Obama, the "Unbwogable" candidate
By Susan Linnee Posted Oct 30 2008
A woman buys a poster of Barack Obama in Kisumu, Kenya, July 2. Kenyans have taken a special interest the US democratic presidential candidate, whose ancestral home is Kogelo, Kenya.
STR, EPA
Mutuma Mathiu, a fortyish veteran of Kenyan journalism, scowled over the shoulder of the layout man at the front page of the Sunday Nation on the computer screen where Barack Obama stood tall. What to say in a word or two about the man most Kenyans fervently want to be the next president of the United States?
UNBWOGABLE! That would be the headline! The word had been magic once before in Kenya’s crucial 2002 election. Polls in the U.S. were indicating that the lead of the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother over John McCain, his rival for the U.S. presidency, was growing steadily. Mathiu could be going out on a limb, but he felt like making a statement.
The managing editor of East Africa’s largest Sunday newspaper remembered when, in late 2002, Unbwogable, the title of a Kenyan hip-hop song in the Duhluo language, was appropriated as the signature slogan of NARC, the political coalition that brought an end to Daniel arap Moi’s 24-year authoritarian rule when its candidate, Mwai Kibaki, was elected president.
Gidi-Gidi and Maji-Maji, the duo that had written the song several years earlier, said the word meant something like “indomitable” or “unbeatable” in their local slang. The song and the word became the rallying cry of millions of Kenyans who voted back then for change they could believe in.
“To us it’s a good story because it’s an issue around which we can sell newspapers, yet it is not divisive, and readers like the idea of a black man becoming president of the United States,” Mathiu said. “But at the end of it, exciting as it is, it’s still a foreign election.”
So the one-word headline ran in black on the front page of the Oct. 12 edition, which sold about five percent above the usual 230,000 weekly copies of the newspaper. The Nation is part of the Nation Media Group, one of the largest media organizations in sub-Saharan Africa.
Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan who studied at the University of Hawaii and then Harvard in the late 1950s and 1960s thanks to U.S. interest in newly emerging African states. His bid for a U.S. senate seat in 2004 attracted media attention in the U.S., while hardly registering with the Kenyan media.
Obama hadn’t yet thrown his hat in the 2008 presidential ring when he made his first public trip to Kenya in August 2006 as part of a Senate Foreign Relations committee delegation. The international media based in Nairobi paid more attention to him than their Kenyan colleagues did, even trekking out to western Kenya to interview his paternal grandmother, Sarah Hussein. The Obama story still hadn’t registered locally.
It wasn’t until the Democratic primary heated up earlier this year that it began to dawn on Kenyan editors and reporters that the young African-American politician might conceivably become the next president of the United States.
But at the same time, the Kenyan media was consumed by a crisis. Politically motivated violence erupted after the controversial announcement of disputed results in the Dec.27, 2007 presidential contest between Kibaki and Raila Odinga, a member of the Luo tribe, to which Obama’s father belonged. Long marginalized on the Kenyan political scene, many Luos were distraught when Kibaki was declared the winner under still-murky circumstances.
Kenya only managed to pull back from the brink through the intervention of former U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan, who mediated the creation of a coalition government with Kibaki as president and Odinga as prime minister. By that time, the joke going around was that a Luo would be elected president in the United States before such a thing could happen in Kenya.
According to statistics from the International Institute of Education, Kenyans account for the largest number of African students at American colleges and universities; and although there are no precise figures on the actual number of Kenyans living in the United States, the remittances they send back to their families in Kenya were totaling around $65 million a month before the financial meltdown.
When it became clear that Obama would secure the Democratic nomination, Kenyan television stations sent reporters to cover both the Democratic and Republican conventions.
Although Kenyan newspapers are among the top papers of the continent, their reach is relatively narrow and limited to educated urbanites. Until recently, coverage of the U.S. presidential campaign in The Daily and Sunday Nation, The Standard and The Nairobi Star came mainly from international news agencies, including the official Chinese agency Xinhua, in the case of The Kenya Times. The Nation Media Group has a U.S.-based correspondent; the Ford Foundation’s East Africa office is partially covering the expenses of several Kenyan columnists who are covering the final stretch of the campaign and the election.
Radio and television have a much greater level of penetration than newspapers in the East African nation of some 39 million. With over 50 radio stations and six television stations, it is no wonder that news spreads rapidly amongst thousands of Kenyans.
Emmanuel Juma, news manager for Nation Media Group’s NTV, said reporters Basset Buyukah and Betty Dindi have been sending regular reports from the United States since Oct. 1 and would be going live periodically on Nov. 4 and 5 in between feeds from CNN. The station also plans to have a political analyst in the studio to comment on the results as they come in.
Anderson Waweru is already in the United States. for K-24, Kenya’s first 24-hour station. Citizen TV, part of the Royal Media Group that also operates seven FM radio stations in Kenya’s main regional languages in addition to nationwide Citizen radio in Kiswahili, has sent Alex Chamwada and Louis Otieno to Washington.
KTN will have Peter Opondo in Washington, and KBC, the national broadcaster, is finalizing its plans for U.S. coverage, according to editor Kennedy Osir.
All the TV stations carried live feeds of the three presidential debates. Anna Kwatemba, a Nairobi housekeeper, was one of the thousands of Kenyans who awoke at 4 a.m. to watch them. Replays were broadcast throughout the day.
When the suggestion of a televised debate arose during Kenya’s elections last year, Odinga invited Kibaki, but the incumbent president’s advisers turned him down with the excuse that a debate was not necessary since people already knew where Kibaki stood on the issues.
“It would be good if our politicians could see how these debates work so that they might do the same in 2012,” she said after the final debate on Oct. 15, referring to the probable date of Kenya’s next presidential election.