On Friday, Barack Obama became the first sitting president of the United States to visit Kenya. For Kenyans, it was a long time coming. But Obama finally gave them the love and recognition they longed for since 2008, when Americans elected this “son of Kenya” president, making him the most powerful man in the world.
U.S. President Barack Obama received a rock star’s welcome during his first presidential visit to Kenya, the country where his father was born…
Speaking outside the State House in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday night, President Barack Obama criticized Kenya for its treatment of homosexuals…
The U.S. president urged the nation’s leaders to continue to root out corruption, eliminate income equality and end tribal conflict and gender violence.
(Daily Mail, July 26, 2015)
Interestingly enough, for the Kenyan people — who showered him with unbridled affection and adulation — Obama must have seemed the personification of the parable of Joseph. For their leaders — who basked in his reflected glow but winced at his rebuke of their corrupt and oppressive leadership — he must have seemed the personification of the parable of the Prodigal Son.
Except that I remember all too well Obama’s historic trip to Egypt in 2009, during which he must have seemed the personification of the same for the Egyptian people and their leaders, respectively.
Yet, for all the hope he inspired back then (for everything from enjoying greater democratic freedoms to forging better relations with the West), Egyptians have little or even less to show for his having been there. So, Kenyans, beware….
Meanwhile, Obama’s Republican critics hurled the same kinds of deranged criticisms during this trip as they hurled during his trip to Egypt. The way Obama championed American values, while criticizing African values, was as instructive as it was unprecedented:
As an African American in the United States I am painfully aware of what happens when people are treated differently. When you start treating people differently, not because of any harm they are doing to anybody but because they are different, that’s the path whereby freedoms begin to erode.
(Reuters, July 26, 2015)
Hell, he even risked offending the entire Continent by declaring that some hallowed African traditions have no place in the twenty-first century.
Yet Republicans would have you believe that all he did was apologize for America … like he always does on trips abroad. They hung their specious criticisms on the we’re-not-perfect way Obama invariably alludes to America’s legacy of imperfections, especially on matters of race, to couch his criticisms of foreign countries.
To his credit, Obama preempted/dismissed their criticisms by joking, during a toast to his hosts at a state dinner, that Republicans probably think he’s in Kenya searching for his birth certificate….
Unfortunately, his critics are too self-righteous to appreciate that the only way to champion American values in developing countries, like Kenya, is to do so with a little dose of humility. In fact, the failure of previous U.S. presidents to empathize with people around the world incited such anti-American slogans as “cowboy diplomacy” and “Yankee go home.”
For what it’s worth, as a native of a developing country, here is what I make of Obama’s outreach.
Only those of us who have been on the receiving end of racial, religious and gender oppression and discrimination can possibly appreciate how liberating and validating it is for Muslims to have the leader of the world’s most powerful nation accord them such respect.
This is why criticism of Obama’s speech is being vented mostly by white American men; in particular, by the narcissistic and arrogant ones who travel to foreign countries and become indignant when locals don’t speak ‘American.’
(“Obama’s Historic [Cairo] Speech to Muslim World,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 5, 2009)
So, if nothing else, Obama’s visit to Kenya will reinforce his presidential legacy of doing more than any other president to present a wholesome image of America: one that not only compares favorably with that of any other country, but also comports fairly with the heroic triumphs and tragic failures in its history.
Meanwhile, the U.S. media had such a “slobbering love affair” with Obama that they covered his historic trip to Egypt like teenagers cooing about their first schoolboy crush. But they are so over him that they begrudged interrupting their obsessive coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s schoolyard rantings to give just passing coverage to Obama’s trip to Kenya.
This, of course, is just the latest manifestation of the pathetic state, well, of the Fourth Estate. I’ve been lamenting its declining state for years—as this excerpt from “Journalism Is ‘Having a Very, Very Pathetic Moment,’” November 13, 2013, shows.
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My pet peeve these days is the malpractice inherent in TV journalists wasting hours every day with idle-minded speculation about the 2016 presidential election – a full three years before any such speculation could possibly have any news value or relevance…
‘Tina Brown, outgoing editor of the Daily Beast and former editor of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Newsweek … told the audience of a THiNK conference in Goa, India, on Friday that she is basically done with journalism, which she said is currently having a ‘very, very pathetic moment’ and has turned into advertising in order to try to make a profit.’
Welcome to the real world, Tina. After all, far from having a very, very pathetic moment, journalism has been in this pathetic state for years – as news programs interrupting reports on the crisis in Syria to bring viewers “BREAKING NEWS” on Lindsay Lohan’s latest arrest will attest. What’s more, I see no end in sight.
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Apropos of this, you’d never know it, but Obama made a historic trip to Ethiopia today, becoming the first sitting president to visit that country too. He is there primarily to discuss peace and security issues, particularly with respect to the ongoing civil strife in neighboring South Sudan and the regional scourge of al-Shabaab militants. No doubt this is why his visit is generating less fanfare there and even less media coverage here.
But Obama will also become the first U.S. president to address the 54-member African Union. I just hope he has the good sense to appreciate the irony of lecturing African leaders about democracy and human rights on this occasion.
After all, the Chinese built the AU’s extravagant new headquarters where he’ll be delivering this address.
Not to mention it being a fitting metaphor for Africa’s geopolitical strategy of staying wedded to the politically staid United States, while having an open and notorious affair with the politically indulgent China.
Mungu ibariki Africa.
Related commentaries:
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* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Sunday, at 7:06 p.m.