Out of Africa

Interesting article on the forces that brought Obama's father to the US.

Mboya ended his article by calling for Africans and black Americans to work together in support of his campaign for a student airlift to the United States. In 1959, he had established the African-American Students Foundation, the purpose of which was to raise funds to bring students from Kenya and other parts of East and Central Africa to study at American universities before returning home to work in public service. In fact, the Harlem incident and the reflection it prompted on the separate identities of Africans and American blacks would not command our attention today were it not for the fact that one of those students, on the very first airlift of 81 young Kenyans, was a man named Barack Obama.

It is now well known, of course, that Obama Sr. entered the University of Hawaii in 1959 where he met and married Stanley Ann Dunham, who gave birth to Barack Obama Jr. on August 4, 1961. Obama Jr.'s birth, even as an almost casual by-product of the airlift's principal purpose--Obama Sr. didn't stay long in the United States, returning to Kenya where he became a senior economist in the Ministry of Finance--adds yet another thread of experience to the deep interconnectedness of Africa and the United States, which was such an important theme for Mboya. Even more, Obama's successful presidential campaign is an affirmation of the main theme of Mboya's message to his "American cousins"--that, if the black American can overcome racialism and "merge his blackness with his citizenship as an American ... the result will be dignity and liberation."

Out of Africa