Barack Obama plans first visit to Kenya as US president

For years, Kenya has been a political headache for US president Barack Obama and a geopolitical headache for his country. But now in his seventh year in office, with his last election behind him, Obama has decided to embrace his heritage by visiting the land of his father for the first time as president.

Obama will travel to Kenya in July to co-host a forum on entrepreneurship as part of an effort to support economic development in Africa, the White House announced on Monday. In the process, the president may hope to exorcise some of the ghosts that have haunted his relationship with his family's home country – so much that he once felt obliged to produce a birth certificate to prove he was not born there.

Until now, Obama has resolutely avoided stopping in Kenya while in office, bypassing it during three previous presidential trips to sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to the chattering such a stop would presumably provoke among those who still refuse to believe he was born in the United States, the idea of a visit to Kenya was also problematic on the diplomatic front because of political instability and charges of crimes against humanity lodged against that country's president.

Now, the case against the president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has been dropped, and the perennial talk about Obama’s birth has faded in the US, so Obama seems to have concluded that a Kenya trip is acceptable at home and abroad. As the White House announced the visit, it tried to present it as a powerful symbol of America’s long-standing ties to Africa as represented by its African-American president.

“Just as President Kennedy’s historic visit to Ireland in 1963 celebrated the connections between Irish-Americans and their forefathers, President Obama’s trip will honour the strong historical ties between the United States and Kenya – and all of Africa – from the millions of Americans who trace their ancestry to the African continent,” two national security aides to Obama, Grant Harris and Shannon Green, wrote on the White House website.

Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr, was a Kenyan who came to the US to study. While at the University of Hawaii, he met and married Stanley Ann Dunham, and the two had a son. The elder Obama returned to Kenya, and the two divorced; the younger Obama met his father only once after that, when he was 10 years old. The senior Obama died in an automobile accident in 1982.

The future president visited Kenya as a young man exploring his roots, a journey chronicled in his evocative 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, and he went again in 2006 as a US senator. But he has remained largely distant from his Kenyan relatives during his presidency. A spokesman, Eric Schultz, said he could not say yet whether Obama would visit family during his trip this summer.

The connection to Kenya has long fuelled unfounded rumours that Obama was not born in Hawaii, despite the birth certificate he obtained from the state in 2011. As recently as December, a poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that nearly one in five Americans believe that Obama is probably or definitely not a US citizen.

The stubborn speculation has long frustrated Obama and his team, but he has tried to deal with it through humor. At the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington this month, he teased those who question his patriotism. "If I did not love America, I wouldn't have moved here from Kenya," he joked. "Still trying to deal with the overstaying-the-visa thing."

Many Kenyans have been upset that Obama has stayed away during his time in the White House. But while Kenya has been an important ally and one of the largest recipients of US aid, it has experienced turbulence in recent years. Kenyatta, the Kenyan president, was charged in 2011 with instigating and financing ethnic clashes after disputed elections in 2007 that cost more than 1,200 lives and forced 600,000 from their homes. The first sitting president to appear before the International Criminal Court, Kenyatta denied the charges and the case was dropped in December after prosecutors could not produce enough evidence.

Since a terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2013, for which al-Shabab, a Somali militant group, claimed responsibility, Kenya’s government has expanded efforts to counter violent extremism. But it has also passed laws restricting nongovernmental organisations from operating there, in the name of security, and critics say the country’s Muslims have been targeted in the zeal to combat the Shabab.

"What really makes it difficult for us is that, yes, we are victims of terrorism, but then we are also victims of counterterrorism," Hussein Khalid, executive director of Haki Africa, a human rights group, told a congressional hearing in Washington last week. "In Kenya," he added, "once you're a suspect of any terror attack, there is no innocent until proven guilty. Once you're a suspect, you have to count your days. Your days are numbered. Sooner or later, we find you dead somewhere."

White House officials said Obama would address human rights issues during his visit. But they emphasized the progress Kenya has made, to be highlighted at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit meeting, the first time the six-year-old forum, founded by Obama, will be held in sub-Saharan Africa.

New York Times