The View From Nairobi

Nairobi, Kenya

The last time Barack Obama ran for president, quite a few Kenyans got rich off the Illinois senator’s unlikely – and astonishingly swift – ascent to the high table of American politics.

Any merchandise that bore the Democratic candidate’s smiling visage was swept off the shelves the moment it landed. Obama-Biden campaign material was everywhere: T-shirts, calendars, bumper stickers, key rings, American flags, campaign badges, DVDs. For a few months in 2008, visitors to Nairobi could be forgiven for thinking they were on the South Side of Chicago.

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A poster of Barack Obama hangs in Kogelo village, Kenya, where President Obama's father was born.Credit Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

Things are a little different this time. The merchandise is gone, and the expressions of support are not as exuberant. More muted enthusiasm this time around isn’t altogether surprising, however. Expectations in 2008 were impossibly high, and there had to be some disappointments down the road.

That’s not to suggest that Kenyans don’t back Mr. Obama anymore. He remains as popular as ever. A recent 21-country BBC poll found support for the president’s re-election in Kenya running behind only that in France and Australia.

But in Kenya, the picture is more complicated. The last four years have been a curious experience for many Kenyans. There’s been pride in Mr. Obama’s accomplishments and his steady hand as a leader, and confusion over those who attack him.

The local press has been extolling Mr. Obama’s virtues and offering detailed appraisals of his first term in florid terms that would not be out of place in a Democratic Party convention speech: “Who killed Osama bin Laden, ended the war in Iraq, got the affordable health care act signed, got the credit card consumer registration passed, fought for equal work, equal pay for women and more?” asked one analyst in Kenya’s largest paper, The Nation.

Yet this bullish assessment has been accompanied by puzzlement at how the right wing of the Republican Party has transformed the president’s Kenyan roots into a toxic campaign issue.

Before the 2010 midterm elections, it was common to see placards calling for President Obama to be sent back to his “socialist village in Kenya” at Tea Party rallies.

We were bemused, to say the least. After all, Kenya is anything but a socialist haven. Since independence in 1963, Kenya has been America’s staunchest ally in East Africa.

While neighbors like Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda and Tanzania flirted with socialism and aligned themselves with the Soviet bloc, Kenya remained resolutely pro-Western and implemented free market policies from Day 1. Warm relations between the United States and Kenya existed long before Mr. Obama came on the scene. And the country paid a heavy price when it fell victim along with Tanzania to the American Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998 — Osama bin Laden’s bloodiest attack before 9/11.

More bizarre was the charge, aired most volubly by the unsuccessful Republican candidate Newt Gingrich, that Mr. Obama is un-American because of his “anticolonial” attitude.

That statement seems exceedingly curious when you consider that one of the things every high school student learns in Kenya is that, among other factors, American opposition to colonialism hastened the end of the British Empire and contributed to the independence of many African nations.

Nobody embodied this stance more than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who differed strongly with Winston Churchill on the future of empire and extracted a concession from the British while drafting the Atlantic Charter of 1941. Indeed, the charter included an explicitly anticolonial line. The two trans-Atlantic powers agreed to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of Government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”

This declaration gave much encouragement to the early African (and Indian) nationalists and offered some legitimacy to their demands for independence even if they wished America had leaned harder on the British.

All these factors, combined with the stubbornly high number of Americans who persist in believing that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya (or is a Muslim) mean Kenyans have learned  to reconcile themselves with the fact the president can’t afford to associate himself too closely with the land of his father’s birth.

For decades around these parts, it did not really matter who was president of the United States. The policies at the State Department essentially remained the same whether a Democrat or Republican was in charge.

The last 10 years have changed that calculus, however. President George W. Bush did some good things in Africa, most notably his administration’s large-scale funding to improve health care on the continent. And Africa remains one of the few places abroad where he can still receive a warm welcome.

But the fallout from his broader policies and the global war on terror – including the rise of militant Islam in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere – has had a major impact in Kenya.

Al Qaeda had been a presence in the region for years, but the Iraq war of 2003 provided an opening for radical Muslims using money from the Persian Gulf to aggressively penetrate East African Muslim communities, taking advantage of a sense of grievance to cultivate local radical groups.

The 2006 American-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian troops entrenched anti-American feelings and emboldened the Somali militant group Shabab, which remains a threat today. Kenya was ultimately drawn into the mire of the Somalia conflict in October 2011 amid rising Shabab-sponsored attacks within our territory. Today, security checks are ubiquitous here in what was once one of the most laid-back and carefree cities in the world.

Barack Obama hasn’t been perfect. But he has restored the sense that America can be a responsible power in world affairs — intervening only in situations where inaction would be remiss, like the killing of Bin Laden.

In fact, the killing of Bin Laden is cited by many analysts as one of the reasons support for Mr. Obama runs so high. “We don’t support him simply because he is black,” says the media commentator Tom Osanjo. “The man has shown a quiet competence that is in stark contrast to what came before. Osama, for example, was responsible for the death of many Kenyans, and few here are sad to see him gone.”

In the last few days, election fever has begun to catch on. It is nothing like it was four years ago – and some of the pre-election events have the flavor of slapstick comedy about them. At the weekend in Western Kenya not far from where Mr. Obama’s father grew up, a bullfight was staged. The lighter bull, “Obama,” was judged to have beaten its heavier opponent, “Romney,” on points.

Whatever the result in the real competition, though, Mr. Obama has already had a profoundly beneficial effect on the way people view America. In many people’s minds during the 1990s, the United States was the land of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, Sylvester Stallone and his larger-than-life roles, the land of Coca-Cola’s sweet sodas. George W. Bush changed that rosy picture of America.

Mr. Obama has resurrected it.

Murithi Mutiga is a reporter and columnist for The Sunday Nation in Nairobi.