The celebrations of Barack Obama's victory in the American Presidential elections were as intense and delirious and glorious in Kenya, the land of Obama's ancestry, as anyplace. Indeed, the results of Tuesday's elections set off a wave of euphoric celebration that were perhaps unparalelled in the country's post-independence history.
G. Paschal Zacary argues in Foreign Policy that Kenyans have projected outsized, unrealistic expactations on Obama:
Yet there is undeniably an over-the-top quality about Kenya's embrace of Obama. The government declared a national holiday to celebrate the Illinois senator's victory over John McCain. The National Theater is staging "Obama: The Musical," which explores the next president's life through song. There are appeals for Kenya to officially petition the United States to become the 51st state. And the country is already making plans to host a visit from the president-elect, even though Obama hasn't indicated when, if ever, he will come.
Obamania in Kenya has gone on for years now, but the hype isn't just about the president-elect's roots. Rather, Kenya's Obama fixation seems to represent a kind of escapist fantasy for an African country beset by political dysfunctionality. Still raw with the memory of the electoral violence that left hundreds dead last spring, Kenya is thirsty for exactly the sort of change Obama represents. Indeed, the Illinois senator seems to possess everything that Kenya's political leaders lack: youthfulness, a conciliatory image, and the hope of transcending narrow ethnic identities in favor of a common national interest.
Yet in some ways, Kenya's euphoria is comparable to that among Obama's supporters in the United States, who are nearly desperate for change after eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration, and across the globe, who have seen their respect and admiration for the United States plummet in most parts of the world. And in all of those cases, Obama's supporters and admirers now need to reconfigure their own expectations. Obama is a talented politician who, it has been said, has a first-rate intellect and a first-rate temperament. But the United States faces serious challenges at home and abroad and Obama, for all of his gifts, is no miracle worker. Kenyans, and Obama supporters the world over, need to recalibrate their expectations so as not to turn Obama as a failure only by virtue of their outsized images of the possible.
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