Change `bad traditions,' Obama tells Kenya

NAIROBI, Kenya - The connection between President Obama and Kenya has always been an echo of his relationship with his Kenyan father, which he once described as "an abstraction."

On Sunday, Obama sought to make that connection real as he laid out a detailed case about what he thinks needs to change for Kenya to become one of the globe's emerging powers.

Speaking to a crowd of 4,500 in the Safaricom Indoor Arena, Obama spoke of how he had "a sense of being recognized, being seen" during his first visit to Kenya three decades ago, how his last name no longer seemed strange.

Noting that Kenyans have the phrase "home anywhere you go," Obama added, "That's the Kenya that welcomed me nearly 30 years ago."

But the heart of the speech was more lecture than reminiscence, as he used his standing as a beloved son of Kenya to critique a country still fraught with tribalism, sexism, and corruption. Under different circumstances, or delivered by someone else, the speech could have sounded like intrusive moralizing by a foreign president. To Kenyans, particularly those dissatisfied with their government, it sounded like sage advice.

"A magical lecture," declared Kenya's Standard newspaper.

"If it came from another world leader, it might be different," said Augustus Muluvi, head of foreign policy at the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis. "But this is coming from someone who knows Kenya, someone who has family here."

Obama praised Kenya's considerable economic and political progress in recent decades. But he said that to fully prosper, it needed to root out corruption, end discrimination against women and girls, and show tolerance for minorities even as it pursued an intense war against terrorism.

"You can't be complacent and accept the world just as it is," the president said. "You have to imagine what the world might be and then push and work toward that future."

Although he emphasized that nations around the globe have different cultures, he also said there was no excuse for practices such as genital mutilation, the sexual and physical abuse of women, or the denial of educational opportunities for girls.

"Those are traditions, treating women and girls as second-class citizens. Those are bad traditions," he said. "They need to change. They're holding you back."

Obama made a specific appeal to young Kenyans, saying they were "not weighed" down by those old traditions.

"You are poised to play a bigger role in this world, as the shadows of the past are replaced by the light that you offer to an increasingly interconnected world," Obama said. "So now is time for us to do the hard work of living up to that inheritance."

The crowd, including many young students, cheered throughout Obama's speech, taking photos with their smartphones and iPads or waving American and Kenyan flags.

Across Nairobi, residents gathered in homes, restaurants and other meeting places to watch the televised address. In Kibera, the city's largest slum, some draped American flags from their homes and stores. In downtown Nairobi, five young men dressed their friend as Obama and pulled him through the streets in a cart.

Obama did not speak at great length about his father, Barack Hussein Obama, except to say that, as a sign of progress, Kenyans no longer needed to leave their country - unlike his father - to seek higher education.

That was one of the moments when some listeners thought Obama was speaking about a Kenya they didn't recognize.

"That's just not true," said Jacktone Juma, a customs agent on vacation from his job on the Ugandan border, watching the speech in a Nairobi restaurant. "If you want to make decent money, you still need to go overseas."

In Washington, Obama's Kenya connections are a punch line, to such an extent that even the president joked about it Saturday night. "I suspect that some of my critics back home are suggesting that I'm back here to look for my birth certificate," he said at the state dinner in Nairobi, prompting laughter and applause from the audience. "That is not the case."

Obama has built a close relationship with Alma Obama, a daughter from his father's first marriage, but his father's tangential role in his upbringing complicates matters for the president in relation to Kenya.

Former White House senior adviser David Axelrod noted that when it comes to Obama's Kenyan family, "the chief connection" is "a father he didn't know. That, by definition, makes it complicated."

Still, Obama has emphasized his Kenyan roots throughout his visit, saying Sunday that he was proud to visit the country not just as the first sitting U.S. president to do so but as "the first Kenyan American president of the United States." It is hard to imagine that he would have uttered such a phrase during his first term.

The president left Kenya on Sunday afternoon, the Associated Press reported, pausing longer than normal atop the stairs to Air Force One to wave to the crowd, a huge grin on his face. He arrived two hours later in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, where he met with diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in the evening.