Seneta Obama hatimaye ameshinda urais wa Marekani na anakuwa rais wa Kwanza Mweusi kwa historia. John Mc Cain amekuwa wa kwanza kukiri kuwa ameshindwa kiungwana na kumpongeza mwenzake Obama. Hili limekuwa funzo lingine kwa wagombea wetu wa kiafrika na kitanzania wanaposhindwa si kukimbilia mahakamani bali ni kukubali.

Chemi Che Mponda at Swahili Time settled for Barack Obama Wins Election 2008 as the headline. She adds:

Barack Obama ni Rais Mteule wa Marekani!!!! Senator wa Delaware Joe Biden, atakuwa makamu wa rais. Mungu yu mwema! Waafrika na hasa sisi kutoka Afrika Mashariki Tujivunie!
OBAMA UBARIKIWE!

Issa Michuzi just posted a collage of front pages of newspapers all decorated with Obama's victory headlines while Charahani posted photographs of president elect Obama and his family waving to the crowds and of people in tears after the historic win.

In a post titled Obama katoka mbali ati (Obama has come a long way), Issa Michuzi posted a number of Obama's photos. And, as if in a photo essay, Mwaipopo also posted Obama's photos from childhood to the great day. He also observed:

Obama! Obama!
Kila mtaa hapa bongo watu wote ni Obama, Obama kufuatia ushindi wake wa kishindo huko Marekani. Kila baada ya sentensi mbili inayofuatia ina neno ‘Obama'. Pegine wakati wafuasi wake wali0tapakaa ulimwenguni wakishangilia, yeye anatafakari ni kwa namna gani ataitoa Marekani (na sehemu zingene za dunia) hapo zilipo na kuzipeleka pengine palipo bora zaidi. Blogu hii inamtakia kila la heri katika kazi yake hiyo aliyoiomba kwa juhudi zote.

Nkwazi Nkuzi Muhango in Mpayukaji blog, Dira Yangu in Fungua Jicho, and Nukta77 all had the Obama's acceptance speech.

Nukta77 also posts an email from one of her reader's on what Obama should do in relation to Africa:

Obama angehutubia AU na awatake viongozi wa Afrika walifanye bara hili kuwa business patner na sio dampo la majaribio ya sera za mataifa makubwa na misaada”.

Kwa wale wanaotegemea misaada kutoka kwa Obama, ninamshauri Obama asitoe misaada kwani katika kusoma kwangu sijawahi kusikia taifa lolote lile ulimwenguni ambalo limetajirika kwa misaada. Maendeleo hayaletwi kwa wingi wa pesa bali kwa ubunifu, maarifa na kazi. Fedha na misaada ni nyenzo na sio mhimili wa kuleta maendeleo.

Nasikitika kuona kuwa vijana wasomi wetu hawaonyeshi kujifunza kutokana na ushindi wa Obama. Wale vijana wa Vyuoni wamebaki kucheza ‘twist' wakati muziki unaopigwa ni ‘bongo flava'!

To acknowledge this historic event Chemi wants Obama's sculpture to be added at Mt. Rushmore. A reader though, calls for caution:

Pamoja na kuwa shabiki wa Obama lakini ni bado mapema sana kwake kuwa mmoja wa marais mashuhuri Marekani.Dada Chemi inabidi athibitishe katika mandate period na ikiisha ndio tuzungumzie hilo.Hao waliopo kwenye Mt Rushmore waliwekwa pale baada ya kumaliza uatwala wao.

In Dar Es Salaam, Issa Michuzi took some photos of people wearing Obama's T-shirts. But the extent of Obamamania started even before he was elected when Tshirts designed by a local artist Mayunga and a Swahili book on Obama written by a Swahili blogger, Mjengwa were often sold out as recorded by CNN in this video found at Nukta77 blog:

* This post also appears in Global Voices Online.

Current TV's Collective Journalism program has started a series of video reports on how the rest of the world views the US. In The View from Over There, people from many different countries state their views on foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the situation with Iran and mention who they would want as the future president of the USA. The video interviews are sometimes in different languages, but all of it is subtitled in English.

This video also uses footage from other shows on the US Elections 2008, but this time concentrating on the foreign perspective. This is something Global Voices and Reuters have been doing for a while now at Voices Without Votes, gathering opinions from all over the planet on the US elections. If you have any posts you would like to submit to the site, you can do it here.

Current TV's next Collective Journalism assignment will be a worldwide view on the US immigration policies.

Perhaps as much as its friends around the world, Africa is especially interested in how the upcoming American elections will pan out with a number tuning in to watch the Presidential debate on September 26, 2008 (which almost didn't happen). Blogger and Ushahidi co-founder Ory Okolloh encourages Americans to really think about their choices and the potential outcomes by participating in the “Dear American Voter Project”:

“Dear American Voter” is inviting you to be a part of a global dialogue featuring responses from around the world to the question, “What should Americans think about as they cast their ballot? ” (Uumm…if you vote for McCain…goodbye USA, hello Russia and China).

Meanwhile, Blackyard notes that Barack Obama's performance at the debate appears to have given him a slight boost in the Gallup Polls. Everest Chiali wrote about the night's exchange in Swahili.

But there are other concerns as well. Siasa Duni suggests that the McCain-Palin ticket suffers from a lack of transparency and wonders if Sarah Palin is being protected from scrutiny by advisers who recognize that she isn't ready for serious questions from reporters, especially after one of Palin's first national interviews with Katie Couric drew an uproar of criticism when Palin embellished her own diplomatic record as Governor of Alaska:

In order to minimize the fallout from the Hail Mary selection of Ms. Palin, the Republican presidential campaign organizers have been limiting Ms. Palin’s exposure to scrutiny. While reporters are allowed to ask her questions, she’s never placed in a situation where she has to answer. In the past four weeks, I have only seen two reporters who have been blessed with access to Ms. Palin. There was the much ballyhooed interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News who was careful to handle Ms. Palin with the softest of kid gloves, even though he still managed to expose her as having limited-to-no understanding of international issues with a question about the Bush Doctrine and its interpretation (America has the right to preemptively attack other nations perceived as threatening).

Angry African likens America's current dilemma to gangs terrorizing a neighborhood:

So you got a guy who was a bit stupid but you liked having him around for a barbeque. Never a good reason to select him, but hey, there you go. You thought, “How bad can it get?” And boy did it get bad. He started fights with neighbouring communities even though they did nothing to your community. Oh, they talked tough, but you knew their community is way to weak to do anything. But he started fighting them in any case. Instead of those guys who kept on throwing bombs over your fence. The fights started sucking you dry and the place started falling apart. The houses started to crack, the lights went off in the streets, and the roads are falling to pieces. Basically your little community is just not the same anymore. And almost everyone agrees that this guy sucked big time. He is not coming to the next barbeque. It’s time to select someone else to run the show and fix up the place again.

So it has come down to two guys you can vote for. One is a guy who doesn’t look a lot like you, he is a bit young, tell you he has all these big ideas to make it better, but also tells you that you will have to pull your weight to make it better. Now he might be a bit shaky.

interview the most certain act in the fight against AIDS is to maintain monogamous relationships. The advice was seen as seen as ironic coming from a former President who was impeached by the House of Representatives (and later acquitted by the Senate) for perjury and obstruction of justice involving an extra-marital affair he was having with a 22-year-old White House intern.

Speaking of politics, the former President later failed to admit that Barack Obama was ready for the highest office of the United States. This has fueled reports that Clinton is still angry over Obama defeating Hillary Clinton to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States.

Win or lose, Obama will find himself most often compared to Bill Clinton, the country’s last Democratic President. In Israel, Aron’s Israel Peace Weblog noticed something familiar when Obama recently sat down for an interview with the conservative paper, the Jerusalem Post.

No one in my quadrant of the political spectrum is ever going to be elected President. So my key criteria for a “good” President are: compassion, worldliness, intelligence and political savvy. Obama seems to have all of these in abundance. Although I don't agree with many of the details of his positions, the more I hear him speak the more impressed I am. He is the savviest and most intelligent politician the Democratic party has produced since Bill Clinton, and I mean that as a compliment. He may not be super progressive, but he seems to be on the correct side of the fence on all important issues. And the more I see him, the more I feel he has the same human empathy and care for people that Clinton did.

Finally, Clinton’s policies against Osama bin Laden have again made waves. Saisi Duni, from Kenya, reports that a new book by the journalist Lawrence Wright claims that the U.S. military strikes to hoping to cripple the Al-Qaeda network in east Africa after the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had the opposite effect.

The Clinton administration’s failure to strike back effectively in 1998 helped make it possible for al Qaeda to carry out the massive attacks on New York and Washington three years later, says the book titled The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Wright describes as “ineffectual” the US retaliation for the August 7, 1998, bombings of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Less than two weeks later, 13 cruise missiles were fired at a factory in Khartoum that the United States believed was being used to develop poison gas for use by al Qaeda. Simultaneously, 66 cruise missiles were launched from US warships in the Arabian Sea. Their targets were al Qaeda training camps near Khost in eastern Afghanistan. The twin missile attacks were given the code name “Operation Infinite Reach.”


On the little square in front of the Hotel Serena in Stone Town a corner for Obama has been created. Just like that! I really like when active citizens decide to express an attitude and gradually take over the public room - in this case with a bit of colourful grafitti and locally made merchandise.

Zanzibar is no exception.

• In Trinidad, calypso legend The Mighty Sparrow sings that America could "regain worldwide respect with Obama’s vision", and in Jamaica reggae star Cocoa Tea adds "This is not about class nor color, race nor creed. It's about the changes, what the Americans need."
• In Egypt, a humanitarian worker has written letters to dozens of superdelegates urging them to back Obama.
• In China a dramatic Obama rally is being planned on the Great Wall.
• In Gaza, a Palestinian student has been making hundreds of campaign phone calls to the US over the internet, whenever he has electricity and is not under Israeli bombardment.
• In Kenya, Obama is so popular that a beer has been named after him!
• On the internet there over 40 international Obama fan groups on Facebook, many with more than 500 members, focused on Denmark, France, Indonesia, Tanzania and many other countries. There are also dozens of blogs and websites (see listings in the sidebar).

And wherever opinion polls have been conducted, comparing him with Clinton and McCain, Senator Obama is consistently the favourite candidate by a wide margin, for example:

• 74% in Japan
• 71% in Brazil
• 68% in Holland
• 64% in South Africa
• 61% in Britain
• 54% in Iraq
• 48% in Switzerland

What suprised me in the economist article is that Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia is actively lobbying for “the Pentagon to put the headquarters of its Africa Command (AFRICOM) in her country, not least because it would make it much harder for ragtag rebels to mount another coup”.

I know that Kenya was being considered for this but I wonder if the election violence has spared us having a U.S. military on our soil. Goodness knows the Brits have done us no good and especially not the women they’ve been raping an violating over the years. It barely makes sense why Liberia would want a base there but why do other African countries actively want the U.S. military on their soil?

African’s have a lot of hope that Obama will do great things for Africa because of his heritage; a lot closer to Africa than most African Americans, since Obama’s father was a Kenyan himself; rather than someone who traces their African lineage through centuries, Obama has a very real and present relationship with Africa.

But the best that Obama will be able to offer Africa will look not dissimilar to what Bush has offered the continent over the last 7 years; namely aid packages that are finally linked to achievements on the ground before more aid is opened up, which leads to diminished corruption and more funds reaching the people who should receive from the U.S.’s generous giving.

But Obama’s right to contest for the Presidency against John McCain in November, is not assured, with the battle of Texas between Obama and Clinton looking to be a dead heat; increasingly it looks like super delegates will be the way in which the candidate is chosen at the convention, which will provide McCain with a massive head start in the national race, as well as the very real possibility that the popular candidate (who may well be Obama) being side-lined by the candidate with the most battle hardened political operatives (namely Clinton).

What may swing the balance is that in Barack Obama, the Democratic party may finally have a candidate who can be as inspirational as John F. Kennedy; the touchstone of inspirational president’s of the last 50 years.

Bill Clinton may have been ‘the first black president’, but Obama will show that being black and being the president doesn’t equate to folksy chicken cook outs; in Obama black Americans, and indeed black people across the world have a role model that shows that excellence transcends race.

That is if Hillary doesn’t take this momentous opportunity for change in Washington away from him.

And my new little long shot/what-if dream of this campaign? Would Hillary run with McCain on a joint Democrat/Republican Washington Establishment ticket against Obama? Now THAT would be a race of my dreams….