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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:9.0pt'><b><font size=2 face="Trebuchet MS"><span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";font-weight:bold'>For
those who have not read this opinion piece, I would urge you to do so and
reflect on it. Why do we need to bring down Brian Longwe on the basis of
his nationality? Why not celebrate his success? Why assume that a
non-Kenyan will not positively contribute to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Kenya</st1:place></st1:country-region>?<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:9.0pt'><st1:PersonName w:st="on"><b><font
size=2 face="Trebuchet MS"><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
"Trebuchet MS";font-weight:bold'>Binaifer Nowrojee</span></font></b></st1:PersonName><b><font
size=2 face="Trebuchet MS"><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
"Trebuchet MS";font-weight:bold'><o:p></o:p></span></font></b></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:9.0pt'><b><font size=2 face="Trebuchet MS"><span
lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";font-weight:bold'>Barack
Obama and the graveyard of hope<o:p></o:p></span></font></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='mso-margin-top-alt:1.5pt;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:
4.5pt;margin-left:0in'><st1:PersonName w:st="on"><i><font size=1 color="#330033"
face="Trebuchet MS"><span lang=EN style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";
color:#330033;font-style:italic'>Wambui Mwangi</span></font></i></st1:PersonName><i><font
size=1 color="#330033" face="Trebuchet MS"><span lang=EN style='font-size:8.0pt;
font-family:"Trebuchet MS";color:#330033;font-style:italic'> (2008-08-11)<o:p></o:p></span></font></i></p>
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4.5pt;margin-left:0in'><i><font size=1 color="#330033" face="Trebuchet MS"><span
lang=EN style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Trebuchet MS";color:#330033;
font-style:italic'><a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078">http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50078</a><o:p></o:p></span></font></i></p>
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on this article.<o:p></o:p></span></font></i></p>
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color="#330033" face="Trebuchet MS"><span lang=EN style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Trebuchet MS";color:#330033'>I am finding it very difficult to
join in the jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the
man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that
the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kenya</st1:place></st1:country-region>.<br>
<br>
I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him if he had come to know
the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents
had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up
somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.<br>
<br>
If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to retain most elements of
his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and
competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.<br>
<br>
Yes, we would have assassinated a Barack Obama if he had remained ours, with
us, one of us here in this schizophrenic cauldron we call home. This is not
going to stretch the imagination of any Kenyan - after all, when we had that
incredibly good-looking and charismatic home-grown hero, Tom Mboya, we shot him
to death.<br>
<br>
And when that austerely intellectual and elegant leader, Robert Ouko,
threatened to look overly intelligent to the world, we killed him too. We
killed Pio Gama Pinto and we killed JM Kariuki. There is no reason to suppose
that Barack Obama, whose integrity of purpose and stringent sense of ethics
even his enemies concede, would have survived his Kenyan roots.<br>
<br>
He is much too intelligent, too charged with the promise of history, too bold
in his claim to a shining destiny, too full of the audacity of hope, for us to
have let him survive. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kenya</st1:place></st1:country-region>
would have killed Barack Obama, or at least his dream, as we inevitably
destroy, in one way or another, the best and the boldest of us. Goldenberg
whistle blower David Munyakei's challenge to his country to be bigger than our
greed was met with a whimper, and then with rapid abandonment. We did not
deserve him, either.<br>
<br>
As for John Githongo, he should have known better than to take the idea of
public ethics seriously - this is <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Kenya</st1:place></st1:country-region>, after all. Let him enlighten
people at <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Oxford</st1:place></st1:City>
instead; such considerations are too virtuous for us, too sensible, too
conducive to a promising future. We do not even remark on the haunting wastage
of all this shining accomplishment - Micere Mugo sings her lyrical poetry for
Americans, and we do not even know enough to mourn the loss.<br>
<br>
And yet we are all enchanted with the power of the idea of Barack Obama, the
hope of him, the beauty of his life's trajectory, the universe of possibilities
and probabilities that it conjures for the least of the rest of us. If
someone's cousin's friend's neighbour makes it to the <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>...
then we all have a chance. We have a strange predilection for schizophrenic loves
and loyalties; we let geography dictate our alliances and imaginary lines
decide our friends. It is as if our social contract states that here, at home,
we are obliged to behave like fighting rats to each other but when abroad, when
released from the shackles of kin and clan and conclave, we can fly and soar
and master the sky.<br>
<br>
When Wangari Maathai is abroad, we feel that her Nobel Prize is partly
represented in each of our Kenyan living rooms; when she comes home, she is
just another Kikuyu politico. We preen about our athletes winning yet another
international competition to anybody who will give us half a chance, but when
they are at home we turn them into more fodder for militias.<br>
<br>
Caine Prize winners are Kenyan by automatic assent, but Binyavanga Wainaina is
a Kikuyu writer when at home and Yvonne Owuor is indelibly a Luo - we shrink
them to fit the midget-sized visions we have of ourselves.<br>
<br>
It is clear to all of us, and the evidence continues to accrue, that we have,
collectively, a certain global competence, as Kenyans, that we produce
individuals of substance and historical purpose.<br>
<br>
Being Kenyan, however, we prefer to drown in the pettiness of our parochial
quarrels when at home, and if one of us threatens to be too hopeful, too
ambitious, too intelligent, too creative or too inspirational to fit into our
trivial little categories of hatred and suspicion, we kill them, or exile them
from our societies, or we just cause them to run away inside, hiding from us
and from themselves the grandeur of their souls, the splendid landscapes of
their imagined tomorrows.<br>
<br>
Nothing but the worst for us, at home. We recognise each other by our most
rancid rhetoric. We insist upon it, we cultivate it, we elevate it to an art
form: Kenyan, and quarrelsome.<br>
<br>
Kenyan, and clannish. Kenyan, and counter-productive. Kenyan, and
self-destructive. Kenyan, and consistently heart-breaking. Genius everywhere,
and not a thought to be had. Promise and potential everywhere, and not an
opportunity to be had. Money everywhere, and not an honest penny to be earned.
Helicopters aplenty, but no help for the needy. A land awash in Cabinet
ministers and poverty.<br>
<br>
I have been watching Kenyans getting high on Obamamania, and I am wondering
what we are so happy about? It is perhaps that we are beginning to acknowledge
what we should always have known - given a half a chance, an ever so slightly
conducive context, Kenyans are more likely to over-achieve than not. At the
faintest provocation, Kenyans will leap past expectations without breaking
their stride or breaking a sweat, especially if they happen to have escaped the
imprisoning edifice we call home and found foreign contexts to flourish in, no
matter how alien.<br>
<br>
I went to a town in the Canadian Arctic once, in the far north, where in summer
the sun shines even at midnight and in the winter the world is an endless
landscape of ice and snow. Here, far, far away from home, where nothing was
familiar except the gentleness of elderly Inuit women and the comforting
weirdness of the white residents, I was told that the local dentist had, for
many years, been a Kenyan. Everybody said he had been an excellent dentist, out
there in the desert of the cold. I was unsurprised.<br>
<br>
We are an adventurous people, we Kenyans, and we take to the world outside our
home as if born to a conquistador culture - we are brave and brash and bold,
out there. We buy and sell things, and make money at it, out there. We go to
school and excel and cover ourselves with accreditations, out there. We win
things, out there. We get prizes, out there. We are at our best, out there.<br>
<br>
However, at home, for some reason we refuse to either acknowledge or examine -
we have chosen simply to set aside this capacity. Here, at home, nothing but
the very lowest common denominator will do; nothing but the basest and most
brutal aspects of our selves are to be presented to each other; nothing but the
most cynical manipulation is the basis of our political space. We prefer to be
ruled by individuals whose mediocrity is matched only by their mendacity, here
at home.<br>
<br>
We prefer to abdicate our adult responsibilities and capacity for reason to
"leaders" whose lack of virtue is as legendary as our attractively
exotic pastoralists. We do not only waste talent, here at home - we go out of
our way to suppress and repress it. We do not only deny dreams, here in <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kenya</st1:place></st1:country-region> - we
devour them, and ask each other, "Who do you think you are?" As if
the success of another is an affront.<br>
<br>
In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kenya</st1:place></st1:country-region>,
grand vision and soaring imagination is illegitimate; here, they just call you
naive. Out there, you stand a chance of becoming a hero; at home, you will have
nothing but the taste of ashes in your mouth. Mothers, take your children
abroad.<br>
<br>
Barack Obama has written two books, in which he discusses ideas. Ideas. This is
a man with vision and conviction, and enough good ideas that even those who do
not like the pigmentally-advantaged are listening, and changing their minds.<br>
<br>
Even those who think that his name sounds suspiciously like a terrorist's are
reading his books and listening to his speeches, and changing their minds. This
is a man with interesting and inspiring things to say - which disqualifies him
from any Kenyan-ness we would have liked to claim.<br>
<br>
Americans like the image of them that Barack Obama has painted in words; which
Kenyan leader would dare to build dreams bigger than his roots? Which Kenyan
leader would ever be so foolish as to attempt inspiration instead of
instigation?<br>
<br>
Barack Obama has seduced the world by the power of his persuasiveness, and
while Kenyans raise another glass to the accomplishments of "one of our
own," it seems clear to me that we gave up our rights to him when we gave
up our hopes for ourselves. When we settled for incompetence, and corruption,
and callousness, we defined ourselves out of his universe, and out of his
dreams.<br>
<br>
We rejected Barack Obama-ness when we allowed those pangas to slash our dreams,
when we watched our hopes spiral away in smoke. We allowed the ones who had
done this to become the only mirrors of ourselves, and then squelched our
disgraced selves back to the mire of our despondency.<br>
<br>
Barack Obama cannot be a Kenyan, and Kenyans cannot grasp Barack Obama's dream.
We have already despaired of it, and of ourselves. His dream would have died
with ours, here at home, here in the graveyard of hope.<br>
<br>
But oh, how we yearn to see ourselves reflected in his eyes...<br>
<br>
<br>
*<st1:PersonName w:st="on">Wambui Mwangi</st1:PersonName> is an assitant
professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Canada. This
article first appeared inThe East African, June 15 2008.<br>
<br>
*Please send comments to <a href="mailto:editor@pambazuka.org">editor@pambazuka.org</a>
or comment online at <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/">http://www.pambazuka.org/</a><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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