Two Obama situations that seem mutually contradictory

Posted  Saturday, July 25, 2015 |  by- PHILIP OCHIENG

He probably has compellingly good reasons for not visiting K’Ogelo.

US President Barack Obama disembarks from Air Force One upon arrival at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, July 24, 2015. PHOTO | SAUL LOEB |

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What would you do if you were in Barack Obama’s shoes? For his situation seems uniquely self-contradictory.

First, being the President of the world’s only superpower, he heads a whole cultural continuum which, because it is so highly developed in techno-scientific terms, often behaves in ways that, in our eyes, seem conceited.

Secondly, the American leader is the son of a geo-politically Southern man. His father came from a Third World country — ours — which is backward economically and techno-scientifically.

For that very reason, Kenyans entertain cultural habits and make demands that appear exceedingly strange in the eyes of First World observers.

Among the Luo, no matter where you were born and whatever your fortunes might be wherever you now are, as long as your father is a Luo, you are also a Luo. All patriarchal societies are like that. That is why the New Testament, for instance, has two long lists of “begats” concerning Jesus from which, dismayingly, all mothers are absent.

MUTUALLY CONTRADICTORY

Though the two Obama situations seem mutually contradictory, in them lies the extreme disappointment among the Luo — especially the K’Ogelo of Alego — that, after quite a number of years of absence — world history’s most celebrated Jak’Ogelo — can come to Kenya without intending to visit K’Ogelo for conviviality with the inner family.

For, as Okot p’Bitek puts it in his Song of Lawino concerning another Luo community (the Acholi of Uganda), it is in a particular homestead of one’s nativity that the old pumpkin is still thriving which witnessed the birth of Barack Obama Senior — near the end of a long line of paternal ancestors of the present American leader.

Barack Obama Junior’s dilemma, then, is that he heads a society at the peak of political and techno-scientific power, a society which, however, is decidedly Euro-Anglo-Saxon in culture.

Yet his paternal origins — being situated in a culturally and techno-scientifically backward community — demand from the President a certain behavioural norm which may, in the eyes of America’s upper classes, seem culturally anti-clockwise.

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Barack Obama probably has compellingly good reasons — including time constraints — for not including a visit to K’Ogelo in his present tour of Kenya.

Why is that so difficult to understand concerning a man who, as Atlas, his Pelasgic ancestor, did on his shoulder, carries the whole world’s problems in his Blackberry?

COMPELLING REASONS

When your father comes from an African tribe but you are the president of the world’s most developed and only superpower, such contradictions are likely to be ineluctable.

But the fact remains that Barack Obama Junior has work to do, work that includes a great deal more than what may immediately concern Africa, Kenya, Luoland and Alego.

However urgent these may be, and however outgoing the US President may prove, Barack Obama’s first responsibility is to his electors. His first obligation is to the American people.

I would fully understand if whatever he did even for Kenya and Luoland was calculated, at least in the long run, to benefit the United States itself in some way.

It would, of course, help matters a great deal for President Obama or his publicity unit to give Kenyans the exact reason their Diaspora son is so keen to spend the least amount of time in his father’s native land. But the prerogative is their own. That is why I wouldn’t demand much more from the US President or his public relations machinery.

Of course, the Luo — a proud people who often feel that official Kenya does treat them not with respect and with justice — may live in the false hope that if the most powerful man in the world carries their blood, then that man should feel obliged to intervene on their behalf.

But the Luo must understand that Barack Obama would be offending the comity of nations if he interfered in that manner in Kenya’s internal affairs.

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