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GEOGRAPHICALLY, Freetown, Sierra Leone, is far away from the United States
campaign trail. But spiritually, it seems I never left America.
Obamamania, naturally in the motherland (or in Barack Obama's case the
fatherland), is alive and well. No disrespect to George W Bush who is also in
Africa, he's not the American politician most people here are talking about.
If Sierra Leonians or other Africans had a vote, it would be one of those
lopsided 80 per cent communist majorities to this son of a son of Africa.
It started before the plane landed. Alvin, a Sierra Leonian from Atlanta, was
wearing a bright red T-shirt with a picture of Obama's face on it. Obama was all
his relatives back home could talk about, he told me. Interest in an American
election had never been this high, and he had never known them to follow an
election this early.
"The brother can do it," he said.
Still on the plane Mohammed from New York was more difficult to spot as an
Obama fan. No Barack T-shirts for him. He wore a West African dashiki-style
shirt under a suit-jacket. We struck up a conversation while the plane had
stopped in Dakar, Senegal, and that's when I found out he was a new New Yorker.
I asked him about Barack.
He was less sure than Alvin, but what he was mostly concerned about was
Obama's safety.
"I almost don't want him to get it, because I'm sure they'll assassinate
him."
I'm taking time out from the campaign trail to run a journalism training
course in Freetown. Paul, a business writer for Uganda's leading daily is one of
the experts on the course and as close as I'll get this time to a Kenyan take on
things.
"The interest in this election is very high in Uganda," he told me over a
Star beer. "Some people I know are even suggesting to their
friends that
they each contribute online, $1, to Obama's campaign."
After Barack Obama had notched up his tenth victory in a row in Hawaii, one
headline in the United States asked if it wasn't time Hillary Clinton started to
panic. Africans I have spoken with see it another way. Is it time they and
Barack Obama start to think the unthinkable?
Hlonipa Mokoena, a South African who teaches anthropology at Columbia
University in New York, said it was time America got used to something that had
been an African reality for more than 40 years – a black man running things.
"Obamamania is all over the African continent. Friends from South Africa are
writing to me wanting to know more about Obama.
"I think if he does become the American president, in many ways he'll become
the African president."
The pollsters say Obama has got the African American vote locked down. Looks
like he's got the African vote too.
The Nation
Newspaper | Obamamania grips Africa
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