African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on February 7, 2009
African Affairs 2009 108(431):197-219; doi:10.1093/afraf/adp002
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Dala or Diaspora? Obama and the Luo Community of Kenya
Matthew Carotenuto (MCarotenuto{at}stlawu.edu) is Assistant Professor of History at St Lawrence University. Katherine Luongo (kluongo@neu.edu) is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. The authors would like to thank Albion College for a 2007 faculty development grant which helped facilitate this work, and Henry Adera for valuable assistance in conducting interviews in Kenya. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Boston University Walter Rodney Seminar and Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Africa Seminar Series. The authors would also like to thank David William Cohen, Frederick Cooper and the anonymous reviewers of African Affairs for their valuable feedback.
As members of the ethnic group to which the American President's paternal family belongs, Luo people in Kenya and in the diaspora have been eagerly claiming Barack Obama as ‘their own’ since 2004. This embrace speaks to a range of ethno-political developments in Kenya throughout the twentieth century. Luo identity has been primarily constituted within a diasporic context, beginning with the large-scale labour migrations of the early twentieth century and continuing with the activities of the ‘dot.com’ generation into the present. Simultaneously, patrimonial politics constituted along ethnic lines have rendered Luos political outsiders and heightened the urgency of securing a powerful patron. Given these two trends, Luo people at home and abroad have reached into the diaspora with hopes of finding their biggest ‘Big Man’ in the figure of Barack Obama.