By RASNA WARAH
The campaign by the republican Party to discredit Barack Obama’s credentials as presidential material has shown how low American politicians and campaigners are willing to sink in order to gain votes.
The recent smear campaign is being orchestrated by a Mr Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative American with Indian roots, who has started to solicit donations for a “Compassion Fund” for Obama’s half-brother George, who has inadvertently become a poster child for the Republican Party’s twisted presidential campaign strategy.
Mr D’Souza claims that he started the fund to show the world that Sen Obama is a hypocrite who claims to care for the underprivileged but does nothing for his own poverty-stricken family in Kenya.
Meanwhile, the Western media has been following the 26-year-old college student around and taking his pictures showing “the youngest brother of the coolest politician in the world” (as the UK’s Sunday Times put it) living in a slum in Nairobi.
To all his detractors, I would like to say just one thing: Read Obama’s memoir; Dreams from My Father, and repent.
Nowhere in this deeply insightful and honest book does Obama pretend that his family in Kenya is living in the lap of luxury, nor does he claim to be their saviour.
Sen Obama is not ashamed of his family in Kenya; he understands that the condition of being poor is not a crime, as some Republicans would have us believe.
But it is a result of global and national forces, which he is seeking to change, not just for the sake of young men like George (whose only fault, he writes, was that he was “born on the wrong side of our father’s cloven world”), but for all the world’s underprivileged people, who remain silent and ashamed of who they are because the world tells them they will never be good enough.
During his visit to Kenya when he was in his 20s, Obama tried to understand how the reality of living in Kenya forces people to turn against their own.
For instance, he even finds it in his heart to empathise with the waiter at Nairobi’s New Stanley hotel, who ignored him and his half-sister Auma, choosing instead to serve white tourists.
The waiter, he writes, has “learned that the same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels that the white man has built…He can’t escape the grip of his memories.
And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition.”
When Obama met his father’s side of the family for the first time, he realised that family was more than just a genetic chain, a social construct or an economic unit.
For him, family became a series of concentric circles that get progressively larger to embrace not just one’s immediate family, but entire nations and races.
Unlike Kenyan politicians, who cannot think beyond their village or constituency, Obama dared to think of family as all those, regardless of race, tribe or nation, who are committed to a particular “moral course.”
He sees himself not just as someone who can uplift the lives of his immediate family or the people of the US, but as someone who puts the world on a path where not just his half-brother George will have a chance to improve his life and expect justice, but where everyone on this planet will have a reason to hope for a better world.
In Dreams, Obama talks of the “survivor’s guilt” that many successful black men experience as they leave behind the throngs of jobless black men who cannot dream of securing a well-paid job, let alone aspire to be president of the most powerful nation on earth.
He realised early on his career that gaining individual power for himself was futile because “without power for the group, a group larger even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind.
And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled – the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns held sway; that no-one here could tell me what my blood ties demanded or how those demands could be reconciled with some larger idea of human association.”
There are few books that have the ability to make me cry with joy, but Obama’s left me completely wet in the face. It is a book that transcends race, class and continent by seeking to find the links that unite all of us as human beings.
My plea to the board that decides which books Kenyan school children and university students should read is that they should include Dreams in their list of required reading, for the sake of present and future generations of Kenyans.
About The Author: Rasna Warah is Editor of Habitat Debate, a UN-HABITAT periodical, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Rasna Warah, a Kenyan of of Indian origin, is also photographer. She was born in Nairobi in 1962, a year before Kenya became independent. Click Here To Read More About Rasna.
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