By David Ohito

Everything is finally falling in place. After all the celebration and tears of joy that have drenched America and the world after the victory of President-elect Barack Obama’s, there is a lucid narrative explaining that he is a fulfilment of a prophecy.

Obama made history when he was elected the first US African-American president on Tuesday. The prophecy goes back exactly 40 years ago when a much-beloved American leader, Senator Robert F Kennedy, while mourning his brother’s assassination, made his prophecy on Voice of America in 1968.

“There is no question about it,” Kennedy said. “In the next 40 years, a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother (former President John F Kennedy) had.”

Those were troubled times in the US. White extremists were still lynching blacks in America’s South and segregation had only been abolished.

Kennedy said: “Prejudice would exist and probably would continue … but we have tried to make progress and we are making progress. We are not going to accept that status quo.”

Those were very brave words, especially because of what was to follow that same year. Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jnr had mobilised a million-man march, and spoken with characteristic eloquence about his vision of the “Promised Land.”

Chillingly, King said he feared he would not live to see it. Only months later, he was assassinated.

Kennedy airlifts

Obama takes over the story. During a campaign in Selma, Alabama, in March he said: “The Kennedys decided: ‘We’re going to do an airlift… We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so that they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama Senior got one of those tickets and came over to this country’.”

However, Obama Snr had gone to the US in 1959, a year before the Kennedy airlifts began.

Many of the airlifted Kenyan students worked their way up to elite universities in America and returned home to help Kenya adjust to independence.

At the time, various universities had given scholarships, but airfare had been a problem. The US State Department had refused to help.

However, in 1959 some 81 Kenyan students arrived in New York. Among them was Obama Snr, who went to the University of Hawaii where he met and married his American wife, Ann.

He and others made the programme so successful that the sponsoring African-American Students Foundation lined up 243 scholarships for the following year.

Family foundation

But airfare was still a problem and the State Department refused to help despite requests from actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, among others.

Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya then sought out Senator John Kennedy, who chaired the Senate Sub-Committee on Africa, for help.

He arranged a $100,000 (Sh8 million at the current exchange rate) grant through his family’s foundation to help Mboya keep the programme running.

“It was not a matter in which we sought to be involved,” Kennedy said in an August 1960 Senate speech.

“Nevertheless, Mboya came to see us and asked for help. When none of the other foundations could give it and when the Federal Government had turned it down quite precisely, we felt something ought to be done,” he said.

Kennedy agreed to fund the airfare through the family foundation. Kennedy was the Democratic nominee for the presidency, but he chose not to make the gift public to avoid politicising the programme.

When Republican nominee Richard Nixon got wind of it, he tasked his ‘truth squad‘ to spread false reports that “the rich kid Kennedy had out bid the State Department” to win black votes.

But Kennedy denounced the smear from the Senate floor as “the most unfair, distorted, and malignant attack I have heard in 14 years in politics.”

On September 14, 1960, two planeloads of African students landed in New York, thanks to the Joseph P Kennedy Jr Foundation.

Kennedy Welcomes Kenyan Students Click Pic To Enlarge		Airlift Students on Way To Airport Click Pic To Enlarge

So the tipping factor in Caroline Kennedy’s decision to back Obama a few days ago appears to have been drama that involved both their fathers.

Admiration for US

In his command of the US political stage over the past year, Obama has inspired many in a way only comparable to JF Kennedy. Both young senators brought a lofty message, an appealing young family and a movie-star aura to the presidential race.

Mr Joel Barkan, an Africa scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said Kennedy’s gift to Kenya helped forge a relationship with America that has remained strong for decades.

“There’s no other African country where there is such admiration for the US… There has always been a disproportionate number of Kenyan students in America to study. Their children come here, their grandchildren come here,” Barkan said.

Environmentalist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, also studied in America, thanks to the airlift.

“Before the Kenya elections, there was a popular question circulating among Kenyan intellectuals: ‘Which country will be first to have a Luo president, Kenya or the United States?’” wrote Prof Ali Mazrui, a renowned Kenyan academic who directs the global studies programme at Binghampton University in New York.

“The question was only half in jest,” Mazrui said adding: “It was all because of Tom Mboya’s vision for it helped produce the next president of the US.”

References:

1. An Evening With Tom Mboya — PDF Document

2. Palin says she doesn’t regret Couric interview

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