Oh, for an Obama we can call our own ...

There was a bittersweet sense of defiant jubilation when Barack Obama was finally declared president-elect of the United States.

The elation pouring out of every corner of Kenya (and most of the world) was genuine and heartfelt, and the tears were of joy and awe as we realised we were witnessing a soaring moment of history.

What tempered the emotion was the awareness that we were enjoying this at a certain remove.

Obama is an inspiration, and his victory a deeply affecting one, but he’s not our president — our claims on him ring hollow, and the true beneficiaries of the revolution (and its true authors) are people who live 16,000 kilometres from here.

Yet our expressions of hope and elation signify a yearning for something — for an Obama we can call our own, without the compromise of celebrating a foreign leader.

This yearning expressed itself in different ways. Those of us who think ourselves as more sophisticated debated the Obama presidency in air-conditioned halls and television studios, our gravitas cautioning Africans against unseemly celebration and unwarranted hopes.

Intellectual sobriety was supposed to triumph over atavistic longings. Those who weren’t buying such pomposity went ahead and let it all hang out.

Young people in Kisumu, who could not wait for Americans to cast their ballots, went ahead and conducted an election of their own, in what will remain one of the enduring images of the Obama miracle (and to make it even more surreal, there were people who actually “voted” for John McCain, and those “votes” were duly counted).

The hunger, then, is deep-seated.

We yearn for our own Obama, given the fact that the one we could have had is the one we let slip away.

But dig deeper into this longing — take it apart — and the questions become less simple, in a way that is less easy to answer. When we seem to be seeking our own Obama, what exactly are we looking for?

Is it Obama the embodiment of the “yes, we can” philosophy (a notion as fuzzy or as concrete as you want to make it)? Triumph of bootstraps over adversity? Soaring rhetoric over muddy reality?

Kenyans, like any other people, are willing to be deflowered with sweet words sweetly said.

Which perhaps explained our fondness a few years ago for Michael Wamalwa, a politician as vacuous as any other, but one able, if only for a while, to seduce with a well-turned phrase. The cold light of morning, however, tends to reveal the depth of eloquence (or lack thereof).

Seduction when you’re clear-eyed is much harder to pull off, and only succeeds when you can back it up.

So, for Obama, the next four years will reveal the reality behind his rhetoric.

The expectation is that, to a large extent, he will be able to fulfil his promise (something about the content of his character implies that he is a man whom challenging times will hone to greatness).

The obverse of that, then, is that we’re probably still stuck looking for the Great Seducer.

There was perhaps a template in Mukhisa Kituyi — a singer of songs to propel us to ecstatic voting and then the smarts to wow the WTO crowd.

But hey, he’s out of power, and the pretenders to that throne, like Ababu Namwamba, ultimately fail to capture the imagination (fawning magazine covers notwithstanding).

What else is it, then? Obama the flower of youth? Claimants to that mantle are myriad.

Some are callow and untested (the aforementioned Mr Namwamba and Danson Mungatana come to mind), some are considered sinister (such as William Ruto) and some are still trying on the broken mould of Uhuru Kenyatta.

Youth is a much-sought after commodity in Kenyan politics, for reasons that are rather unclear.

True, the old geezers tend to have little energy for anything beyond legislative mischief (getting the media fraternity in a tizzy with one stroke of a pen, instead of letting them enjoy the first peaceful New Year’s in a while).

The real trouble is that our history books tend to read like newspapers, with the same cast of characters (or at least characters bearing the same surname) making repeated appearances, uttering the exact same lines that were a hit decades ago.

They seem not to follow instructions too well (“exit, stage left” seems to be reserved for a change in party costume, and not a hint that we need an entirely new cast of characters). Kenyan politics is a good Catholic marriage — death seems to be the only way of parting us from our “leaders.”

So the sight of doddering old men reliving the days of the Emergency makes us long for a young, handsome Obama to take us away from this.

What we forget is that Obama’s youth is relative.

His 50th birthday is a mere two summers away, and he has been plugging away at politics for almost 20 years.

The campaign was a distillation of all the lessons learned from politics at university, local and state level, and finally national contests (and his youthful sexiness is the distillation of the paradox of eight cigarettes a day and unrelenting workouts at the gym).

Our young ones jump straight into the national pond, and we seem to let them revel in it. Which perhaps speaks to the shallowness of our national politics — that midgets stand so tall in it.

More answers may lie in a clue given to me by a friend who claims to have his finger on the pulse of Luo politics.

He claims that by ethnicity — his surname is Olwa; and by residence — he lives in the heartland of Kisumu — he knows what’s going on in Luo Nyanza, and he has quite a radical thesis.

He claims that the biggest loser in Obama’s victory — besides poor old clueless John McCain — is Raila Odinga.

According to some of his supposed conversations with Luo elders — the oft-frustrating search for a “ruoth” has found its culmination on the faraway shores of Lake Michigan. Jaramogi and his son made a good fist of it, but the ultimate stench of failure means that their bid was not a successful one.

What Judge Kriegler said — that we will never know whether the election mess was the result of fraud or benign neglect — is irrelevant.

What matters is that the younger Odinga is not president, and Obama is, so the young and impressionable will go with the certified winner. Certainly an arguable concept, but one with legs...

And those of us with no Luo blood (or those of us who snootily make fun of this yearning for a champion) still sneak in a tenuous affiliation with Barack whenever we can.

Finally, is our search for Obama a yearning for a cleaner politics?

The sludge that is Kenyan politics seems to thicken by the day. If it is not the avarice of our parliamentarians, it is the grudging realisation that our leadership at the presidential level has been an advertisement for tyranny of different flavours — from a senile tyrant to an under-educated tyrant and finally ending up with an uninterested tyrant.

We look 16,000 kilometres away hoping that the coming morning will be an endless November 5 — a tableau of hope and history and joyous tears.

Yet even November 5 in America gives way to December 9.

Yes, even Americans have venal and tawdry politicians who see public office as a route to quick and illegal wealth (cue Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor who was arrested a month after Obama’s victory for trying to auction his Senate seat).

Many American politicians would fit right into our scene, and our MPs would enjoy the American way of corruption (and be just as highly paid).

Maybe the desire, then, is less for political purity and more for the feeling that hope is not a cheaply peddled commodity.

Sincere revolutionaries like Obama can make it to the top, and unfortunate idiots like Blagojevich will have the full force of the law descend on them, and the future may be unadulteratedly brighter (once you get economic crises and Middle Eastern politics out of the way).

While we make up our minds about what incarnation of Barack the Legend we seek, we will satisfy ourselves with the half loaf that is an ersatz Kenyan, in his guise as the most powerful man in the world.

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