As a film, First Run Feature’s 2007 documentary chronicling a tour of Africa by Senator Barack Obama’s doesn’t quite match director Bob Hercules’s previous effort. Unlike “Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” “Senator Obama Goes to Africa” is not particularly interested in using its protagonist’s experiences to draw the viewer into a complex discussion of complicated themes. For that reason alone, the film also may not work too well as persuasion. Those who find Senator Obama’s campaign long on style and short on particulars aren’t likely to find the detailed policy or position polemics that they claim they want. Those who believe he is more effective at winning people with his personal charisma than he is at translating that support into the enactment of social policy will no doubt think the film a valentine rather than an argument.

But…

If what you want is exposition rather than argument, to understand what it is about Senator Obama that makes those who like him really, really like him and those who are generally cynical about politicians feel genuinely hopeful about this one, then the film gives you ample opportunity to see Obama being Obama—and to see it in a context where his person and persona are most likely to invite favorable comparisons to those who practice the hypocritical sound-bite politics of personal destruction peppered with spin.

The film follows Obama as he travels to Kenya, South Africa, and Chad. Each section highlights a way in which Obama does not fit the conventional profile of a presidential candidate; whether that’s a good thing or not may be dependent upon what the viewer wants from a candidate and how fed up the viewer is with politics as usual.

While in Kenya, Senator Obama and his wife Michelle agree to get tested for HIV/AIDS. This section nicely highlights the way his supporters and detractors have tried to frame his qualities during his candidacy for the presidency. Obama’s detractors might note that this is a largely symbolic gesture and question whether it has the same value in addressing the AIDS epidemic in Kenya as might a detailed public health policy. Conversely, his admirers might point out that the test does galvanize the public and help relieve some of the stigma attached to testing that has apparently made Kenyans (especially males) reluctant to utilize the services that are available. As if to underscore this point, Hercules caps the segment with a sound bite from a Kenyan male saying he has not yet been tested but that he may get a test now that he has seen an American senator get one.

Also while in Kenya, Senator Obama visits Kibera a large slum in the capital of Nairobi. In one of the film’s most effective moments, Obama reflects on the differences between a previous visit when he took his sister’s car to a mechanic living in Kibera and his current visit with security and an entourage. This episode provides an interesting opportunity to reflect on the nature of “experience” as a political commodity.

On the one hand, the film states more than once that the political purpose of the trip is for the Senator to develop his foreign policy profile, an area in which—ironically—he was perceived as lacking in experience. I say “ironically,” because his life experience, the time he spent in Kenya with his family, is somehow not treated as relevant to his ability to understand foreign affairs and cultivate foreign policy. While one could argue that personal life experience does not always translate into a professional advantage, one could just as easily argue that when it comes to defense policy Americans want to see candidates who have personal experience and not just good ideas. The argument is that someone who has served in the military simply has a better understanding of the culture of the organization he (or she) is asked to lead. By extension, it follows that one’s ideas of foreign policy that are informed by personal experience are likely to be better thought out than those that are merely the product of ideology or second-hand intelligence.

While in South Africa, Obama visits the prison where Nelson Mandela was held. Here again, some viewers might find the segment long on photo-ops and short on explicit connections to contemporary American policy decisions. Obama nods sympathetically as one of Mandela’s compatriots speaks of missing the presence of children while in prison or about how Mandela prompted later prisoners to continue to improve themselves while incarcerated.

Of course the word that I’m skirting here is “opportunistic,” but only because the difference in politics between a candidate being opportunistic and being authentic is often a matter of whether or not one supports that candidate. One could certainly look at Obama’s attempts to be symbolically linked with an African head of state and Nobel Prize winner as a sort of crass attempt to play the “race” card, but it’s strange how those charges always come from people who don’t seem bothered by Giuliani invoking “9/11” every 9.11 seconds, McCain reminding everyone he is a war veteran, Huckabee pandering to the evangelical Christian vote by reminding people he is a minister, or Senator Hillary Clinton playing the “sisterhood” card.

Obama is of African descent and those of African descent have suffered oppression and injustice stretching back over a hundred years and more. That’s just a fact, and if reminding people of that fact makes for a feel good story about one man’s family rising from poverty and obscurity, it also highlights the fact that America is one of the few countries in the history of the world in which those historical barriers can be met and (perhaps) transcended in as little as one generation. When the documentary shows the grave of Obama’s father in Kenya, it made at least one viewer understand not just how far the Obama family had to come but also how and why America continues to stand as a beacon of opportunity and hope for millions around the world. If anything, this section of the film renders silly those who would criticize Obama or his wife Michelle for not being patriotic or loving America—perhaps it is those who have been deprived of freedoms and opportunities that many of us take for granted who are often the most appreciative of them even if they, like Shakespeare’s Cordelia, cannot always happily heave their hearts into their mouths just to flatter those who demand they must always and only ever be praised.

If the section of the film in Kenya highlights the real difference that symbolic acts can make in the lives of the needy and oppressed, the section in Chad, where Senator Obama listens to the stories of refugees from Darfur, is a chilling reminder that the problems of the world do not simply disappear once the camera turns away. This was the most painful part of the film to watch, because it was a reminder of how little has changed since Obama’s visit for some of the most forlorn of the world’s occupants—those whose best chance for survival in the world seems to depend on the ability to catch the interest and concern of a population half a world away.

Here, once again, a cynical viewer might point out that little has changed or will change for these people simply because an American senator listened to their story and that Obama offers no concrete suggestions about what he might or could do for them. So once again we are asked to gauge the value of first-hand experience. Do we trust that he is more likely to do what he can for these people when he can because he has demonstrated enough of an interest to look the poorest and neediest in the eye? Obama’s only promise to the refugees of Darfur is that he will not forget them. In an election year in which foreign policy towards Iraq dominates the American political consciousness, Hercules’s documentary is powerful reminder that neither should we.

I am a cynic when it comes to believing that politicians intend to keep their promises, but here, at least, is one who is making the sorts of promises I would like to see kept. In the 1998 political comedy “Primary Colors,” the character Henry (another Gen-X cynic about politicians) says that John F. Kennedy was the last politician who could use words like “honor” and “sacrifice” without his listener’s thinking they were just empty rhetoric and spin. Actually Henry says Kennedy was the last from whom he could hear such words without a voice inside his head saying “bullshit.”

If Senator Barack Obama can look a Darfur refugee in the eye and say he won’t forget her without a little voice inside my head going “bullshit,” that may well be only be a symbolic act. But it may be the kind of symbolic act that gets him elected president.

8 March 2008