NAIROBI (AFP) — Kenya, where US hopeful Barack Obama's father was born, led the continent Thursday in cheering the US senator's nomination victory, squarely backing him to become the first African-American to clinch the most powerful office in the world.
In Nairobi, dailies all carried front-page pictures of a beaming Obama following his defeat of Hillary Clinton in the US Democratic Party nomination contest.
"Our Super Power Son" was the huge headline splashed across the front page of the Daily Metro, which also featured a picture of the White House nominee's Kenyan father, now deceased.
Obama was born in the United States and barely knew his father but his 86-year-old grandmother, now best known as "Granny Sarah", still lives in the family village of Kogelo and has become a local celebrity.
The Standard newspaper took more than a little pride in the possible prospect of having a man of Kenyan extraction sitting in the Oval Office.
"The precocious politician who counts Kenya as his cradle is a phenomenon who could well be the defining force if international politics," it said.
"Cynics who claim Barack Obama has never been, will never be, a Kenyan are wrong. Obama may have no Kenyan passport but that does not make him any less our own," the newspaper added.
The Standard said it had been receiving an avalanche of congratulatory messages from its readers.
The top-selling Daily Nation bore the headline "Historic Moment" and offered a special 12-page pullout section.
The newspaper recounted the "airlift meant to benefit Kenya that could change the US," referring to how Obama's father arrived in New York in 1959 in the first ever group of Kenyans on a US scholarship project.
"Among the 81 young Kenyans who eventually disembarked from that maiden flight was 23-year-old Barack Hussein Obama.
"What began as a plan to prepare young Kenyans for top jobs after independence could change history," The Nation said.
The Nation, however, sounded a note of caution to over-excited Kenyans, pointing out that Africa's problems appeared to feature no higher on Obama's agenda than on that of his rivals.
"Judging by word on the street, one would be forgiven for thinking that Mr Obama was poised to become either the president of Kenya, or Africa," it said.
"There are many reasons for the hysteria, but the immediate one is national, racial and ethnic pride that a black man can become king of the empire.
"Would Obama represent a departure for Africa from previous US presidencies? The answer is no," the newspaper warned.
Obama was given a hero's welcome during his last visit to Kogelo in 2006. His relatives are ethnic Luos, the same tribe as Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whose party on Wednesday issued a congratulatory statement.
"I think that the fact that today, whites can choose a black man as candidate, it is a revolution in mentalities in the United States," Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade was quoted as saying by the national news agency.
Other African countries celebrated Obama's epic nomination victory as a historic occasion but also stressed that it revealed the kind of public tolerance that has so often been lacking in Africa.
The Ivorian Fraternite Matin newspaper saw the trust being extended by Americans to a black politician as "a message addressed to all nations and peoples still grappling with identity issues."
In South Africa, which last month was rocked by deadly xenophobic attacks against immigrant workers, Obama's victory was described by The Star as a "Watershed for Change".
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