SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 176

The most famous modern “Roots” trip to Africa or possibly anywhere else was taken by
Barack Obama just before he entered Harvard Law School. He told the story of his first
trip to Kenya in the final chapters of his best-selling Dreams from My Father , which be-
came a key part of his appeal during his successful campaign for president of the United
States. His is a classic story. As a first-generation American on his father's side, he had been
in touch with his father's Kenyan family for most of his life.
He called the trip a pilgrimage. “It will be just like 'Roots,' ” a friend told him at a going-
away party even though Obama was tracing the roots of his African father, who had come
to the United States as a university student, many generations removed from the days of
slavery. It became a homecoming for the future president. In Nairobi he met a parade of
relatives whom he got to know better over the weeks. He also discovered the bias they held
against wildlife parks. When he told his half-sister Auma that he wanted to take a safari,
he got an earful about white colonials who care more about one dead elephant than one
hundred black African children. “How many Kenyans do you think can afford to go on
a safari?” she asked. But in the end she agreed and went with her clearly American half-
brother to the reserve, where Obama saw herds of zebra, giraffe and wildebeest; camped
on a riverbank; and studied the stars. He was awestruck watching hyenas feeding on the
carcass of a wildebeest. At the end of that day he wrote: “I thought to myself: This is what
Creation looked like.”