Audacity of Hope Dawns for Kenyan Village on Obama Win
Looking up ‘Kogelo village’ on the Kenya page of Google Search, you are bombarded by 6,540 results in just 0.04 seconds. Well, to start with, Kogelo village is where the remarkable story of Barack Obama begins.
Hours after the news of his clinching the Democratic Party presidential nomination over Hillary Rodham Clinton reached Kenya, I took the trouble to visit the cradle of an African immigrant whose son would be United States of America’s 44th president for one thing - to see the faces of the village elders here and the look in the eyes of Mama Sarah Obama, Barack’s step-grandmother, and try to describe what I’d see.
Well, a definite description of the pride, nobility, ecstasy, hope, jubilation, glory, humility and triumph that I saw in those faces and in the deep penetrating eyes of this charming 85 year old lady escapes me. But I saw a twinkling tear in Mama Sarah’s eye and I dropped a tear too.
Mama Sarah told a TV crew that was there too: “I feel very happy, I have no worries, and I am not the only one who feels this way, all the Kenyan people are happy too. He is a child of
Kenya.”
For Obama, I am proud to say, is my kinsman; a proud Luo like myself and our common ancestors before us. Yes, despite the fact that we are worlds apart, I have to lay a claim on his new, profound glory.
I am a teetotaler but in Kisumu, the modern capital of the Luo Nation, I saw men, women and not so young children make merry with pints and pints of Senator, a local beer brand made popular here by the presidential nominee’s current job description.
As an African community, we never forget our seed, however, wherever, whenever sparsely spread. Fate and divine intervention (alas, God or Nyasaye Were Nyakalaga, is the Planner of all things, including fate and hope). So when a son was born in America on 4 August 1961 to a Kenyan Luo student father and a Kansas lady called Stanley Ann Dunham, it never escaped our mind. He journeyed with the hope and determination of the African race throughout his life.
This story is not a piece of anthropology but the lady with a man’s name (after her father who wanted a son) who Time called a dreamer - the Chicago Tribune called her strong-willed and unconventional - was a PhD in anthropology, getting there well ahead of Barack in his political rendezvous.
In those days in the early ’60’s, African students were sent to foreign lands like America and Britain by their communities to acquire the white man’s education and return to help build the newly independent nations.
Talk of a twist of fate, senior Barack Obama’s journey to America was organized under the Kenya-US Student Scholarship Program by the flamboyant Kenyan nationalist, Thomas Joseph Mboya, or Tom Mboya, himself a Luo and who like President John F. Kennedy, whose family later supported the student airlifts, was felled by an assassin’s bullet. As we say in local parlance, he did more than just study, and his exploits there produced the famous Illinois senator!
That Barack Obama has appointed Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, a daughter of JFK, to be part of his VP search team is magnanimous. The Kennedy clan - Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Caroline, and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, formerly a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter - is now firmly behind the Chicago senator. Tom’s own daughter, Susan, domiciled in the US, has been in a quiet African diaspora presidential campaign for Barack. History indeed has a way of intertwining itself.
Audacity of hope truly dawns for the dusty Kenyan village of Kogelo where subsistence farming and manual jobs fetching mostly under $US 1 is what many of its inhabitants survive on.
Like Barack Obama’s dreams influenced by his goat-herder father, this village is hoping that this milestone in one of their son’s life will bring better jobs, fresh impartation of economic skills, new roads and improved infrastructure, and a generally improved lifestyle.
Image courtesy: The Village
Very inspiring, article. Thanks, Sam.
We need determined people like Obama.
[...] choice in Kisumu, a lakeside town near Kogelo village, which should be famous by now à la Obama, during frenzied celebrations after news trickled in that the Illinois senator with Kenyan roots had clinched the Democratic [...]