DM
Nairobi
President Barack Obama spent much of his time in Kenya on serious issues such as gay rights, but also found time to boogie with some of the country’s most famous pop stars.
Four-man group Sauti Sol performed at a State House dinner hosted by Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, who joined Obama and the musicians on stage for a dance. The dancers, accompanied by Kenyatta’s wife Margaret Kenyatta, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Obama’s half-sister Auma, performed the Lipala dance that has recently taken the country by storm.
A traditional dance, the Lipala has enjoyed renewed popularity after being reworked by Sauti Sol earlier this year in their song Sura Yako. The song, which translates to English from Swahili as ‘Your Face’ and praises a woman’s beauty, became a quick hit due to its catchy melody and people posting videos of themselves dancing it on YouTube.
‘To the right to the left, to the left,’ Sauti Sol group leader Bien-Aimé Baraza is heard telling the president when he asked how to do the dance. Obama, who is no stranger to the dance floor and made headlines for his moves throughout his presidency, quickly picked up the maneuvers during the Nairobi event. ‘And for those who doubted President @barackobama ‘s step - the #LipalaDance #SuraYako is his new favorite Kenyan dance!,’ Sauti Sol posted on their Instagram.
The pop stars also referred to the First Lady and said ‘We are so sad that our mother Michelle could not come,’ according to the Guardian. Obama and Kenyatta shared the stage on Saturday night after an earlier press conference that saw the visiting leader criticize his host country for its treatment of gay people. Kenyatta said that his nation, where everything is illegal, did not share all its values with the US and that gay rights were ‘a non-issue’ in his country.
The state dinner was a friendlier affair where the American president, whose father was Kenyan, was also joined on his Kenya trip by his grandmother, aunts, uncles and half siblings. Obama joked about meeting with his relatives and previous accusations that he was not born in the US. ‘I suspect that some of my critics back home are suggesting that I’m back here to look for my birth certificate. That is not the case’, he said at the state dinner. On Sunday he headed to Ethiopia for the next leg of his Africa trip