Around Carrefour EMIA in Yaounde, I spotted a plush car with a sticker: Obama 08. It was parked a few meters from the road.

Beside the car was a cute and expensively dressed gentleman who was constantly on the phone. The car and the gentleman contrasted vividly with the immediate environment that was littered with rubbish, crumbling buildings and rubbles left behind by Yaoundeans and bulldozing caterpillars of the Yaounde City Council; a way of making the city clean!

At first blush, I thought the sticker on the car was homemade but I was lucky to have as company a friend who always has his ears to the ground."Oh no," he said, "this is straight from the US of A".

Stickers always convey persuasive and effective messages. When a sticker in these parts bears the name of someone through whom "the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans" and "hope rises again and the dream lives on" (dixit Senator Ted Kennedy), there is every reason to stand and ponder.

In Cameroon, we have seen stickers of all shapes, shades and forms. Stickers with clinched fist, stickers with a burning flame, stickers bearing power to the people, stickers sporting lion man, stickers with greater ambitions, stickers with a transparent ballot box, and stickers for change and so on.

At one time or another, these stickers fired in us the zeal to effect change, to maintain the status quo, to hope for a better tomorrow, to rig elections, to fan ethnic or tribal hatred, to dream, to think and act on parochial/national lines, to hit below the belt etc. Since almost all this came to nought, disillusionment set in with the usual annoying rhetorical question, "on va faire comment?" (In pidgin, how we go do?) even when our basic human rights are being trampled upon.But dream indeed, we have.

When Francis Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah mounted the rostrum at Addis Abeba, Ethiopia, and appealed persuasively for an African Union government with all its trappings, it was probably the height of any African dream. It did not come to pass in his lifetime and it may not come to fruition in ours no matter how romantic we feel and think about it. That is another matter for debate.

For the short time Captain Thomas Sankara walked this earth, pundits thought Nkrumah had passed on the torch of progressive action to him. Alas, it glowed for four years and flickered and died in 1987.

Here comes Barack Obama, the product of a Kenyan and American union, who seems to make my people, sub-Saharan Africans especially, dream again. Indeed, there is something appealing, resonating and ringing about Obama. The name Obama is definitely African, Luo to be precise and Beti - if I stretch it a bit.

That is probably not the reason why Africans of all shades want to identify with Obama. If that were the case Kweisi Mfume, Kwame Kirkpatrick, Imamu Amiri Baraka and so on would have been the chouchou of Africans long ago.

There is something intriguing about Africans looking up to Obama as a source of hope and dream.In Douala, Cameroon, there is an association dubbed: Friends of Barack Obama. The membership is made up of a cross-section of public intellectuals- journalists, lawyers, writers and persons in public view.

Some of them talk about Obama's universal appeal and "a world movement" centred on Obama. Hear the president of the association: "Barack Obama, born of a Kenyan father and a mother from Texas, is the candidate that can better understand Africa, the cradle of humanity". No comment.

In Nigeria, so-called friends of Obama went an extra mile; they organised a fundraising that raked in millions of naira that is now under the searchlights of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC. Let's wait and see.

What motivates the mushrooming of associations for Obama? Is it the quest for high ideals or the search for lucre and socio-economic advantages at all cost? A cursory look at the ladies and gentlemen who claim membership of these associations speak volumes about the African condition, predicament, psyche, mind-set and vision.