I'm dating myself here, but I remember when everyone was super into Africa. Remember? This was the eighties. We did a fundraising concert for it, and "adopted" children from it for a nickel a day. Today, Africa's about as cool as Cavaricci's — slow-burning famines and plagues can't compete with the more reality-TV-like disaster zones in Iraq, Indonesia and New Orleans. About the only thing keeping it on the radar is Barack Obama, who's running for president and also happens to have a father from Kenya, as well as a sister and grandmother who still live there. Senator Obama Goes to Africa is more political propaganda than international-awareness builder ("As seen on Oprah!" cheers the DVD case), but that doesn't mean it's not a good film.
Its best effect is to show how very close Obama's roots actually are to this poorest, most exotic continent on the planet. Even if you're already aware of the senator's background, to see him visit his grandma — who's clothed in traditional native African garb, complete with headdress — in her small, mud-walled Kisumu house, is completely different from just hearing that Obama's family is from Kenya. This is not some distant, thrice-removed relative of his: this is his grandmother, and she lives in the world that we've only seen on those Sally Struthers commercials. It's almost alarming to actually witness.
To Obama supporters (full disclosure: I'm one of them), this is exactly the biggest argument for electing him president — that he's intimately linked with the world that Americans usually acknowledge only when it's a cause celebre. But to its credit, the film doesn't coast as a sound-bite-safe international love fest. We see Obama starkly chastise the corrupt Kenyan government in a speech to students and officials, and even when he and his wife, Michelle, get publicly tested for HIV, it comes off less as a photo-op than his way of coaxing African men who respect him to do the same. It's hard to exaggerate the degree to which Obama is a national hero in Kenya — he appears in the news there more often than their own president, and is cheered by epic throngs in town after town. The contrast is shocking — just try to imagine George and Laura sincerely conversing with rural Africans, then taking an AIDS test in front of a crowd of them. Campaign agitprop it may be, but you can't say it's untrue. — Will Doig
