American Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump and It

George Floyd and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

By Norbert Odero

I watched Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for the second time while waiting for the verdict in Derek Chauvin’s trial for George Floyd’s murder. The film focuses on Ma Rainey, an influential blues singer, and dramatises a turbulent recording session in 1920s Chicago. I was looking for escape.

The trial of Derek Chauvin was emotionally draining. It was also scary because of the very real possibility that Chauvin might walk free. And George Floyd would become just another statistic. Just another black man losing his life to a mix of police brutality and racism. We waited for the twelve jurors to do the right thing. To look beyond the skin colour of the executioner and the executed and give us a reason to believe again in the promise of justice for all. The jurors chose the right side of history.

I was looking for a good film with a strong black cast, and for literature by leading contemporary black intellectuals to provide me with perspective, a sense of reality, and hope during the trial. So I settled on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, on Barrack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was an opportunity to witness black excellence on the screen, characters navigating America by their wit, pain, industry and love. I did not know much about Ma Rainey the artist before watching the film although I had heard about her pioneering work as a blues artist. And so I was looking forward to rediscovering her, and to once again paying homage to Chadwick Boseman, thanking him again, bidding him farewell a second time. My stomach was a knot of emotions, churning with excitement. But there was also a tightening in my chest. To look for closure for George Floyd in the beauty, the finesse, the artistry of Chadwick Boseman was quite an emotional trip.

The film turned into something else for me. It turned into an institution of higher learning. A thesis presentation by Levee, Chadwick Boseman in the character of a virtuoso trumpet player, who shows us how the anger and helplessness, the rage of young black men and women, robbed of their industry and creativity by white men, consumes them, sending them into self-destruction and to the destruction of those around them. Through Levee’s reflections on his life and the conflicts with the other members of Ma Rainey’s band, the film brings to life in a very dramatic and tragic fashion the destruction wrought by generational trauma. It calls us to be acutely aware of the trauma brought on by the murders of black men and women, the murders of men such as George Floyd. The film warns us to protect ourselves, to guard from descending into a murderous rage like Levee, where we end up killing our fellow blacks while those who profit by the actions of white supremacists continue to enjoy the fruits of our industry. We need to creatively self-preserve even as we relive the trauma of George Floyd’s murder during the trial of his murderer.

Obama’s elusive hope

Reading Obama’s Dreams From My Father, which permeates with hope for an equal America, reduced the anxiety that came with this trial. Revisiting the path of Obama’s early life and his ascent to the White House was refreshing, a reminder of the convergence of goodwill from the entire fabric of this great nation that propelled the young Obama, raised without a father, to the highest office in the land, provided a break from the intensity of the trial. I was very hopeful of a conviction. But I was also alive to the reality of Michael Brown in 2014. And the strangulation of Eric Garner. And Alton Sterling. And the execution of Breonna Taylor in her bed. The black bodies riddled with bullets kept piling up. The police kept walking free, unaccountable for their actions. A litany of deaths until the graphic murder of George Floyd shocked the world back into the reality of the systematic elimination of black men in America.

Donald Trump’s presidency, and the blossoming of white supremacy, might cause the hope expressed in Obama’s book to seem distant but it was a welcome break from the intensity of the Chauvin trial. We needed hope to cling to. Hope that justice might yet prevail, a life jacket in the tumultuous waters that are America for its black people. All our hope was in the twelve jurors. Did they share our hope for a better America. Could we trust them to do the right thing? Who were the jurors? What were their politics? Did they believe that black lives really do matter?

Ta-Nehisi’s electric shocker

Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates after Obama felt like being sucker-punched into reality. I had to compose myself. How could these two black scholars have such distinct and diverse experiences of America? How could Ta-Nehisi Coates walk under such a heavy yoke of historical trauma and Obama with so much optimism? Where was the magic switch to turn the darkness into the bright dawn of promise? Where did Obama find this switch? And what realities and historical traumas accompanied Ta-Nehisi in his daily living as a black man in America, reminding him that this optimism only existed as a hopeful comfort in our imagination?

Obama’s book, I would later conclude, was one that was hopeful for a perfect union. Just as his body was a beautiful union of an elegant African man and an elegant white woman. Both blessed with a great education and a superior understanding of the world. But could America let Obama be the embodiment of this perfection? It would not. He could only be black. The prescription of race was waiting for him at birth. This prescription was meant to place him in a world that America treated differently. A world where he could not enjoy the privileges that his mother was born into, even though he was hers, the product of her womb.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the other hand embraces the reality that things are broken. The way Ta-Nehisi Coates relives the trauma of what happened to his friend and compatriot, Prince Carmen Jones, is as painful as when Darnella Frazier, the teenage girl who witnessed the murder of George Floyd, relived the trauma and her helplessness at the scene. All Darnella could be was a witness. With a cellphone. Incapable of providing any help because the force that was on George Floyd’s neck was the force of hate. Of white supremacy. A force that had taken so many black bodies. And was emboldened by the justice system to take many more.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that Prince Jones was stalked by a policeman across multiple jurisdictions and state lines before he was shot. Prince Carmen was educated, God-fearing and successful. When the man the killer police had allegedly mistaken Prince Carmen for was arrested, he did not look anything like Prince Carmen. The only plausible explanation for Prince Carmen’s killing was that the black policeman who killed him was only aware that he carried the authority of the land that did not value the life of the innocent black man that he had tracked like wild game. He was aware that being a policeman was the licence that would get him his job back without having to account for his actions.

On the other side, within the black community, the policeman’s actions left a colossal loss. The loss of years of investment in Prince Carmen. The loss of a brilliant future. The loss of the only son. A lifetime of trauma for his parents’ generation. His friends’ generation. Trauma in the many generations of blacks to come. And a chilling reminder that black lives are dispensable. Ta-Nehisi Coates was reliving this historical trauma for his son. Reminding him of the space he occupies as a black man in America. This was the reality of black America. For many generations to come, fathers and mothers would relive for their children the trauma of watching George Floyd begging for his life under Derek Chauvin’s knee. As long as these killings continued, the trauma associated with them would never leave the black communities. I realised that I couldn’t escape it either. It was deeply embedded in art. In literature. In film. A reminder that hope was just but temporary relief, a mirage before the next execution of a black man.

Does trauma heal by itself?

Obama’s book promises hope as a pathway to healing, reminds us to give hope a chance and continue believing in the collective goodwill of humanity. But Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that no one, regardless of their social standing, is safe from police brutality or the miscarriage of justice that follows in the wake of the brutality. And that the trauma of witnessing these repeated acts of brutality against black people stays with us forever, no matter how well educated or successful we are.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a warning about the destructive impact of the generational trauma suffered by black people in America from past encounters with white supremacy and the miscarriage of justice that soon follows. It is also a warning about what seeing George Floyd laying there, pleading for his life, could do to our collective psyche as black people. And a reminder of how the loss of black industry and art at the hands of white people in positions of power has a lasting negative impact on everyone.

Derek Chauvin is appealing his conviction and we are waiting to see if there will be another trial. But his conviction has brought some hope that the wheels of justice may have received a tiny drop of oil and will continue turning, moving inexorably towards justice and towards a more perfect America at last freed of the generational trauma of witnessing police brutality against black people.

Black Lives Matter.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

George Floyd and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

By Norbert Odero

Ten years after the 2008 election campaign, the “Birthers” have won for now in the United States, but Barack Obama remains a positive symbol with time for another act. The former US president stopped in Kenya on his way to South Africa, his third visit to his father’s birthplace since arriving on the national political scene in 2004 as an Illinois state legislator through a speech at the Democratic Convention that nominated John Kerry to challenge the re-election of George W. Bush. It is now ten years since I returned to the United States with my family from our year-long East Africa democracy assistance sojourn in Nairobi in the wake of the failed 2007 election, the post- election violence, and February 28 “peace deal”. The day we flew out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport for Amsterdam en route to Atlanta on the way home to Mississippi, I was first exposed to the “birther” conspiracy theory through a front-page story in the Daily Nation.

Many may not remember fully now but recognise that, in its inception, the “birther” conspiracy theory was not just the idea that then Senator Obama was born in Kenya, and secretly smuggled into the US as an infant, and was thus not technically eligible to be elected President of the United States; it also fit into the context of the claims that Obama was involved, as a US Senator from Illinois in 2007, in a conspiracy with Raila Odinga to steal Kenya’s election on behalf of Muslims. These bizarre claims embellished from there into a narrative that rather than being a loyal American, Obama was essentially on the side of al-Qaeda and the global jihadists to establish a Sharia-enforcing caliphate and that Obama was, in essence, on the other side of the war being fought by Americans in the “surge” led by Bush and General Petraeus in Iraq to defend the fundamental underlying values of our democratic republic and Western democracy in general.

Many may not remember fully now but recognise that, in its inception, the “birther” conspiracy theory was not just the idea the that then Senator Obama was born in Kenya, and secretly smuggled into the US as an infant, and was thus not technically eligible to be elected President of the United States; it also fit into the context of the claims that Obama was involved, as a US Senator from Illinois in 2007, in a conspiracy with Raila Odinga to steal Kenya’s election on behalf of Muslims.

The conspiracy theories about the 2007 Kenyan election faded somewhat over time, partly because of the peace deal that put Odinga in Mwai Kibaki’s government as Prime Minister, where he continued to be friendly to the West, and partly because it became clearer that the election was stolen by Kibaki’s side, which controlled the Electoral Commission of Kenya (and not by the opposition which didn’t). Reports at the time from the American right at the Heritage Foundation think tank and National Review magazine, noting the theft of the election, helped American conservatives who cared about facts avoid getting sucked into nonsense about a Luo jihad involving “tribesman” Obama and “cousin” Raila.

While there remain a few holdouts who claim that “we can’t know” who won Kenya’s 2007 election, they seem to be pretty well limited to personally interested parties at this point, with the release of the State Department cables showing that US ambassador Michael Ranneberger himself saw tallies being changed at the ECK and claimed to have encouraged the late ECK Chairman, Samuel Kivuitu, to withstand the pressure to declare Kibaki the winner anyway, even though Ranneberger knew that the chairman had no way of controlling the Commission, which was thoroughly stacked by Kibaki in the weeks and months before the election.

Once it is recognised that the vote tallies were actually changed at the ECK, Americans (most especially rock-ribbed traditional stalwarts attracted to “the Tea Party” and/or Donald Trump’s “neopatriotism”) will understand that Kenyans had a duty, not just a right, to protest the 2007 election. Americans would not trust biometric voter registration (or tolerate secret voter lists) but most certainly, the traditional American narrative would demand that we march on our country’s court houses if our votes were simply changed by our election officials. Ranneberger’s pre-election cables to Washington made clear that as of that time, the Kenyan courts were not independent and would provide no recourse so that voters would be forced to go to the streets if there was fraud that became known. Once you legitimise protesting the actions of the ECK, and recognise that the largest category of deaths (35%) during the post-election violence, as per the Waki Commission, were the result of violence inflicted by Kibaki’s security forces, and that a large number that were identifiable by tribe were Luo, then the whole notion of some extraneous evil conspiracy somehow involving Obama and the global jihad as the reason for the post-election violence becomes that much more irrational.

According to the Waki Commission’s report, the largest number of casualties (744) were in the Rift Valley. A portion of violence that then Assistant Secretary of State, Jendayi Frazer, insisted on calling “ethnic cleansing” in a January 2008 visit (a label not adopted in Washington) was conducted by Kalenjin militia in the pattern employed by KANU in 1992 and 1997. KANU was a religiously diverse secular party that sought to maintain single-party hegemony through compliant cadres among all major tribes and religious groupings in accordance with its political needs. No suggestion that Moi, who personally identified as a Protestant Christian, was a secret Muslim jihadi, even though the victims may have been mostly Christians.

The International Republican Institute/University of California, San Diego exit poll funded by USAID (the one showing an Odinga presidential win by roughly six points that was embargoed for six months) gave more evidence in the details that the 2007 election contest was driven, as is normal in Kenya, by tribal rather than religious alignment, with Odinga shown as winning a majority of self- identified Christians and of Muslims (although the margin was greater among Muslims). On the other hand, there was a “gender gap” with women favouring Kibaki and men Odinga.

It may also seem hard to remember now but by January 2009, Obama was sworn in to a wave of good feeling with high approval numbers. He had campaigned as a pragmatic moderate Democrat who was against dumb wars and only for smart ones; a Christian who grew up with limited religion and who was popular with the irreligious left and the Christian left and who made some real inroads courting what we call “Evangelicals” who were not part of the more politicised, harder, “Religious Right”.

The inaugural celebrations seemed to suggest some real healing from the cultural rifts of “the Sixties” and “Vietnam” that featured so prominently in presidential campaigns throughout my lifetime, as well as a milestone to show that we had come so far in overcoming racial prejudice in the post-Civil Rights era that black/white racial issues were no longer a part of those cultural rifts. Maybe we had more in common than our political leaders had been telling us since the rise of Fox News and the Bill Clinton impeachment saga; maybe this president could be a “uniter not a divider”. In part the failure of his predecessors was because the Bush political operation ended up pulling a “bait-and-switch” by mobilising gullible church networks to support the invasion of Iraq for regime change using a claimed causus belli of active chemical/biological and nuclear weapons programmes, then firing up the culture wars further to drive turnout to get re-elected over John Kerry. This was a bad error of moral judgment that has continued to reverberate through American politics.

Kerry was certainly a Yankee patrician from “central casting” — as Kenyans well know from the 2017 election — but he was unquestionably accurate in pointing out in debate with Bush that we had gotten “stuck in Iraq”. Of course, Kerry was too polite, patrician and/or patriotic to go for the jugular and trash Bush for Iraq the way Donald Trump did in his 2016 campaign. For saying that we were “stuck in Iraq”, Kerry got pilloried as “unpatriotic” aside from the “Swift Boat” sliming he got over his military service in Vietnam – conveniently not a problem for Clinton, Bush, Cheney or Trump, who all managed in various ways not to get sent, unlike Kerry who actually volunteered to go to Vietnam. Nonetheless, the unhealed cultural wounds were such that almost 30 years after the fall of Saigon, Vietnam was still a winner for Bush over Kerry, in spite of Iraq.

Part of the reason that Obama took office with a wave of good feeling and better numbers than he had during the election was that John McCain declined to play along with the trashing of Obama in darker ways and treated him as a legitimate political adversary. It was good for the country and gave Obama a fair start in office.

“Birtherism,” though, in spite of McCain’s choice, became an enduring American movement that has had a profound effect on our politics and transformed the Republican Party with which I had been involved for much of my life. Ultimately, the Birther Movement became a tool for Donald Trump as an outsider to gain “free media” attention and admiration from those who were otherwise profoundly afraid of or opposed to the Obama presidency.

People like John McCain and George W. Bush or his family members in politics, whatever their faults and mistakes on policy choices (even the really big one, invading Iraq, which McCain acknowledges in his latest book, The Restless Wave) were too experienced, too educated, and too well advised to believe the craziness about Obama being secretly smuggled into the US as a Kenyan child (although the McCain campaign did check it out to make sure as did the McClatchy newspaper chain) and were morally constrained, in my judgment at least, from deliberately lying about it to hurt Obama. If you cannot buy that it was morals, at least we can agree that they were restrained by a judgment that it was better politics to stay out of that gutter. Hillary Clinton also stayed away (even if one credits the report that her adviser Sidney Blumenthal triggered the McClatchy review to make sure there was nothing to it).

Donald Trump was not similarly constrained and his hectoring of Obama put him in the front row of politics in America. He shared headlines with Obama even as Osama bin-Laden was being killed by Navy Seals under Obama’s command. Not one to accept defeat in an argument by being proven factually wrong, in this case by the release of Obama’s long form Hawaii birth certificate, Trump bided his time and cranked the Movement back up for his presidential campaign in 2015 and 2016, discarding it once he had seized the agenda and the Republican Party since the specific “birther” claim was no longer useful to him.

It has been a bit surreal for me to see this happen. Educated middle-class Americans of my generation (Obama’s, essentially) have a lot to answer for in our complacency. Our democratic republic requires more attention and effort than we have delivered in recent years – whatever our party or policy preferences.

Not one to accept defeat in an argument by being proven factually wrong, in this case by the release of Obama’s long form Hawaii birth certificate, Trump bided his time and cranked the Movement back up for his presidential campaign in 2015 and 2016, discarding it once he had seized the agenda and the Republican Party since the specific “birther” claim was no longer useful to him.

Fortunately, just as Obama himself has, we hope, time for other acts in his public life as an American after elective politics, the Trump presidency too shall pass and the Birther Movement will be a strange chapter in political history books. It will leave scars and I expect that Trump will be willing to use other lies for domestic advantage that will manipulate gullible people and torque emotions on difficult and divisive social matters. But in the longer term, I think we will rise to the occasion and get to a better range of equilibrium. We have significant long- term challenges on poverty, education, healthcare, economic mobility, and government debt that have been building up during our protracted wartime, but I think Americans are getting more engaged and are rolling up their sleeves to work on solutions.

Trump as an individual is something of a fluke. Most of the people who voted for him have little in common with him really. I know this because they are my peers, my extended family and friends to a great extent. He lost the national popular vote in a low turnout election. Trump won in large part because neither Obama nor the Clintons succeeded in building a Democratic Party that was seriously competitive in much of the country.

The big difference as of now is that Trump as president in our system still has far less power than the president in any of the East African countries. He will leave office by the end of his lawful first term or his second, if re-elected.

On balance, I think that we will see American policy in its relations with Kenya in the Trump years to continue to be largely a continuation of that under Obama, as reflected in the American approach to supporting both the 2013 election with John Kerry as Secretary of State and 2017 with Kerry as chief election observer and Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, with Bob Godec as “our man in Kenya” throughout – just as Obama’s relationship with Kenya in its policy aspects was primarily a continuation of the approach under George W. Bush.

There have been a few major inflection points in the American/Kenyan relationship in the last twenty years, but most have not been specific to whoever was president in either Washington or Nairobi.

The first, of course, was the al-Qaeda Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, kicking off the ongoing conflict between the US and Kenya, on the one side, and various Islamist “violent extremists”, on the other. As reflected in the Mombasa rocket attack, the USS Cole bombing, the bombing in Kampala, the various attacks in Kenya, most notoriously the Westgate Mall and Garissa University killings, terrorist incidents have been a regional “fact of life” ever since.

For most Kenyans, terrorism is not quite so central a concern as it is to Americans, but it has still inevitably shaped both sides of the relationship over the last two decades. And in this context, after 9/11 and our ensuing land wars in South Asia, with the establishment of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa base in Djibouti, Kenya resumed its regional security role along the lines established in the 1970s and ‘80s when the United States was fighting the Cold War and Kenyatta and Moi wanted protection from Idi Amin and Siad Barre, as well as the kind of relationship that would be useful to them in avoiding disruption to their domestic rule.

The next inflection point, albeit of lesser magnitude from an American standpoint, was the retirement of Moi and the transition to NARC and Kibaki.

Next was the demise of NARC and the failure of constitutional reform with the 2005 referendum. Related this was the Anglo Leasing scandal that showed that security and counterterrorism were for sale at high levels, along with the baseline of corruption in the police and security services that let terrorists move about and in and out of the country. The Artur Brothers and the Standard flamboyantly highlighted the rot.

Next, and finally, was the start of the war in Somalia to save and reinstate the Transitional Federal Government and oust the Islamic Courts Union in December 2006. Since that time the United States Government has continued to have and support all our other existing priorities in Kenya, such as lifesaving humanitarian health support through PEPFAR and other lower profile programmes, food assistance and small farm agricultural support, along with supporting all sorts of philanthropic-type programmes and the somewhat more controversial “big development” initiatives like Power Africa, frequently in cooperation with other donors.

In recent years we also started devoting more governmental focus to promoting international private financial investment, such as the 2015 U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation investment in the Dubai-based Abraaj Growth Markets Health Fund, L.P., that has been active in the Nairobi private healthcare market prior to recently entering liquidation under circumstances being investigated.

Nonetheless, in the meantime we have been at war in a country with a huge border with Kenya – a country during much of these last eleven-and-a-half years that has been too dangerous to support with a full diplomatic and aid presence and which has thus had those parts of the effort supported from Kenya. And from reading the newspapers back in the day and a few books, it is apparent that Kenya provided some military support for the invasion by the Ethiopian military at the time to contain the potential spread of terrorism.

In 2011, during Kibaki’s second term, with the support of Prime Minister Odinga, Kenya entered the war directly and formally in its own right. Roughly nine months later, the Kenya Defense Forces were admitted into the AMISOM peacekeeping collaboration, allowing for financial reimbursement through Western donors, and eventually driving al-Shabaab, now formally asserting affiliation with al Queda, out of their previous position of direct control of the port at Kismaayo (not to say that al Shabaab did not continue to apparently benefit from the illicit charcoal and sugar trade through the port).

In June 2006, a few months before the Ethiopians were invited to install the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu, Ambassador Bellamy finished his service in Nairobi and Ambassador Ranneberger was appointed by President Bush from the Foreign Service. Within a few months of the start of the war, Ranneberger sent a cable to Washington explaining that his approach for “achieving U.S. objectives in Kenya’s elections” was to stay quiet on the debates on constitutional reform and election reform and “build capital” with the incumbent. With the perturbation of the 2008 crisis and the intervention for constitutional reform up through 2010, this has remained the baseline beat of our relationship over the years.

Will the recent moves by Kenya’s dominant new Jubilee Party to align with Communist Party of China structures and philosophy to accompany its huge borrowings from the Chinese state cause any serious rethink in Washington? I have no idea, but it certainly does not seem to have captured any particular place in the priorities of either the retired President Obama or current President Trump.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

George Floyd and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

By Norbert Odero

Barack Obama’s eagerly awaited homecoming in July jolted many, especially the Luos, out of a romantic stupor. Obama’s meteoric rise to the pinnacle of America’s state power as the first African- American president with strong Kenyan roots had held out much promise for the far-flung villages in his father’s homeland, such as K’ogelo Nyangoma in Siaya County, where Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was raised.

The launch of his half-sister Auma Obama’s Sauti Kuu, a K’ogelo-based learning and resource centre, was full of tensions and contradictions. It revealed not only the limits of Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric on human equality and democracy, but also Auma Obama’s feminist politics, which was nearly drowned in the din of corporate accolades and her diatribe against the Luo have-nots for their practice of “gonya gonya” and “konya konya” (soliciting hand-outs).

Of the eight children sired by Barack Obama Sr., Auma Obama is closest to her famous half-brother Barack. She is also among the most educated of her siblings, having attained a PhD from Bayreuth University in Germany. Auma and Barack’s fondness for each other was evident when the latter made an official visit to Kenya in July 2015 when he was the US president – Auma not only was at the airport to receive him but had the unusual privilege of sharing his armoured limousine – popularly known as “The Beast” – with him. This bond is probably what prompted Barack Obama to agree to attend the opening ceremony of Sauti Kuu, a project that Auma initiated to improve the lives of youth in her home village.

Speaking at the opening of the Sauti Kuu centre, Barack Obama said he was “really coming back as a citizen of the world, with so many people who are family to me, as a brother, as a citizen of the world, as someone with a connection to Africa.”

“I believe in Nelson Mandela’s vision, I believe in the vision shared by Gandhi and King and Abraham Lincoln,” Obama thundered when delivering the Nelson Mandela annual lecture in Johannesburg shortly after his Kenya visit. “I believe in a vision of equality and a vision of justice and freedom and multiracial democracy, built on the premise that all people are created equal and they are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights. I believe that a world governed by such principles is possible,” he said, extolling the virtues of liberal democracy.

But a day before, in Nyangoma-K’ogelo, the Barack Obama-Auma Obama tag-team’s performance showed that the rhetoric of human equality was just that — rhetoric. Sauti Kuu’s launch reflected the failure of the Obamas to mitigate the power and material inequalities that often characterise human relations.

Obama’s return to Kenya was low-key, some said. Disappointing, others noted. But it served many sobering lessons – lessons well known by the residents of coastal cities such as Mombasa or Malindi, whose wisdom and maritime experience span the ebb and flow of geopolitics and commerce, from the days of the dhow to the coming of cruise ships. They will tell you that when a big ship docks at a quay near you, it doesn’t lift up every canoe ashore; no one rides atop the crest of its waves. It comes ashore with sharks in tow that feed off its jetsam; its powerful engines and propellers generate waves that can easily keel one’s canoes over, producing ripples that can easily drown, rather than buoy up, even the strongest swimmer.

Sailing in a skiff, rowing a boat, or swimming too close to such a ship is a perilous undertaking, unless, of course, you are a corporate shark or a ticket-carrying passenger aboard the ship. Only those aboard and the sharks know the unalloyed joy of disembarking to the ecstatic reception of crowds, expectant with hope.

A disappointing homecoming

Barack Obama might be free of the cumbersome security restrictions of a sitting US president, but he is still captive to the restrictions of Brand Obama, which eschews radical black politics at home in the United States – as Aziz Rana, a law professor at Cornell University, points out – and avoids the murky politics of “home square” in Kenya. Since his rise to the presidency of the United States, Obama has avoided sailing too close to Kenya’s politics, especially Luo politics. He has assiduously avoided Kenya’s narrow ethnic or national capture, but has embraced and celebrated corporate capture, which has taken away the warmth, charm and spontaneity that endeared him to so many, especially in Siaya and Kisumu, when he first came calling when he was a senator from Illinois.

In 2006, Senator Obama courted the affection of Kenyans, addressing crowds of people in Nairobi, Kisumu, and Siaya. On that occasion, Raila Odinga, whose political future looked bright too, accompanied him and his wife, Michelle, on their home square stretch of the journey. The Obamas took an HIV test at the Nyanza General Hospital to publicly demonstrate individual responsibility on matters of sexuality and sexual health as well as to demonstrate moral leadership on a serious health concern as crowds of Kisumu residents looked on from afar. He addressed the residents of K’ogelo at a primary school, speaking a word or two in Dholuo, acts that greatly endeared him the Luo/K’ogelo community, with many spinning yarns of kinship connections to the Obama family after his visit. But on his return to his father’s homeland this year, Obama spurned the Luo/K’ogelo community, claiming to be “a citizen of the world” and took this visit as an opportunity to take a dig at those “who claim to be family” (a reference to those who have used their kinship ties to the Obama family to lay claim on him).

Since he became the president of the United States, Obama’s visits to Kenya have become stilted, served to carefully selected and canned audiences in a heavily guarded stadium or hall. In Nyangoma-K’ogelo, no effort was made to extend the joy of seeing and listening to Barack Obama to the hundreds of villagers and admirers who were not invited to the Sauti Kuu launch. Not even a giant TV screen, like the one put up far away in Kisumu’s Kenyatta Sport Grounds for some residents of Kisumu, was put up for the villagers of K’ogelo.

Instead, hundreds of sweat-drenched villagers stood by the roadside on a hot sunny day eagerly waiting, hours on end, to catch a glimpse of or to wave at K’ogelo’s most famous son under the watch of hawk-eyed police officers. There was the occasional pulling and pushing, as the crowds surged forward to catch a glimpse of the dignitary. “We are disappointed that after spending more than nine hours here, it was in vain. We never came to beg, but we just wanted to see our son and greet him,” Ms. Mary Awour told the Nation. “We are happy he came, but angry that they have not allowed us to access the venue,” Mr. Kennedy Owino told the Standard.

“We are disappointed that after spending more than nine hours here, it was in vain. We never came to beg, but we just wanted to see our son and greet him,” Ms. Mary Awour told the Nation.

Some Kenyans on Twitter mocked Barack Obama, saying he “is facing the same challenge African men face…spouses refusing to accompany you to your ancestral home,” a reference to the fact that Michelle Obama chose to go to a Beyoncé concert in Paris rather than accompany her husband to the Sauti Kuu launch in K’ogelo.

In Siaya County, Cornel Rasanga, the governor, experienced the emasculating power of Obama’s security detail: “My friend, I’m the host here. I don’t need to be searched,” he is reported to have said. His Kisumu County counterpart, Prof. Anyang’ Nyongo, and his deputy, Mathews Owili, however, submitted to the checks at the gate of Sauti Kuu without a fuss.

Governor Rasanga could neither count on the fabled Luo kinship ties that bind every Luo to the Obamas nor on the prestige of his office to get a dignified hearing. He had to boldly waylay Obama’s entourage as it made its way to the main hall to get in a word edgewise.

In the main hall, the chosen ones – a motley crew of celebrities and corporate types – were entertained by talented dance troupes. A sumptuous lunch awaited them at the end of the event.

Challenging patriarchy

Auma Obama’s stage was set. Her finest moment was also a moment of some hard-hitting truths for the Luos – spoken and unspoken. By design, the event assiduously avoided Luo patriarchal, parochial political capture, but embraced and celebrated corporate capture. Auma Obama stoked insurgency against Luo patriarchs, symbolically silencing the governors of Kisumu and Siaya, other patriarchal Luo voices, and perhaps those of their accomplices, such as Ida Odinga, who also attended the launch. However, she amplified resilient Luo women, such as Phoebe Asiyo, a Luo elder and former Member of Parliament for Karachuonyo Constituency in Homa Bay County.

The Luo society’s male-dominated leadership was reduced to peripheral or perfunctory roles. Prof. Nyongo welcomed Obama at the Kisumu International airport. Strictly observing protocol and official business, unlike the welcoming of the Cuban doctors in Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport a few weeks before, there was no time for the multilingual governor to wax lyrical in Dholuo, English or Spanish. Together with Governor Rasanga, Prof. Nyongo and other leaders were part of the audience, assigned a minor role in K’ogelo. No elected leader from the area spoke at the event.

Only Phoebe Asiyo, spoke, signaling a welcome endorsement of strong women leadership among Luo society. She, in turn, symbolically endorsed Auma Obama’s leadership, perhaps signaling a long overdue inter-generational succession in Luo politics.

Although Mrs. Odinga’s presence was hardly publicly acknowledged, contrary to the custom in this part of the world, where she enjoys the title and privilege of being a Min piny (mother of a people/nation/territory). Was her voice silenced at the launch because she too is a leftover from the past political struggles though now part of the Luo leadership for whom the struggle is past?

Auma Obama’s launch ruffled many feathers, not just of Luo leaders, but also of the Luo have-nots, the riff-raffs who supposedly don’t want to earn their keep. When she first broached the contentious conversation on the practice of “gonya gonya,” as an irritating act of begging or dependency by the Luo have-nots on the Luo haves, she sounded urban chic. Her remarks, like a sting in the tail, came at the end of a wide-ranging interview with Ann Kiguta of Citizen TV on a number of issues: Kenyan students burning schools; parenting; education; NGOs; slums and development; Barack Obama’s legacy; and the upcoming launch of Sauti Kuu. “This is this gonya gonya … gimme, gimme. Stop guys, stop… In the time that Obama has been president, up until now, what have you done? What have you done to make a difference in your country, in your life, in your community? Because you cannot sit and just wait for Obama. I can tell you what I have done… Do something. Stop gonya gonya,” she said. In yet another interview with the KTN TV, Auma was emphatic: “We are trying to change the mentality of gonya gonya, give me give me, help me, help me. Don’t keep begging.”

Auma Obama’s launch ruffled many feathers, not just of Luo leaders, but also of the Luo have-nots, the riff-raffs who supposedly don’t want to earn their keep.

On the auspicious occasion of the launch of Sauti Kuu, Asiyo reiterated Auma’s message. Speaking in Dholuo, she said: “Adwaro nyiso oganda Luo niya, ng’ama ja kwecho e piny oganda Luo, onge dwol. Ok nyal goyo mbaka kata e anyuola. Auma en nyako ma eluungo ni migogo, ka ne een dichuo waluonge ni Migosi. Etimo gima lich ne oganda Luo….” (I want to tell groups that make up the Luo community that one who begs among us has no voice. You can’t even participate in a conversation among your kin. Auma is a woman called a Migogo. If she were a man we would call her a Migosi. You have done something great for the Luos).

Unbowed, Auma Obama said, “We need to start taking care of ourselves, we can…let’s stop the gonya gonya syndrome. Let’s stop, and I repeat it even if I get a lot of flak on social media, let us stop the gonya gonya, konya konya, syndrome. I insist, and if you think you are mad at me come and join me let us work together and I’ll show you how not to do it.”

The Sauti Kuu initiative and the criticism of the Luo have-nots echoed her brother Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Initiative in America, with its emphasis on hard work, individual responsibility and self-reliance. However, Auma failed to address the social and political contexts that give rise the practice of gonya gonya. Her criticism evoked furious responses. Some took offence with the manner in which she broached and took up the conversation on gonya gonya, first on national television, where ethnic pride is at stake, and second, in the glare of the international press at the launch, where the community was stripped of its pride and dignity on a global platform. Perhaps those who took to tweeting in Dholuo (but who normally tweet in English) were expressing a wish that this was a Ramogi-FM kind of conversation, an in-group, internal critique. It hurt many who also find the pesky practice of begging for hand-outs shameful but yearn for a safe space for this kind of conversation.

Some took to Twitter, saying that Auma “oelo dugwa,” (Auma has exposed) rather than covered up communal nakedness, a response that expresses a shared sense of shame that the practice of begging brings to a community whose members once lived by mantras such as “adak makata ee oonge,” (I do or can live without you) while sustaining opposition politics against one party-state repression, and without asking for relief food even during severe famines.

But the loudest responses were viscerally misogynistic, couched in the caustic and retrogressive terms that have characterised Luo politics from the days of Grace Akinyi, Kenya’s first post- independence female mayor and the first woman Member of Parliament, to those of Phoebe Asiyo and Millie Odhiambo, the twice-elected Member of Parliament for Suba North. The responses reflected castration angst, misogyny, and sexism, captured in a concept frequently used to stoke the patrilineal and patrilocal prejudices of Luo society: “en migogo or tend migogo rach,” (a married woman’s leadership is bad or being led by a married woman is a bad thing).”

A male-centric reading of who a migogo is holds that as once married, a daughter or a sister might have some stake in the affairs of her father’s home, but has no voice over issues that matter. She may contribute material resources but can neither sit where binding decisions are made nor lead the rest of the family and clan on such matters. Instead, she must defer to her uncles and brothers on matters affecting her natal homestead.

Migogo means different things to different people but it is mostly a misogynistic slur.

Millie Odhiambo blows a raspberry at those who use the concept to denigrate and exclude women from active involvement in their family, community and constituency politics. She provides alternative reading of the concept. “Migogo connotes I am a daughter and not a stranger. Migogo had a special place. If she visited she was allowed to go to the dero (granary) and pick whatever she wanted. I went to the dero and picked leadership,” she told the Sunday Nation four years ago.

As Gilbert Ogutu points out, the fisherfolk of Nam Lolwe (the Luo name for Lake Victoria), who include Millie Odhiambo’s constituents in Rusinga and Mfangano islands, named their boats after a grandparent, or someone of great achievement. Ogutu notes that these fisherfolk say Yie en migogo as well as Yie en mgongo and that one can easily miss the difference between migogo (married woman) and mgongo (the keel of a boat); this difference completely collapses when they quip that “yie en migogo,” (a boat is a married daughter).

Auma Obama, like Millie Odhiambo, seems to have “returned,” to her father’s homestead and picked out leadership too, but did she get Sauti Kuu’s keel right? Did she place Sauti Kuu on an even keel in the choppy patriarchal waters of Nam Lolwe as well as those of black politics of education and freedom?

Gonya gonya double standards

At the launch of Sauti Kuu, it seems not all kinds of “asking,” “help me,” or “begging” riled Auma Obama. Asiyo’s “askings” or “help us” at the launch did appear odd but did not merit a strong public response from Auma. Speaking in Dholuo, Asiyo asked Auma Obama to build a Sauti Kuu in Homa Bay County, where Hussein Onyango Obama, Auma’s grandfather, migrated from. Speaking in English, Asiyo also asked Barack Obama to use his connections and get someone from America to help the Luos get rid of the hyacinth weed that has impeded fishing and navigation in Lake Victoria since the early 1990s.

It seems that the gonya gonya that riles Auma Obama is the kind that doesn’t do her political bidding. What irks Auma are the hand-outs that the Luo haves give to the Luo have-nots, the kind of donor funding that stigmatises its beneficiary because it comes without a written proposal or a memorandum of understanding between the giver and the taker.

Nurtured mostly by opportunistic politicians whose political agenda was out of sync with the Luo society’s aspirations, “gonya,” also translates to “untie me” or “set me free”, in English. It is a code word for a hand-out and is mostly used on politicians by a cynical and demoralised electorate. Its seeds were sowed by KANU politicians who thought they could buy their way out of the strong waves of Luo opposition politics. The Luo, in turn, used it as a mechanism of extracting a pound of flesh out of the elite, especially the politicians, who once ensconced in public office or because they were rich, disengaged from the affairs of the village and became unreachable.

Ironically, gonya gonya, in its irritating form, is partly nurtured by the Auma Obama rural development model: top-down, elite know-it-all-driven projects executed without any meaningful participation of the “beneficiary or host community”, who presumably know nothing about what’s good for them and who have no preferences. It is noblesse oblige par excellence, underpinned by no reciprocal horizontal relationship between the giver and the receiver, thereby displacing collective communal action and its positive effects.

Listening to Auma Obama’s tributes to “my donors, my sponsors, my partners, my family”, one is hard pressed to point out what the K’ogelo Nyangoma community’s contribution to Sauti Kuu is, apart from being the immediate beneficiaries of the project. Auma thanked the Red Cross, Kenya Airways, the Eagles, Toyota, and the Gina Din Group. But the Nyangoma-K’ogelo community’s offer of 24 acres of land for a proposed Barack Obama University of Leadership and Technology was lost in the din of corporate accolades.

What excites Auma Obama’s community project is offers from abroad, such as that from Yale University for a programme on emotional intelligence. “Hey, hey, Yale University is looking at us,” Auma said, with hardly a word about Nicholas Rajula, the Nyangoma-K’ogelo community spokesman and his plans of turning Siaya Agricultural Training Centre into a constituent college of the proposed Barack Obama University, as reported by the Nation on the eve of the launch.

Auma Obama’s project is not novel, it seems. It is underpinned by a vertical relationship of accountability between the director of the project and the donors/sponsors/partners. It is a supply- driven project in the name of development made popular by NGOs, which thrived in the gaps left by the state and market failures, especially among the Luo, after the onslaught of neoliberalism in the 1990s. The combined effect of this NGO model of development and the sell-out politics of gonya gonya is a generation of youth who’ve refused or are reluctant to earn their keep, and who are often found loitering and shooting the breeze by the roadside or sitting in betting dens days on end.

Auma describes Sauti Kuu as “a space” – abstract postmodern speak which suggests that centre’s potential is multiple yet still undefined by any particular activity, product or character. If and when it becomes a place, one hopes it will not only be defined by excellence in sports and vocational training, but also by the kind of education that can reproduce a Barack Obama Sr., whose agnostic but liberal critique of Kenya’s development “Bible”, “Problems Facing Our Socialism: Another Critique of Sessional Paper no. 10”, stands vindicated by the return of Sauti Kuu-like initiatives to the countryside 55 years after Kenya’s independence, ostensibly as a solution to unemployment, slums, economic inequality and rural-urban migration.

If Barack Obama’s winning political identity was partly constructed by successfully dropping radical black politics and leftist imaginations that connected black resistance against oppression worldwide and partly by enmeshing his autobiography with the American Creed, as Aziz Rana says, then Auma Obama is constructing her political identity partly by spurning Luo patriarchs and Kenya’s toxic ethnic politics as well as by championing a conservative creed: hard work, individual responsibility and self-reliance.

Still, Sauti Kuu will have to contend with the fact, to paraphrase Barack Obama Sr., that economic issues cannot be divorced from the political-social-cultural context in which we find ourselves. Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

George Floyd and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

By Norbert Odero Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

George Floyd and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

By Norbert Odero Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future. Follow us on Twitter.