A Luo President of the United State

US Senator Barack Obama is a student of political science, international relations and American law. He is a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States of America and he is the son of Barack Obama, Sr., of the Luo tribe in western Kenya. What will President Obama’s American Indian Policy be when he announces it in the Fall of 2009? What will President Obama’s policy be toward other Fourth World nations in the world…including those presently being shot and bombed in Iraq, Iran, Colombia, the Philippines and in Indonesia? In less than a year we will know how a Luo President of the United States handles nations in the Fourth World.

Senator Obama traveled with his wife Michelle and two daughters in 2006 to Kisumu, the port city of more than 300 thousand in Kenya on the eastern shores of Lake Alexandria to visit his father’s village to encourage AIDS prevention and to learn more about his family and the Luo tribe. Nyangoma Kogelo, Obama’s ancestral village, turned out to welcome the symbolic return of a native son. He has begun the task of rediscovering his Luo roots. He is coming to grips with a Fourth World reality that courses through his veins. He has a reality that may well serve all the people in the world to open mutual and beneficial communications of different peoples.

On President Obama’s list of Fourth World policies will be Climate Change and the significant role Fourth World nations must play in the negotiations of what will be called the Copenhagen Protocol.  Self-Government of Fourth World nations will be a prominent issue that not only concerns nations inside the  United States, but in Canada, Taiwan, subSaharan Africa, South America and of course Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine.

President Obama will need to tune his Fourth World antennas very soon. The agenda may overtake him. Since many of the major issues facing Mr. Obama are rooted in Fourth World nations like the Luo, he will have to act swiftly to become familiar with the complexities of Fourth World Geopolitics.

A Luo may well become the President of the United States.  He will have a special duty to the world to bring clarity and focus to US Indian Policy and its Fourth World policies elsewhere in the world. The world deserves a president who will recognize the powerful realities in small places that affect peace and security for us all.

(c) 2008 Center for World Indigenous Studies