Ngwatilo

In these days leading up to Barack Obama’s inauguration, Kenyans have left the euphoria of November to reflect on the possibilities the Obama moment has brought for change in their particular lives. Concerned Kenyan Writers, an online collective of writers and scholars who came together during the 2007 post-election violence, have engaged in lively debates in the last week over the entertainment scheduled for the inauguration dinner at the Kenyan Embassy in Washington, DC. A particular poet and a particular boys’ choir are the subject: are they the kind of representation we would like for Americans and the world to see? The one, Caroline Nderitu, is well known in Kenya as an artist who often graces corporate functions to offer soft words appropriate for the day – usually at a fee. She could teach many poets a thing or two about earning bread in exchange for verse. The other group is a fine boys’ choir rumored to be preparing a particular song this Kenyan intelligentsia insists is an insult to self-respecting Kenyans: a colonized Kiswahili version of minstrelsy, welcoming tourists to an idyllic Kenya of “Hakuna Matata” fame.

Caroline is as rosy as Maya Angelou and is expected to put together a piece not unlike Ms Angelou’s 1993 offering to President Bill Clinton – which was inclusive, but not quite as brave as the anticipated offerings of president elect Barack Obama’s chosen inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander. It’s anyone’s guess what she will present, but this body of Kenyan writers is at this moment concerned with how Kenya shall represent itself at this very public moment in history. Are we merely a welcoming tourist destination of golden sands, giraffe and elephant – all beauty and no brain or perceptible soul?

In Kogelo, where president elect Barack Obama’s paternal family is from, government and private interests are already working to brand the village as a tourist destination. “The Obama Route” is a likely hit. Kogelo is set to make the fanfare a jumpstart to its economic development. Yesterday at my local 24hr supermarket I noticed calendars depicting the soon to be First Family on sale, and we’re told someone has come up with a design that puts Obama on the one enduring traditionally Kenyan cloth; the khanga with the typical design of an image and proverb or saying. The Concerned Kenyan Writers are therefore engaging in similar ways with this Obama moment, as they express concern for the artistic and literary representations of Kenyaness that will be witnessed at the Kenyan Embassy in Washington, DC on January 20th.

The Obama moment belongs to all who crave it for themselves; it suggests what may be possible in our own places. Obama’s story is actually not merely an American possibility, but one the gift of life affords regardless of where it may be spent. This is why we care. We are believing, to directly translate Kiswahili construction, that “even us we can” be remarkable, be anything we dream.

We wait with baited breath to see how he shall redefine Presidency, how representations of Americans including African Americans will change, if people will redefine themselves. We want to know even, if he’ll be anything like the presidents on 24 or The West Wing. It is not “Hakuna Matata” in Kenya; the madness and euphoria of our two country’s recent elections have given us pause. America is a kind of guinea pig for us: we want to know whether there is such a thing as a good man in politics, whether he can inspire people to be better more enduringly than a new year’s resolution.