Reflections on Obama Village

There is an Obama Craze in West Africa, and it has been going strong for two years now. As an American living in West Africa I was subjected to the Obama craze well before there was an Obama Presidency. During presidential campaigning, I was politely but firmly told by more than a dozen Togolese that I HAD to vote for Obama. During the inaugural address, which I was privileged to watch on a Dutch NGO television run on a generator in one small village, I was greeted with many handshakes and treated as a small hero for voting for our first African American president. But in recent months the infatuation with the president has morphed from idolization into industry in West Africa. There are Obama T-shirts, bumper stickers, and baseball hats coming out of Nigeria and yards and yards of cloth with the president’s likeness emblazoned on them being sold in Ghana. There are buildings with the president’s face painted on the side; local businesses are named after him (Obama Café in one village, and my favorite Obama Hairstylist in another); and one of the most popular baby names in the area where I live is Obama. There is even a village in Togo which is pushed back in the bush, four miles from the nearest road, which has changed its name from Agbassou-Kopé (translated from the Ewé language, it means “male goat village”) to Obama Village and erected a life-size statue of the American President, complete with big ears and great shoes.

But despite all the idolization and the influence the American President has had on African pop culture, the people I have spoken to have little or no knowledge of Obama’s personal or professional life or his administration’s stances on many issues. When I talked with a group of people sitting in a bar in the Togolese capital city of Lomé about what the Obama administration was doing in America, no one could give me an answer. And when I pressed them to answer questions concerning the administration’s policies toward things like health care, terrorism, torture, and unemployment all I received for a response was silence. But when asked about Obama’s African policy, the answer I received was a chorus of: “Obama is African and he is going to help Africa.” In fact, little is known about the popular American President beyond the fact that his father was Kenyan. Most people don’t even know that Obama’s party affiliation is with the Democrats or who Joe Biden is. Over the past year Obama has become a brand name in Africa, and sadly enough, the icon has become more important than the essence. It has become a way to sell products and services, make money and, in the case of Obama Village, attract the attention of NGOs, which are handing out grant money to organizers of development projects in Africa. What Africans are lacking in knowledge of Obama’s history, they are making up in their knowledge of marketing strategies and American-style capitalism: Obama sells - and Africa knows it.

During my time in Africa, the Obama craze has been a double-edged machete. On the one hand, President Obama has managed to rehabilitate the American image in Africa. He has done this partly with his moderate style of governing and his willingness to create a dialogue between himself and other countries, but mostly by having family ties to Kenya and by being black. Whether good or bad, this has made being an American in West Africa great. Here I’m a hero just because I’m an American. Besides having the random family scream “OBAMA!!,” at me I have received more cadeaux of chicken eggs, papayas, and what passes for moonshine from poor Africans than I and my wife can consume, thus making us bigger heroes when we re-gift the local hooch and fruit to our neighbors.

Remember, the machete does cut both ways. Because President Obama has African ties, many Africans believe he will “help” Africa. This I’ve come to realize is just a polite way to say that Africans expect Obama to send over boat loads of USD to the African continent and that obviously I must have been sent to Africa to be the distributor of this money. The people I have met in West Africa have become emboldened by the belief that Obama is sending “help,” for me this translates into daily requests for money and a constant badgering for “gifts.” Imagine a world where you are Britney Spears and the rest of the world is paparazzi watching your every move: that’s what it’s like being an American in West Africa.