Barack Obama visits Africa, makes it a homecoming

You could sum up Barack Obama’s fourth visit to Africa as US president in four loaded words: history-making, China, proselytisation, and Nigeria.

His trip marked the first time a serving American president would visit either Kenya or Ethiopia. With Kenya, there was the added significance of a homecoming: his father, Barack Obama Snr, was born in Kenya, spent most of his life in the country and died there in 1982. (Mr Obama had visited thrice before now.) Indeed, in one of his speeches while there he described himself as “the first Kenyan-American to be president of the United States”.

With every one of his Africa trips the American president has seemed keen to make a grand, historic statement. His debut, a visit to Cairo 35 years to the month after Richard Nixon became the first sitting US president to visit Egypt, was meant to kick-start a new phase in US-Arab relations after the grave misunderstandings of the Bush years. The visit to Accra, Ghana, a month later, even though it lasted less than 24 hours, was no less significant — Ghana was the first black African country to gain its independence (from Britain, in 1957), and the most stable democracy in west Africa. Senegal (first visit to francophone Africa), Tanzania and South Africa (then the continental economic giant) followed in 2013.

China has been paying attention, not surprisingly — it and the US are frontrunners in a race for economic and diplomatic influence on the continent. The intensification of the battle has coincided with Mr Obama’s time in office; China overtook the US as Africa’s largest trading partner during his first year as president, the culmination of a 20-fold rise in trade between China and Africa in the preceding decade. The new order triggered US resentment; no one missed the veiled reference to China in a comment by secretary of state Hillary Clinton, while on a trip to Senegal in August 2012, that “the days of having outsiders come and extract the wealth of Africa for themselves, leaving nothing or very little behind, should be over in the 21st century”.

Five years on, the tables appeared to have turned, and now it is the Chinese who are being snarky. China’s state news agency Xinhua reportedly went as far as to allege that Mr Obama was seeking undue advantage by “playing the family card”.

It is not clear why the Chinese feel that way. Perhaps it’s a measure of the success of the president’s attempt, in his second term in office, to make up for the indifference that marked his first. In this term, Mr Obama has unveiled important partnership initiatives in infrastructure (Power Africa; involving eight countries from east, west and southern Africa) and trade (Trade Africa; focused on five countries in east Africa), and a Mandela Washington Fellowship targeting young African leaders. In August 2014 he was host to 50 African heads of state at a three-day US-Africa leaders’ summit.

The upper hand remains with China. The number of Chinese people in Africa is now estimated to be more than 1m (Howard French’s aptly titled China’s Second Continent: How a million migrants are building a new empire in Africa tells some of their stories). The icing on their cake is to be found in the fact that Mr Obama’s final speech in Africa was delivered in the African Union’s imposing new headquarters, a $120m gift from the Chinese government.

Preaching to Africa is the one thing the US has done better than any other imperial partner, and a US presidential trip would not have been complete without it. In Kenya, Mr Obama spoke against homophobia, which is widespread on the continent. Many Africans perceive America’s pressure regarding homosexuality as an attempt at imposing an alien culture. In Ethiopia, he was scathing in his assessment of the African Big Man’s penchant for tenure extension. (Unlike the homosexuality issue, this was extremely well received.)

The pulpiteering came with a whiff of hypocrisy, in the differing reactions to recent elections in Burundi and Ethiopia. As one Twitter account pointed out, Mr Obama’s description of the Ethiopian government — which took 100 per cent of the vote in elections in May — as “democratically elected” jarred with his “not credible” verdict on Burundi’s, in which the opposition took more than a quarter of the vote.

Twitter itself ended up featuring prominently in news of the visit, in an unanticipated way. After a CNN news story described Kenya as a “hotbed of terror” in the days before the visit, outraged Kenyans made headlines by resurrecting the Twitter hashtag #SomeoneTellCNN. The first time they used it was in 2012, in reaction to what they considered to be skewed coverage of a grenade attack at a bus station in Nairobi. Then they used it again during the country’s 2013 general elections. The enthusiasm of the social media responses generated as a counterpoint to foreign media representation offers compelling evidence of the game-changing role of mobile phones and the Internet on a continent once defined almost exclusively by its guns.

Hanging over this Africa trip — as with all Mr Obama’s previous ones — has been the question: “Why not Nigeria?” The last two US presidents, George W Bush and Bill Clinton, visited the country while in office. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, and its largest economy; the US is its biggest foreign investor and until last year the leading importer of Nigeria’s crude oil.

Days before Mr Obama travelled to Kenya, he treated Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari to a lavish reception in Washington. (It is very likely the Nigeria visit was scheduled first to mute the force of inevitable “why not Nigeria?” sentiment.) In an interview, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Mr Buhari if he was “disappointed” that the US president had yet again left Nigeria out of his itinerary.

“I wouldn’t say I was disappointed, but how I wished he’d change his mind and go to Nigeria,” Mr Buhari replied, adding that he planned to “send a formal invitation”. If Mr Obama accepts, we should expect one final Africa trip by him in 2016.

The writer is west Africa editor at The Africa Report