Obama and Kenya. Matthew Carotenuto
side by side with the vestiges of colonial rule from the saltwater shores of the Indian Ocean to the freshwater beaches of Lake Victoria.
For example, visiting Mombasa, Kenya’s second-largest city and an urban center of note for more than a millennium, one is struck by the muezzin’s call to prayer, so familiar in the predominantly Muslim, Kiswahili-speaking areas of Kenya’s coast, echoing over the fortified walls of Fort Jesus, erected by the Portuguese in the late 1400s, and across a port where international cargo vessels and dhows, a type of lateen-sail vessel used in the region for a thousand years, both ply the waters. Unsurprisingly given the region’s deep cosmopolitan connections, inhabitants of the Kenyan coast, both past and present, have imagined their distinct “Swahili” religio-cultural identity as intimately linked with the experiences of other Indian Ocean communities from the Middle East to Indonesia.15 Yet, the Swahili Coast is not the only region of Kenya where identity has been imagined through webs of cultural and linguistic connections constituted by long-standing patterns of migration and trade.
Heading west to the freshwater coast of Lake Victoria, where Kenya borders Tanzania and Uganda, one arrives in the port city of Kisumu. In the home of Kenya’s Luo community, the paternal kin of Barack Obama, one encounters traders from around the Lake Victoria basin mingling on the beaches, wolfing down grilled tilapia and ugali, a thick maize meal porridge, at long picnic tables while chatting in a mixed lingua franca of English, Kiswahili, and Luo as Swahili hip-hop from Tanzania competes with Congolese Lingala and local Benga and Ohangla beats. In this region, too, connectivity and a sense of distinct linguistic-cultural identity stretch deep beyond present-day commerce, back centuries to the migrations of people from along the Nile up to northern Uganda and down to South Sudan who belonged to groups related in language and practice to Kenya’s Luo community. Here in Barack Obama’s ancestral home, colloquially called “Luoland,” many Luo signal as much affinity for other Nilotic-speaking groups as they do for their fellow Kenyans nationwide.16
In sum, the vignettes presented above point to the book’s key themes—the complex narratives that make up Kenya’s history and how the politics of belonging create sometimes competing notions between national and local identities. As Obama and Kenya shows, there is no one story of what it means to be Kenyan. Rather, identities are historical, flexible, multilayered, and crosscutting. As such, any claim to the existence of a definitive “Kenyan” identity or to a singular Kenyan history is fraught with inaccuracy and bias. Here we also want to caution readers about the politics of language broadly used in the debate about Obama and Kenya and direct them to pay close attention to the politics of one loaded term, “tribe,” which can have disparaging connotations, but is also widely employed by Africans themselves. In Western discourse, “tribe,” “tribal,” and “tribalism” have often been used to dismiss Africans as primitive, primordial. Such usage does not reflect how African communities figure their own identities along tribal lines.
As much as this book is about unpacking the contested histories that Obama’s East African roots underscore, it is also an exploration into the local politics of belonging in Kenya. Many popular outside accounts frame the complex history of ethnic identity in Kenya with simplistic and static terms like “tribe” and use pejorative adjectives like tribal and tribalism to describe everything from cultural beliefs to political conflict. Like many students in our classes, we, too, agree that these words carry political weight in contemporary discourse that perpetuates understandings of African identities as “uncivilized,” “primitive,” and “timeless.” As the term “tribe” fails to capture the ways Kenyans have historically debated ethnicity as constantly changing, contingent, and negotiated, we reject the term in our own analysis and treat the Obama and Kenya connection as much more complicated than a simple story about the son of a “Luo tribesman” from Kenya hewing to his “tribal” heritage.17
Given Kenya’s fascinating environmental and cultural diversity, it is not surprising that the country and its people have inspired the production of numerous historical narratives. However, these works often deliberately fail to embrace Kenya’s complexity, instead simplifying or skewing Kenya’s multifaceted past to fit with particular social and political agendas. Since the earliest days of British imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century, Western audiences have been bombarded by scenes of majestic wild landscapes where heroic beasts are pitted against noble yet “savage” Africans. Further, literary and cinematic representations of a glamorous colonial life of sundowner cocktails and lion hunts abound, and films like the Oscar-winning Out of Africa have long helped to perpetuate romanticized images of the colonial period with the civilizing zeal of the “white man’s burden” lurking as a dangerous subtext.
While contemporary representations are perhaps more subtle than the popular accounts of the colonial era, Kenya’s past has long been narrated as the history of a wild environment brought into the “developed” world through colonial expansion targeted to serve European interests. For instance, when Frederick Lugard, a famous British colonial official and architect of imperial policy across much of the continent, wrote about The Rise of Our East African Empire, he cited the Earl of Rosebery’s now famous speech, delivered at the Royal Colonial Institute in 1893, which argued that the British were “engaged in ‘pegging out claims for the future.’ . . . We have to consider what countries must be developed either by ourselves or some other nation and we have to remember that it is part of our responsibility and heritage to take care that the world, as far as it can be moulded by us, shall receive the Anglo-Saxon and not another character.”18
Written in an era of colonial expansion and violent repression of African resistance across the continent, Lugard’s book argued that colonial policy in East Africa should keep with the nineteenth-century paternal logic of social Darwinism and scientific racism wherein African subjects would be expected to adopt the “three C’s”: Christianity, civilization, and commerce. Lugard argued:
The essential point in dealing with Africans is to establish a respect for the European. Upon this—the prestige of the white man—depends his influence, often his very existence, in Africa. If he shows by his surroundings, by his assumption of superiority, that he is far above the native, he will be respected, and his influence will be proportionate to the superiority he assumes and bears out by his higher accomplishments and mode of life. In my opinion—at any rate with reference to Africa—it is the greatest possible mistake to suppose that a European can acquire a greater influence by adopting the mode of life of the natives. In effect, it is to lower himself to their plane, instead of elevating them to his. The sacrifice involved is wholly unappreciated, and the motive would be held by the savage to be poverty and lack of social status in his own country. The whole influence of the European in Africa is gained by this assertion of a superiority which commands the respect and excites the emulation of the savage.19
Throughout the colonial period, this racist and ethnocentric view of Euro-African relations dominated how the story of Kenya was told, and historians have noted how these early, popular narratives have clouded the more complex story of Kenya’s colonial past and postcolonial present. For instance, David Anderson, in his seminal work on the anticolonial Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s that ultimately led to Kenya’s independence in the early 1960s, notes that the rhetoric of popular, colonial accounts of the Mau Mau period differed little from the racist language of nineteenth-century writers like Lugard. Citing a 1955 best-selling novel about the well-known Mau Mau rebellion, Anderson highlights American author Robert Ruark’s warning to readers: “To understand Africa you must understand the basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we civilized people have encountered in two centuries.”20
Remaining largely unchallenged and even promoted by popular accounts produced throughout the colonial period, such stereotypical representations, as many African authors and scholars have long complained, have continued to be firmly perpetuated in print and on film long after the end of colonial rule. Painting Africans as marginal players in world historical events, these enduring stereotypes have long shaped the way many outside audiences have been introduced to and encouraged to think about Africa’s past. For instance, Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainana quipped in his 2005 satirical instructional essay, “How to Write about Africa,” that to sell books in the contemporary global market,