[ Charles Onyango-Obbo ]

Charles-Onyango-ObboA year ago this week, Barack Obama made history when he was sworn is America's first black (or coloured) president. He also took office as the most popular US president in the world ever.

Indeed, the global fawning over this tall, handsome lad was almost embarrassing.

As a son of a Kenyan from Kogelo in Nyanza, quite a few people in Africa expected Obama to do something for our long-suffering continent.

A comment in the Nation yesterday perhaps best summed up the Obama score on Africa: "There is general agreement . . . that Kenya and other Africans held exaggerated hopes for the US president of African descent that could not possibly be fulfilled."

Looking a year back, though Obama's victory was history-making, it was still too easy (considering the odds against him). And the global adulation he continues to enjoy fell like manna from the heavens on his lap. He really didn't – and still hasn't – worked that hard for it.

It has been a hard year for Obama, trying to wind down a messy war in Iraq, and to ramp up efforts to win another one in Afghanistan.

Obama's difficulties, though, were only to be expected. They are what you might call the "curse of novelty" or the "curse of the pioneer".

Tiger Woods became the first black person to become an American and global golf superstar. Tiger broke so many records, it seemed unreal.

Then as 2009 came to a close, Tiger got involved in a bizarre car accident in an awkward hour of the morning, apparently after an altercation with his wife.

Then the dam burst.

This Mr Clean and Do-No-Wrong, it turned out, was cheating on his wife and had had affairs with nearly a quarter of the women in America, so to speak.

The exceptional bright boy in class is expected to go on to great things in life, and becomes an endless talking point if he turns to be a drunk and failed doctor in a small town.

The women who were the first to go to Parliament faced the same problem. Like Obama, they were a powerful symbol of possibilities for marginalised women.

But they struggled to be seen as something more than a set of breasts, headscarves, and golden earrings to lend colour to institutions long-dominated by graying, balding, and pot-bellied men.

The only thing they were expected to do was to push for "women's issues". In Uganda, women's spokespersons in Parliament mostly made news when they called for men who rape to be castrated.

In the late 1980s, they managed to push through an amendment to the Penal Code that provided more severe punishment for rapists, and raised the age of consent from 14 to 18 years.

Njoki Ndung'u spearheaded similar legislation in Kenya in the 2007 Sexual Offences Act when she was a Member of Parliament. But success beyond these "expected" initiatives has been rare.

In Uganda, women MPs pushed to increase the amount of money allocated to women's health. They failed. There was a sense in which they were expected to be satisfied with being the first female MPs, and not to seek to do more.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Nelson Mandela is such an iconic figure is that he seems to have avoided the curse of novelty.

Here was a man who spent nearly 30 years in prison, becoming South Africa's first democratic elected leader, and faced with the challenge of what to do to the white apartheid functionaries.

Many whites expected Mandela would seek revenge, and ruin the prosperous economy like other African leaders all over the continent had done. The black majority expected some settling of scores for the sins of apartheid.

Mandela confounded both sides, forging a rainbow nation, and standing above the fray as a figure of unity and reconciliation.

Beyond that, Mandela did nothing, and he effectively handed over power to his deputy Thabo Mbeki in his fourth year in office, and stepped down after just one term.

It was left to Mbeki to fix the problems, and he became one of the most hated figures in South African politics. In a final act of humiliation, the country's current leader, Jacob Zuma ousted him in a party coup in December 2007.

Obama is living proof of two seemingly contradictory realties: One, that the most difficult things in the world are being the first to achieve something. Second, that the greatest peril we face is to be larger than life.