The Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday, November 16 ran my photo from the Obama home in Kenya as the entire front page of a special commemorative (and collectors) issue, which included a farewell letter from (Senator) Barack to the people of Illinois.

I just returned from a month-long trip to Kenya. watched and celebrated the election last week with the Obama Family, in Kenya. 

Barack’s victory reverberated into his ancestral home village of Kogelo at dawn local time, heralded by crowing roosters and then declared in chorus by members of his extended family who danced around their modest homestead, chanting in their tribal tongue, “Our son / has won! Our son / has won!”

Below are articles I filed for Slate and U.S. News and World Report (and the Chicago Sun-Times) on Obamamania in Kenya and what it now means to be an Obama in that country. But the stories say nothing about how blown my mind was last Wednesday, sitting in the homestead where Barack’s father and grandfather are buried, while his sisters, brothers and numerous relatives celebrated the unlikeliest of moments in their family’s history.   

In Dreams From My Father, Barack wrote about the impact of his first visit there, in 1988: “I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago – all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away…. I felt the circle finally close.”

“That’s it, man,” Barack’s half brother Malik said to me. “Now we can walk around and feel free. Really free.”

As Barack delivered his acceptance speech in Chicago, digesting the steak his family had reportedly dined on earlier in the evening, his family in Kenya prepared to slaughter a bull. Later, as we sat together in plastic lawn chairs - watching elder women sashay to African beats and chop carrots, and villagers parade through the homestead shaking branches and chanting - his uncle Said told me: “It wasn’t until the speech that I realized what had happened, that we came to terms with what we knew was possible all along. What I saw was a man who could call attention to the world - who could say, ‘No, this is not how things should be, we should do it another way.’ Then I became deeply moved.”

Before I left the home and this sleepy village suddenly etched onto the world map, I talked with Auma, one of the sisters Barack acknowledged in the speech. “You heard what he said,” she told me. “He can’t do it alone. He needs you, too. This is your opportunity - take advantage of it. This is your time.”

-Andy

The U.S. Election/Obama visit was just one part of my month-long journey through many aspects of Kenya. For more pictures of Obamamania, of African wildlife, of multinational refugees living at the Kakuma Camp along the Sudan border and Turkana tribespeople inflicted with AIDS, check out the gallery here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/worldwideeyes/Kenya# 

Slate article: http://www.slate.com/id/2203232/