At the height of the crisis that followed a disputed presidential election early this year, Kenyans chuckled at an anonymous text message that poked fun at the Luo, one of the country's largest ethnic communities. They should make up their minds on which of the two Luos they would want to be president, the message said, an apparent reference to Raila Odinga - and Barack Obama.
Last year, Odinga sought, but failed, to become Kenya's fourth president since the nation gained independence. He is now prime minister in the new coalition government.
Obama, the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, is seeking to become America's first black president. His late father, Barack Obama Sr. (1936-1982), was a Luo from Nyangoma-Kagel village in Nyanza, the ancestral home of Odinga.
No one knows precisely how and when Kenya's Obama phenomenon started, but it began around the time Obama was elected to the Senate, in 2004. From public service vehicles festooned with images of a smiling Obama to American flags hoisted on mud-hut houses to newborn babies named after the senator, the Obama craze is on full display.
As Obama inches closer to the Democratic nomination, Kenya is ecstatic with thoughts of an American president with true Kenyan roots.
And if the bitterly fought elections in Kenya divided the country, the democratic duel between Obama and U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton thousands of miles away has galvanized Kenya.
As I checked out of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on my way to the United States in mid-March, a languorous clerk looked at my passport and as he gave it back asked: "Unaenda kusaidia Obama?" ("You are going to help Obama win the nomination?")
"Yes," I said. Of course, he and I knew that to be impossible, but if there is a place that Obama could win without breaking a sweat, it is Kenya - if Kenyans were allowed to vote.
The excitement about Obama in Kenya boils down to identity. Kenyans want to identify with him, and most would do anything for him to win.
In his search for an identity, Obama - whose father, then a foreign exchange student, left his wife and child in Hawaii when Obama was a baby - twice visited the ancestral home of a father he only saw once, when he was 10. In his best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama wonders whether the only tie that bound him to his absent father was "a name, a blood type, or white people's scorn."
Ordinary Kenyans feel that they are connected to Obama out of a shared ancestry and country.
