My teary moments for Obama

I hate to say I told you so, but I’ll say it anyway. I told you here in September that I planned to cry on January 20, when the first black man with a Kenyan father takes oath of office as “leader of the free world.” Well, January came early.

I stayed awake all night on Tuesday, slouched on the coach at the family house in Nairobi, glued to CNN and a laptop. Who wants to sleep through a revolution? I stayed awake to soak in history.

The polls were closing on America’s east coast. Wolf Blittzer, Anderson Cooper and John King were leading “the best political team on television.”

Exit polls said America’s youth had come out huge for Barack Obama; that Obama’s strongest issue, the economy, had topped all issues, and that his 1 million volunteer foot soldiers tasked to get out the vote had delivered.

Then this: Obama has won the state of Vermont, they said. Then, all the traditional democratic north-eastern states are safely in his column. Then, he is leading with 207 Electoral College votes. And McCain is trailing badly. I began a battle with tears. I quickly lost.

At 7am in Nairobi the polls closed on the west coast. An avalanche of votes flooding into Obama’s basket smashed through the required 270 mark. All media threw caution to the wind, declaring with bang finality: “Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.”

I cried. I cried at the word’s reaction: people were crying like children in Beijing, Tokyo, London, Kogelo and at Martin Luther Kings’s church in Atlanta. I cried because a four-star general, former Secretary of State Collin Powel was crying, and because civil rights leader Jesse Jackson refused to wipe the tears streaming down his face.

I cried because 106-year-old Anne Nixon Cooper in Georgia whose vote had been counted, said she had just one more wish on earth, to shake the hand of her new president. I cried when that president-elect came out and somberly announced that “to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.”

And I cried when the new man that has so moved the world turned to those watching from beyond America’s shores and told them with the clarity of a fountain that, “our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared.”

I cried at the deathly calm demeanour of the new leader. I sat there riveted, unable to tear my gaze from his somber mood, the usual spring in his walk gone, the weight of the presidency evident on his shoulders.

That weight had begun to show in the closing days of the campaign, according to the New York Times on Monday. The lines in his face had grown deeper, the notches of gray hair along his temples more pronounced. He smiled less.

Obama’s world appeared awash with powerful, conflicting emotions: the realisation, perhaps, that he was about to become president; the huge optimism that he had unleashed, which he said to close aides worried him a bit, given the expectations set for him. And all of this going on when his grandmother — the woman he has said poured everything she had into him — was approaching death.

I cried at the new leader’s appraisal of the future. “We may not get there in one year or even in one term,” he said. “But, America… we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there.”

The writer is a lecturer of journalism at the United States International University, Nairobi