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Nigeria: Obama Election Miracle By Genius and Hard Work

Okello Oculi

11 November 2008

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opinion

Like Nelson Mandela in the middle of the 1990s, Barack Obama, now America's President-Elect, gave birth to a spirit of virtue yearning for manifestation from the wider human community, transcending geographical and various social borders including those of religion and what the Italian Prime Minister, Berluscone, referred to as "his tan".

Just as Mandela also held within that global virtue a special meaning to black Africans, in general, and inside South Africa, in particular, so did Obama's specialized appeal include black Africa through his Kenyan father, and to African-Americans through his birth to a white mother who had dared to marry a black man.

The United States during the colonial era remained nervous about its relations with Africa. As a predominantly immigrant community that wished to anchor and cement the loyalty of its citizens around a new nationhood, it held back from advocating freedom and dignity for continental Africans while it held those in her belly in serfdom and profitable degradation; and vice versa. But as Milton Obote advised a youthful President John F. Kennedy (on the occasion of the birth of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963), his good wishes for independence, freedom, development and human dignity for Africans should, like charity, begin at his own doorsteps inside America in the way he treated his own sons of Africa. Obama's election has, with rare historical drama brought forth this matter to a momentous confluence. His election is an act of reparation.

In his speech Obama brought this fusion out with a simplicity of statement, and flatness of tone, that made the pain it carried within it also rebuke the idiocy of racism. He reported that his grandmother (who had gone to join our ancestors only the night before voting day), was watching the drama of his election victory on a Chicago stage. So were her husband (and his grandfather), her daughter (his own mother), her Son-in Law (his Kenyan father)- all in a rare galaxy of star actors who were taking a bow from a stage in "After Africa". That way of underlining his African roots was more profound than if he had talked about ending conflicts raging in Darfur or the Democratic Republic of Congo. That contact through a chat with his ancestors was prime native African; and also expressed a marriage of peoples: one white Caucasian and the other Luo-Kenyan.

Obama has already given both sides of his roots a rare symbolic income- racial pride on a world scale associated with more power than Bolton's one hundred meters' record at the Beijing Olympics. Both women and men referred to the new gift of a model for their children that they too can dream to be the topmost in their personal and racial ambitions. A brutal reality was, however, not visible on election night were over 3 million black young men locked in American prisons and being exploited as cheap labour by industries inside vast prison yards That wasted generation are sprouted by vast and deepening unemployment and desperate poverty, alcoholism and deliberately promoted drug addiction. Too many basketball, football and other sports stars continue to represent the African-American youth who did not become an engineer, a star architect, an inventor of information and space technology; precisely because in the 21st century gates to high quality education in the richest country in the world still remain shut to black children in America's slums. America's cultural development has, with rare idiocy, dragged behind her industrial speed. Obama has been blunt in addressing this matter with a sympathetic boldness that is enriched by his record of working to raise the political awareness of poor blacks in Chicago. It is a record that offers a window for a new type of visibility inside America's White House.

Thanks to a welcome revolution in television coverage, Obama also gave the world an opportunity to see an intensely exhilarating spectacle of white Americans: old, middle-aged and the politically activist younger generation spontaneously convulsive with joy and adulation for their new hero. CNN cameras captured Oprah Winfrey with coy girlish eyes looking at Obama while she leaned her head on elbows spread across shoulders of a white woman friend: holding a lid over volcanic emotions of relief, joy, disbelief, sheer wonder at seeing a pained historical sunset crossed. This was a new American political army that had worked tirelessly for twenty long months of intensive Internet-conveyed election campaign, to wrench its historical trophy and the right to shape a future of "Change" fuelled by the movement's war cry"YES WE CAN!". This was the sector of the American humanity that was shaking hands with an anxiously waiting and equally exultant global one. This is the American humanity that must seize the gates now open and prevent Obama's promise of civilizing history from being hijacked into a new war-mongering jingoism by a vindictive mauled Republican Party rising with its leprous record of the Bush presidency. John F. Kennedy's idealism and Lyndon Johnson's promise of the "Great Society" air crashed into a horrendous Vietnam war. Obama should not be sucked into dark holes at the centre of Jerusalem; on the nuclear-weapons in the Iranian desert, or in warped minds of Georgia's leaders. Africa must act vigorously to support Obama's vision.

One potential benefit to Africa is in Obama's call to McCaines's bitter supporters. "I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too", Obama called out. The message of elected officials serving both those who voted for them and those who voted against them has even before military dictatorships seized power been lacking. Where supporters of other parties are treated as prisoners of political war, power has too often been used to victimize, as they say, in order "to teach them a lesson". Obama comes with one powerful weapon in his bag-the privilege of a blood relation to talk bluntly and call a corrupt, murderous and visionless African leader the despicable and unacceptable governance leper that he or she is. And directly address that ruler's people to throw the disciplinary power of change at him/her.

It was a matter of divine sense of humour that as Americans were celebrating their snatching good governance for themselves, television news reels interjected with horrendous pictures of thousands of desperately poor and harassed villagers in the Democratic Republic of Congo fleeing from gun-totting Tutsi tribal warriors. A small band of armed men backed by Rwanda, one of Africa's tiny and impoverished countries (that is steeped in enormous efforts to rehabilitate its attitude to power from ravages of the 1994 genocide and its aftermath), are fighting government troops for control of territory with rich volcanic soils and precious minerals. The weakness of Congo's government has its roots in over thirty years support by successive American governments of Mobutu Sese Seko's corrupt, brutal, murderous and visionless misrule. On two occasions in the 1960s and 1970s, American rulers transported troops supplied by Morocco to fight and defeat Congolese armed uprisings to topple Mobutu. Obama studied Political Science and International Relations at a time when Mobutu was at his peak of decay. He could not have missed those who opposed American collusion in Congo's tragedy by protesting inside America's legislature at "Congressional Hearings". His war cry of "Yes We Can" must target this sad record urgently and creatively. More than that, he must change the language of relations with Africa from "aid" as a cynical cover for horrendous and ruthless exploitation to Africa-based industrialization and agricultural revolution.

(To be continued)

Oculi is Executive Director of Africa Vision 525 Initiative.

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