The article below is indirectly endorsing Obama, if you read it to the end.
But it does make you think how tribalism pervades across the globe.
Dilip
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From the NYT
Op-Ed Columnist
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By ROGER COHEN
Published: March 10, 2008
NAIROBI, Kenya
The joke going around here, after a rigged vote, is that it may be easier to
elect a Luo president in the United States than in Kenya.
We beat them to it, I just wasnt sworn in, Raila Odinga, the opposition
leader and a member of the large Luo ethnic group, told me. Obama, if elected,
would have been second, but I was robbed at the ballot box.
Barack Obama is an American delivered by birth from the fissures of his
fathers land. But it is through the charged tribal prism that Kenyans view the
U.S. presidential race after a spasm of postelectoral ethnic killing and
cleansing that left more than 1,000 dead and a half-million people uprooted.
Because Obamas paternal family is Luo, the Luos love him without reserve. By
contrast, Kikuyus, the largest tribe, are cool to him.
Since independence in 1963, Kenya has never had a Luo president. The
incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, is a Kikuyu and widely accused, as the countrys first
president Jomo Kenyatta was, of favoring his tribe.
Thats the 45-year backdrop to the violence, now stanched, that saw Luos who
felt cheated in the Dec. 27 election chasing Kikuyus from their homes and
Kikuyus killing in reprisal.
History is prologue. Back in the 1960s, Obamas father, shaped by his
American experience, warned that tribalism was going to ruin the country,
according to the senators memoir. Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, punished the old man
for his frankness.
Odingas father also suffered as a Luo. Oginga Odinga, the first
vice-president to Kenyatta, was arrested in 1969 after ethnic violence in the
Luo-dominated western city of Kisumu, near the Obama homestead. Today, burnt
buildings and shattered stores line Kisumu once again.
But were beyond tribalism, right?
Wrong. The main forces in the world today are the modernizing,
barrier-breaking sweep of globalization and the tribal reaction to it, which
lies in the assertion of religious, national, linguistic, racial or ethnic
identity against the unifying technological tide.
Connection and fragmentation vie. The Internet opens worlds and minds, but
also offers opinions to reinforce every prejudice. Youre never alone out
there; some idiot will always back you. The online world doesnt dissolve
tribes. It gives them global reach.
Jihadism, with its mirage of a restored infidel-free Caliphate, is perhaps
the most violent tribal reaction to modernity. But fundamentalism is no Islamic
preserve; it has its Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other expressions.
Americas peaceful tribes are also out in force. As Obama and Hillary Clinton
engage in the long war for the Democratic nomination, we have the black vote,
and the Latino vote, and the women-over-50 vote, and the Volvo-driving
liberal-intellectual vote, and the white blue-collar vote, and the urban vote,
and the rural vote, and the under-30s vote sub-groups with shared social,
cultural, linguistic or other traits and interests.
Thats democracy at work. Sure. But the United States is divided, within
itself and from the world, in growing ways.
It is divided by war, by income chasms, by foreclosures, by political
polarization and by culture wars. Increasingly it is looked upon from outside
with dismay or alarm. Healing, within and without, will be a central task of
the next president.
For several years now, Obama has made the possibility of unity beyond
division the core of his politics. Thats just poetry, the pooh-poohing Clinton
people say, but governing is about the prose of experience and grit.
I see plenty of Obama prose, in new proposals for national service, for more
equitable taxation, for health care, for international dialogue; and in his
unique experience, both personal and professional, of reaching across
continental, racial, religious and class lines. His grit is self evident. Look
where he came from.
I looked. Those charred buildings and smashed windows in Kisumu are borne
somewhere in Obamas soul, just as the words of his half-sister Auma are when
she described their elusive fathers travails: Kenyatta telling him he would
not work again until he had no shoes on his feet. On the south side of
Chicago, Obama has lived the American refractions of such violent division.
If I was to sum up this presidential race, Id say: Its the generations,
stupid.
An American generation under 45 has glimpsed an interconnected world beyond
race and tribe. They know its attainment will be elusive but, after a bitter
season, they feel summoned by what Lincoln called the better angels of our
nature. And, speaking of experience, they know Lincoln came to the presidency
with all of two years in Congress behind him, and a failed Senate campaign.
Looking out from Kenya, where he mediated an end to the tribal violence, Kofi
Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, told me: I think an Obama
presidency would be inspirational, an incredible development in the world.
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