Obama arrives in Kenya

US President Barack Obama (Center) greets his half-sister Auma Obama (Left)

alongside Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta upon his arrival at

Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi on July 24, 2015

The United States President, Barack Obama arrived in Kenya at 1705GMT Friday evening, on an anticipated trip that will also include a stop in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. 

It has been nine years since Obama last set foot on Kenya’s soil, a span that for Kenyans brought pride, hope and no small portion of unmet expectations.

In 2006, Obama was a junior US senator from Illinois. Joined by his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters, Obama mixed with locals and took an HIV test to encourage others to do so. He went to the village of Kogelo for lunch with his grandmother and a visit to the grave of his father, whom he barely knew and who died in a 1982 car wreck.

This time will be different. There won’t be any stop in his ancestral village. The logistics of presidential travel and security concerns will keep Obama mostly confined to Nairobi. The contrast isn’t lost on the president.

“I’ll be honest with you, visiting Kenya as a private citizen is probably more meaningful to me than visiting as president because I can actually get outside of a hotel room or a conference centre,” Obama said in a news conference last week. Nonetheless the trip is “obviously symbolically important.”

Obama’s itinerary is built around the sixth Global Entrepreneurship Summit, being held in Nairobi, and a visit to the African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, the first by a sitting US president. He’ll also meet with leaders of each of the two countries.

This will be his fourth trip to the continent since taking office, the most of any sitting US president, yet many in Africa expected the first black president and the son of a Kenyan would invest more time and US resources into strengthening ties on the continent.

“Africa in general expected a great deal out of the Obama administration,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “No place expected more than Kenya, birthplace of his father. So the failure to visit Kenya up to now has sort of cast a shadow that’s hung over the administration’s engagement with Africa.”

In an interview with the BBC before he left Washington on Thursday, Obama said the trip will give him a chance to expand US engagement and flesh out his prescription for creating economic opportunity.

“I believe that when people see opportunity, when they have a sense of control of their own destiny, then they’re less vulnerable to the propaganda and twisted ideologies that have been attracting young people,” he told the BBC.