniss wrote.
“Instead, his trip offered only more contradictions that were hard to
reconcile.”
Mr.
Obama’s own account of his physical and emotional journey helped define
him for many Americans. “I read his first book and was moved by it,”
said Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona and chairman of an
African subcommittee, who will be among the lawmakers joining the
president on the trip. “I don’t think anybody could read it without
being moved by it. It would be a great experience to go back.”
Mr.
Obama returned as a young man and then in 2006 as a relatively new
senator. That trip was a preview of what he will encounter this week,
with a 12-car motorcade and swarms of people greeting him everywhere he
went. He visited Mama Sarah’s village and stopped by his father’s grave,
but was surrounded by media hoopla.
“It’s
amazing to think of a president of the United States in this little
tiny village with very basic structures,” said Bob Hercules, who
accompanied him and made “Senator Obama Goes to Africa,” a documentary
about the trip. “It’s just unbelievable.”
As
president, there were plenty of diplomatic reasons not to go to Kenya
at first, not least the indictment against the country’s president. But
there were other reasons, too.
“If
you’re asking me, ‘Was there a political discussion as to whether it
would be disadvantageous to show up in Kenya when Donald Trump was
questioning his citizenship,’ I don’t recall ever having that
discussion,” Mr. Axelrod said. “But maybe no one needed to have that
discussion.”
With
that concern now behind him, Mr. Obama will depart Washington on
Thursday night. But he acknowledged last week that it would not be the
same as when he first visited as a young man with questions. Given
security and logistical concerns, Mr. Obama will not be able to visit
his father’s village. Instead, his relatives, including Mama Sarah, will
be brought to him in Nairobi.
“It’s
obviously something I’m looking forward to,” he said at a news
conference. “I’ll be honest with you, visiting Kenya as a private
citizen is probably more meaningful to me than visiting as president,
because I can actually get outside of a hotel room or a conference
center. And just the logistics of visiting a place are always tough as
president. But it’s obviously symbolically important.”
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