On Sunday, Time Africa bureau chief Aryn Baker filed a gushy report from Nairobi: “Obama Electrifies Kenyan Youth With a Speech From the Heart.” Baker seemed to be harkening back to the first Obama campaign eight years ago.
Using words such as "electrifying," "youth," "future," and descriptive phrases such as "exuberant welcome," "spoke from the heart," "explosion of applause," "shouts of 'I love you!'," Baker can only remind a reader of when Obama became the first black presidential nominee of a major party.
When first nominated, Obama spoke to his adoring and weepy-eyed fans amid cheers and zestful excitement in an 80,000-seat football stadium complete with enough Greek columns on display that one might have looked around for Zeus. Baker's description of Obama's speech inside an arena in Nairobi, albeit on a smaller scale, is quite similar.
From the start, Baker seemed to boo-hoo the fact that Obama's first visit to Kenya as President had "largely been an official affair, defined by bilateral meetings and entrepreneurship conferences." She believed Obama didn't get the welcome he deserved until later:
As his convoy turned into Nairobi's SafariCom Arena, he finally received the exuberant welcome that security precautions had all but denied him since his arrival two nights prior.
Crowds of men, women and children, some waving flags and banners welcoming him back to his father's homeland, thronged the highway. Inside the arena, some 4,500 students, government officials and civil society leaders jumped to their feet as Obama's half sister, Auma Obama, introduced a man who really had no need for introduction. By the time Obama took the podium, the crowd was ecstatic. "I love you!" shouted a member of the audience. "I love you too," Obama said to the crowd.
Baker wrapped up the article with more gush from attendees about Obama:
“To see him standing and defending Muslims makes me feel empowered, and makes me feel that I have a support system.”
“…he held my hand for, like, five seconds. It was electrifying.”
“The fact that this time the advice was coming from someone who knows Kenya, who is of Kenya, that means it will have a much stronger impact.”
“Obama’s speech has given us all great encouragement to be better as a nation.”
Knowing his background couldn't compare with the majority of those attending his speech, Obama relied on the stories of his father and grandfather to try and connect with the struggle Kenyans face daily. Baker writes:
"He spoke of Kenya's turbulent history, and of his grandfather's job as a domestic servant for a colonial family, who, even as a grown man, was called "boy".his father's disappointment upon returning to Kenya after an education in the United States "in part because he couldn't reconcile the ideas that he had for his young country with the hard realities that had confronted him.
"A young, ambitious Kenyan today should not have to do what my grandfather did, and serve a foreign master. You don't need to do what my father did, and leave your home in order to get a good education and access to opportunity."
Baker writes that Obama offered some "hard-hitting prescriptions" when it came to helping Kenya progress, which included outdated traditions, the oppression of women, child marriages, ethnic tensions and the "cancer of corruption." Sounds like a campaign speech we already heard - with the exception of child marriages.
Obama even recycled some of the old "war on women" rhetoric from his speeches in the U.S. and applied it to Kenya - a country with a REAL war on women. He spoke about women's equality, girls' right to an education, and female genital mutilation: "Treating women and girls as second-class citizens, those are bad traditions.They need to change. They're holding you back."
Those are some hard-hitting words right there! Ironically, he made no mention of women being treated like second-class citizens during his negotiations with Iran.
