WASHINGTON
— For years, Kenya has been a political headache for President Obama
and a geopolitical headache for the United States. But now in his
seventh year in office, with his last election behind him, Mr. Obama has
decided to embrace his heritage by visiting the land of his father for
the first time as president.
Mr.
Obama will travel to Kenya in July to co-host a forum on
entrepreneurship as part of an effort to support economic development in
Africa, the White House announced Monday. In the process, the president
may hope to exorcise some of the ghosts that have haunted his
relationship with his family’s home country — so much that he once felt
obliged to produce a birth certificate to prove he was not born there.
Until
now, Mr. Obama has resolutely avoided stopping in Kenya while in
office, bypassing it during three previous presidential trips to
sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to the chattering such a stop would
presumably provoke among those who still refuse to believe he was born
in the United States, the idea of a visit to Kenya was also problematic
on the diplomatic front because of political instability and charges of
crimes against humanity lodged against that country’s president.
Now,
the case against the president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has been dropped, and
the perennial talk about Mr. Obama’s birth has faded in the United
States. So Mr. Obama seems to have concluded that a Kenya trip is
acceptable at home and abroad.
As
the White House announced the visit, it tried to present it as a
powerful symbol of America’s longstanding ties to Africa as represented
by its African-American president.
“Just
as President Kennedy’s historic visit to Ireland in 1963 celebrated the
connections between Irish-Americans and their forefathers, President
Obama’s trip will honor the strong historical ties between the United
States and Kenya — and all of Africa — from the millions of Americans
who trace their ancestry to the African continent,” two national
security aides to Mr. Obama, Grant Harris and Shannon Green, wrote on the White House website.
Mr.
Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was a Kenyan who came to the United
States to study. While at the University of Hawaii, he met and married
Stanley Ann Dunham, and the two had a son. The elder Mr. Obama returned
to Kenya, and the two divorced; the younger Mr. Obama met his father
only once after that, when he was 10 years old.
The
future president visited Kenya as a young man, a journey chronicled in
his evocative 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” and he went again in
2006 as a senator. But Mr. Obama has remained largely distant from his
Kenyan relatives in office and the White House could not say yet whether
he would visit family during his trip.
The
connection to Kenya has long fueled unfounded rumors that Mr. Obama was
not born in Hawaii, despite the birth certificate he obtained from the
state in 2011. As recently as December, a poll by Fairleigh Dickinson
University found that nearly one in five Americans believe that Mr.
Obama is probably or definitely not a United States citizen.
At the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington this month, he teased those who question his patriotism.
“If I did not love America, I wouldn’t have moved here from Kenya,” he joked.
While
many Kenyans have been upset that Mr. Obama has stayed away, the
country has experienced turbulence in recent years that made it harder
for him to visit.
Mr. Kenyatta, the Kenyan
president, was charged in 2011 with instigating and financing ethnic
clashes after disputed elections in 2007 that cost more than 1,200 lives
and forced 600,000 from their homes. The first sitting president to
appear before the International Criminal Court, Mr. Kenyatta denied the
charges and the case was dropped in December after prosecutors could not
produce enough evidence.
Since
a terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2013, for which
the Shabab, a Somali militant group, claimed responsibility, Kenya’s
government has expanded efforts to counter violent extremism. But it has
also passed laws restricting nongovernmental organizations operating
there, in the name of security, and critics say the country’s Muslims
have been targeted in the zeal to combat the Shabab.
“What
really makes it difficult for us is that, yes, we are victims of
terrorism, but then we are also victims of counterterrorism,” Hussein
Khalid, executive director of Haki Africa, a human rights group, told a
congressional hearing in Washington last week. “In Kenya,” he added,
“once you’re a suspect of any terror attack, there is no innocent until
proven guilty. Once you’re a suspect, you have to count your days. Your
days are numbered. Sooner or later, we find you dead somewhere.”
White
House officials said that Mr. Obama would address human rights issues
during his visit. But they emphasized the progress Kenya has made, to be
highlighted at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit meeting, the first
time the six-year-old forum, founded by Mr. Obama, will be held in
sub-Saharan Africa.
“Choosing
Kenya as the destination for G.E.S. underscores the fact that Africa,
and Kenya in particular, has become a center for innovation and
entrepreneurship,” Mr. Harris and Ms. Green wrote.
