Okello Oculi
30 July 2008
opinion
The word and charm bomb dropped by Obama on adoring Germans at a speech to Berliners on 25th July, 2008, was a fitting revenge for the ungainly protest staged by Adolf Hitler when he fled out of the stadium because the super-American athlete, Jesse Owen, had achieved his athletic miracle by winning four gold medals in the 1936 Olympic Games held on German soil.
The speech was, in its intellectual thrust and political timing, a rebuke of the remains of Hitler's legacy in modern Germany and modern America. It called for seizing the current times in both countries and the world as a whole to break down walls of conflicts and injustices rooted in race, tribe, religion and economic resources; and reach out for the challenges of constructing a new civilisation.
European commentators were quick to see the choice of Germany in terms of American electoral and presidential memories. Obama himself referred to past American actions to break the Soviet blockade of Berlin by dropping American food to grateful hungry Germans. There were also echoes of President Reagan's call to Mikhail Gorbachev to open the cement and iron curtain that in 1989 demarcated the domain of Soviet power from that of American power.
President Bush was both bashed and supported as Obama blamed him for irritating "Europe" (and Germans) with his crude self-delusory and low cowboy morality in conducting world governance and supported with Obama's endorsement of calls for Germany to send more of their troops to go and share the trans-Atlantic ritual of dying in Afghanistan. What was missed was the message that this son of Africa-America is more than mere brawn and screaming muscles (as Owen was), but an intellectual hurricane whose power to hug and arouse the best in America's peoples, particularly the youth and self-respecting adults, was not limited to his native land. The tenacity with which a breed of racist scientists hold on to research that seek to show differences in brain profiles along racial lines makes this case worth making.
Germany is also the major economic power in the European Union. It is a country with critical levers in the neo-Malthusian economic and political worldview that since the end of the "Cold War", the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have thrown as spears against African economies. With lethal thrusts ranging from preaching the virtual collapse of university education in Africa; blockage of internally-driven industrial growth; denial of health care and food self-sufficiency to sustain Africa's populations, to draining wealth out of African countries through ruthless debt collection (including the use of intelligence operatives to ensure compliance by indebted African countries), this nefarious worldview has wrecked African countries since the early 1970s. Any exertions by Obama to mobilise the German and American public opinion behind reversing its brutal hedonism must be welcome.
With specific reference to Africa's history of relations with Europe, Germany holds the notorious record of committing genocide in its former colony now named Namibia. At the dawn of the 21st century, a German cabinet minister refused to apologise for a policy of exterminating the Herere people. At the 2002 World Conference Against Racism, Nigeria with others in Africa insisted on Europe and North America offering an apology for the slave trade and slavery precisely because to do so would recognise the human dignity of African victims of that enormous crime against humanity; indicate a pledge never to commit the crime again and open a window for the payment of reparations - even if such monetary action assumed forms such as cancelling Africa's debts with the provision that such funds are spent strictly on human development activities, including supporting healthcare and education in African countries. That the German government refused to offer an apology raises deep concerns about German racism against Africa: a malady that deserves to be put on the agenda of change in global values that Obama called for in Berlin.
That Africa was in Obama's mind was obvious. Evidence of that rolled out with his rejection of the degrading hunger in children in Somalia and wish that votes in Zimbabwe be made to count, being as trenchant as his call for ensuring that "genocide in Darfur" (another bow to President's Bush's policy on Sudan) would be terminated immediately.
If only for warding off a most unlikely accusation that the McCain campaign mind-factory would accuse him of turning a blind eye to bad governance and suffering in Africa, Obama sent out these lashes at the African condition. There were also references to the rich of the world taking concern and support for the production of prosperity in poorer corners of the globe. However, no specific economic programme came out and could have been expected from that Berlin platform meant for charming and dropping balls of idealistic fires into adoring German hearts and minds.
Obama's booming eloquence, scintillating earnestness and decency made one regret that Nelson Mandela came back to Africa as a frail and physically vulnerable politician. By the time Mandela came to power in 1994, Kwame Nkrumah's anti-colonial and pan-Africanist rhetorical flames had been blown out three decades earlier. Patrice Lumumba and the poet, Aime Cesaire's seller of "Primus Beer" or political anti-colonial mental raindrops across arid slums of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) had been murdered in 1961.
A generation of anti-colonial firebrand politicians had become desecrated and silenced by military tanks and bullets of military coups. As a writer put it, by the early 1970s, the development train had left Africa stuck at cold and visionless stations. Obama, the new moral and visionary voice that Africa can only tangentially lay claims to, stood on a Berlin stage to unwittingly expose the vacuum of political leadership that Africa must now strain to fill. In this regard, the Berlin stage was also a special gift to Africa to bear witness to the diamond that lies either dormant or wasted in Obama's twin women and men relations all across the continent.
The United States has shown more generosity in exporting to Africa sky loads of "Rap Music" (with its garbage load of violence, sex and lack of visionary ambition), dreamland luxury in Hollywood movies, than in exposing the high hurdles that those seeking leadership on her soil must jump over. Even in the Bush-days of exporting democracy, its missionary workers in the "National Democratic Institute" and the "Republican Institute" have excluded hard sweat (including reading books) from approved diets for nurturing agents of "good governance" in globalised Africa. Setting up anti-corruption militias to chase Africa's leaders that have sinned out of gardens of Eden from power to prison cells has not been accompanied with establishing Plato-schools for breeding both "barefoot" and high-flying philosopher kings.
Obama sweated his way through America's topmost educational farms; sweated at being groomed into a grassroots politician by the harsh poverty-culture of Chicago's black population; has been churned by the turbulence of a primary election campaign against Hillary Clinton and now has many more fires and rivers to cross. When he wins in November 2008, he should give utmost priority to packaging that personal "technology" for "transfer" to irrigate leadership breeding all across Africa.
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"Paying its debts"? How about you pay them?
I think Africa, you will develop and put in play your very intimate solutions to clean water and air, as each continent and piece of earth must. That crop that would bounty load, will make peace with all her wild tree elders; dry, scoured ground form again a soil; and these givers wait: old, sure honouring known before wallstreet made good its dishonest name. Other forms of energy must be chose. The tree/grass kingdom wants man's breath and watering; plenty power seems but treadmill or cycling half-hour per citizen per turbine, per generator away; and no nukes to filth environment for thousands years. Air it seems, is the father we took granted when we had him, that when gone more than pine after, all our ammends hollowing in hurting hearts and lungs. Rhyme nor prettiness (ever part) can themselves reform forces blank in the hear of them, that sound not reason, hug desperate staid status. But good, peaceful governance take the road. Which leads to say of read and learn: when done, none can take from. This the fortress, the bulwark in defense of.
I suggest you not be so romantic and so prone to being swept away by charm and charisma. He's pulling at heart strings like politicians so often do and blunting our reasoning with the same old platitudes. And, also, don't think because Obama is of African descent that he's naturally up to fighting the isms that plague our world. As we so often see, those we believe in turn impotent or silent when put up against corporations and big business. Consider Ralph Nader.
Wow- what a thoughtful, well meaning article. A little wordy, nay, over-eloquent. Don't try so hard.
The thing you are missing is that the world is going to enter an era of self-determination. The Middle East will have to rot, or kill itself, or succeed, or whatever it wants without help from the USA or Germany, unless it finds a better way.
And Africa will rot and starve and die without reforms and better government. This means democracy probably, and this means paying its debts. But it's Africa's choice to make.
I will not hold my breath waiting for help from Obama.
scott