Prime Minister Raila Odinga impressed US officials as well as independent analysts during his three-day official visit to Washington. He won respect not only for himself as a politician but for Kenya as a nation returning to stability and striving for prosperity.
Mr Odinga was warmly received at each of the five public appearances. He was also said to have struck the right codes in a series of closed-door meetings with senior Bush administration figures and key members of the US Congress.
But while Mr Odinga did sign an Open Skies agreement permitting direct flights to and from the US as well as a compact signifying the return of Peace Corps volunteers to Kenya, he did not take home any unexpected prizes from the US government.
And a certain awkwardness was evident on the few occasions when he was asked whether he would be meeting with the two major US presidential candidates: Senators John McCain and Barack Obama.
Neither of the prospective leaders greeted Mr Odinga. The standoff posture was especially notable in the case of Mr Obama, an African-American. The likeliest explanation is that the senator's camp did not want to provide grist for an Internet rumour mill that distorts Mr Obama's tribal kinship with Mr Odinga as a sinister association. Obama-haters circulating defamatory e-mail messages depict Mr Odinga as both an Islamist and a radical leftist.
Carefully scripted visit
But the omission of an Obama meeting did not deflect attention from the focus of Mr Odinga's carefully scripted visit, which was jointly orchestrated by the two countries' respective embassies. As the prime minister himself indicated at one point, he had come to Washington mainly to burnish Kenya's tarnished image. Mr Odinga travelled to the US not to ask new favours but to express gratitude for the help the US provided during the post-election turmoil.
Indeed, Mr Odinga declared at a luncheon hosted by the Corporate Council on Africa that Kenya is seeking investment rather than aid. He also suggested in a policy speech that Africans should take responsibility for their own problems instead of looking to the United States and other outsiders for answers.
Those calls for self-sufficiency were coupled with strong condemnation of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. US officials were especially delighted to hear an African leader echo Washington's position on that crisis.
"The vision he sketched out is the kind of thing that has real resonance in this town," said Mark Bellamy, a Washington-based former ambassador to Kenya. Mr Odinga struck his hosts as an authentically new type of African leader, Mr Bellamy added.
A similar assessment was offered by Joel Barkan, a Kenya expert at the non-governmental Centre for Strategic and International Studies where Mr Odinga spoke soon after arriving in the US.
To Mr Barkan, the greatest significance of the visit was the opportunity it afforded Washington to "put its imprimatur on the prime minister post and the coalition government in a very visible way so Kenyans could see it".
Mr Odinga was treated as "one of two representatives of the Kenyan government," Mr Barkan said, noting that the prime minister was officially received "at all but the highest level, which is reserved for heads of state". Mr Odinga did not meet President George W. Bush but was invited to the White House for a talk with National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley in addition to being welcomed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
There was general receptivity to Mr Odinga's reassurances in regard to Kenya's stability and readiness to do business. Not only was the prime minister judged to be a persuasive advocate, but he was able to tap a reservoir of good will toward Kenya on the part of some influential Americans.Mr Odinga recalled on a couple of occasions the "airlift" of the early 1960s that brought hundreds of Kenyan students to the United States. Expressing his "fond nostalgia" for that expression of American support for newly independent Kenya, Mr Odinga was drawing on what Peter Ogego, Kenya's ambassador to the US, described as "the historically friendly relationship" between the two countries.
Americans had started returning to Kenya as tourists even prior to Mr Odinga's assurances in Washington that the country is safe to visit. Ambassador Ogego told the Sunday Nation that the Kenya embassy was processing an average of 300 visa applications per day, compared to 250 a day in June last year.
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