Obama warmly received in Ghana

Presisdent Obama was interrupted several times and appeared to be very well received as he delivered remarks at Ghana’s parliament on Saturday.

Obama is delivering a speech titled “A New Moment of Promise,” and, through the grainy and green-tinted video currently streaming over the cable news networks, it looks like Obama has been very well received.

Early on in the speech, Obama described his ties to Africa and Ghana.

“I have the blood of Africa within me,” Obama said.

He went on:

My grandfather was a cook for the British in Kenya, and though he was a respected elder in his village, his employers called him “boy” for much of his life. He was on the periphery of Kenya’s liberation struggles, but he was still imprisoned briefly during repressive times. In his life, colonialism wasn’t simply the creation of unnatural borders or unfair terms of trade – it was something experienced personally, day after day, year after year.

My father grew up herding goats in a tiny village, an impossible distance away from the American universities where he would come to get an education. He came of age at an extraordinary moment of promise for Africa. The struggles of his own father’s generation were giving birth to new nations, beginning right here in Ghana. Africans were educating and asserting themselves in new ways. History was on the move.

Obama said that Africa is “too often overlooked” by the rest of the world and praised Ghana for working to put democracy “on firmer footing.”

In particular, Obama also got a healthy round of applause when he discussed elections in Ghana.

“The people of Ghana have worked hard to put democracy on a firmer footing, with peaceful transfers of power even in the wake of closely contested elections,” Obama said.

jeremy.jacobs@digital-staging.thehill.com