Okello Oculi
4 July 2008
analysis
Abuja — Courtesy of Cold-War machinations, Barack Obama didn't grow up in the same conditions as black Americans and wasn't born in Africa either. Is he therefore, the right man for Africa and Black America? asks Abuja-based commentator on African Affairs OKELLO OCULI
US Democratic Party presidential candidate Barrack Obama is a post-Cold War dividend in several shades. His father was flown away from Kenya to participate in a silent war-game between the capitalist West, principally the US, and the communist East as lead by the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and The Peoples Republic of China in that order.
Barack Obama and his Kenyan grandmother. Photo/File
The Soviet Union's Vladimir Lenin, and later China's Foreign Affairs Minister Chou En-lai, had both waged an indirect war on Western colonial empires, their neo-imperial spheres of influence and Euro-American capitalism. Kenya was a prized piece of colonised space where Britain had used a combination of loud military violence to grab land from various communities in the hinterland of the Indian, and silent violence - through holding on to robbed lands and forcing former black landowners to rely on labour wages for their livelihood. Where force was not used, the British grabbed land through dubious treaties with mesmerised chiefs and kings whose territories were now "protected" by the grabber.
Then came the Second War in which Kenyans fought on the side of the British against the Japanese, who colonised huge chunks of South East Asia. Back to Kenya after the war, the soldiers preached the gospel that it was possible to fight the British and kick out settlers out of the fertile volcanic soils of Kenya.
In the early years of independence, Kenya found itself torn apart by rivalries between the greed of the British Empire (and its most famous former colony, the United States of America), on the one side, and the roaring of an angry Russian-Chinese communism on the other.
That geo-political situation rendered US President John F. Kennedy most receptive to a proposal by a Kenyan politician and trade unionist, Tom Mboya, to breed future friends for America in an independent Kenya, after 1963. The way to do it was by airlifting several hundred African - not Asian or white residents in Kenya - secondary school graduates to go and study for degrees in American universities.
It came to pass that under that scheme, Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama would study in the University of Hawaii where he met the white girl Ann Dunham (later to be known as later as Ann Sutoro) from Kansas State that he would marry and beget Barack Obama. Some African students tagged such adventures as "Uhuru revenge" presumably as reprisals against the rape of Africa's natural and human resources by European invaders. Uhuru is the Swahili word for political freedom from colonial dictatorship. It is a legacy which Obama could not share with African-Americans whose ancestors had been captured and exported to the Americas.
Obama's ancestors in Kenya might be accused of deporting the ancestors of current African-Americans, which has been invoked by some to claim that he is not black enough.
The transplantation of Obama's father to Hawaii was a show of diplomatic love by a white American ruling class that was also meant to weaken an emerging thrust by black American politicians (both by reformers like Martin Luther King and "communists" or radicals like W.E.B. Dubois and Malcolm X), who saw the emerging African nationalism of the 1960s, against white domination, as a new weapon to be used to break the yoke of racism on the necks of black people in America itself.
At the founding of the Organisation of African Unity, OAU (now AU), on May 25, 1963, Uganda's new Prime Minister, Milton Obote brutally rebuked John F. Kennedy for sounding like a friend of Africans while his government was oppressing black Americans. Subsequently, State Department officials would keep the cynical game of creating a diplomatic rift between Africa and African-America by ensuring that African visitors to the US were, as much as possible, kept away from visiting slums in major American cities or share-cropper rural slums in the southern States of the country. The anger, despair, desperate poverty, drugs and alcohol addiction in the "black ghettos" did not make good diplomatic tourist sites for visitors from newly independent Africa. Now, this would explain why echoes of the social distance, built over the decades, resonate in doubts about Obama not being a typical part of the historical experience of African-Americans.
Hospitality measures like attaching African students in white American universities to white families who regularly entertained them as guests in their homes during weekends and during holidays became the norm.
Ironically, the scholarships were not available to black Americans.
This engineering of social relations also served to amass clouds of ignorance that covered the visibility of US racism, which was similar to apartheid South Africa's, the two colonial Rhodesias (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), Angola, Mozambique, Malawi and Namibia.
It took the African student in America a lot of soap to wash away the walls of invisibility that made him or her not see the pain and poverty of black Americans and of other Africans on the African continent.
Obama's father probably fought to break down such walls at the Universities of Hawaii and at Harvard.
That Obama Snr would readily marry a white girl from a deeply "conservative" (meaning racist) middle America and grow up as healthy self-confident lad without the traditional guarantee of being brought up by a strong black grandmother, is part of the Obama wonder and deviance from African-America. In this sense, he was a true breed of Cold-War diplomacy's determination to invent its own species of Africans cooked in American pots.
It is not clear how much the new versions of those walls will affect the votes Obama Jnr has been getting in the political marathon to election day in November 2008.
While John F. Kennedy was ferrying future leaders of Africa for mental conditioning into enjoying the benefits of capitalism and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), a group of ravagers of Africa's natural resources and labour were settling down into refraining from growing capitalism in the hands of Africans in the same way they were supporting its growth in South Korea and Japan. It was a strategy for showing that capitalism is sweeter and brought more prosperity to Asian nationalism than the freedom the Russian and Chinese communists were promising them.
Africa was, in vital areas, safely under the grip of their white cousins all across southern Africa and the rim of the Mediterranean Sea. There were also vast terrestrial and cultural barriers (in India, Iran, Turkey and the vast Indian Ocean), which the communist enemies had to cross before arriving in their millions to drive white settlers out of Africa. In the interim, difficult African patriots like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in West Africa, Milton Obote in Uganda, Modibo Keita in Mali, and others, could be shoved out of power without fear of the Russians and Chinese rushing out to fight a Third World War to save them.
Worse still, soldiers that were hastily trained, poorly educated (including having low awareness of international diplomacy) and without the knowledge of managing capitalist economies, could be induced by their former European officers to topple African politicians that were inconveniently fired by patriotism.
President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, as Obama's political grandfather, took power in a Kenya whose economy was marked by limited "European Settler capitalism" that had failed to integrate the vast majority of its 42 ethnic groups into a dynamic productive and rapidly expanding industrial labour force. It was, however, richer than neighbouring Uganda and Tanzania. Kenyatta settled for an alliance with the richer leadership of the European settlers and rejected friendly relations with communist Russia and China. As such, insulating Obama's father as secondary schoolboy in Cold-War Kenya from the communist virus came easy. The legacy of colonialism and the Cold War across Africa was to ensure that there was no large industrial labour pool to broadcast the language of that revolutionary ethnic group known as the proletariat.
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