Obama Opens The Century —Odia Ofeimun

By Odia Ofeimun

November 4, 2008 will henceforth be remembered as the date that started off the 21st century. Because it is the date on which Barrack Obama, the first African American, became the 44th President of the United States. Nothing else has happened since the turn of the millennium that provides a revision of the past 500 years with such earth-shaking clarity. Nothing has been so definitive of the differentiation of tone that marks one century from another. Whatever the obstacles on the way, the fulfilment of the credo of the Founding Fathers was not to be halted. They, who went fundamental on the question of freedom and equality, had said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. And that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” These famous and memorable words came closer to being confirmed reality with the accession to electoral primacy by a black minority in a country with an overwhelming white majority. Let him or her in whose country a minority could win with such a landslide in a Presidential election attempt to demean the extraordinariness of the event that has just taken place. Only India perhaps has something to teach the United States in this regard. India beat the virulence of the problem of the untouchables beyond cavil. The implacable nature of racism in the United States that had marred her wonted triumphalism as the land of liberty, was not expected to be ridden down so soon. But it has happened.

It is quite natural to wonder what it was in the psyche of citizens or the trauma of the events they were undergoing, that induced this recourse to the common humanity their history had so often appeared to be denying. But we should not forget that it was, at all times, about the quality of a political culture in which the fight for freedom was always a multi-racial project. The real majority could not be ascertained in the struggle against racism in the face of a vicious minority of the white population. But that moral majority has been piling up victories. Black and white, yellow and brown stood together, and were bloodied together. Now it was time to bunch and put to the test the little triumphs that all antiracist combatants across the divides, had pooled across centuries. Again, not to forget: so many had been lynched for daring to look white power in the face. There were black and white marchers for freedom bludgeoned beyond recall. White judges risked their careers and reputations to stand up for people of colour as deserving the coverage of the Constitution. So many were distrusted and doubted from one victory to the other. But the time had come to add another mite which could torpedo and outweigh old successes. And usher in a new world - even if it was a world no one knew how to define well. The real cunning in the venture was that everyone knew that this was a plebiscite at the core of the racial question. But everybody, black and white, made as if it was only over other matters. America it seemed was too ashamed of its past to dredge it into another century.

There just happened to be a daring, audacious merchant of hope, who had a quality of personhood that could turn shared morality into fighting proof that the founding fathers were not wrong. He woke up latent forces in the society. He challenged the young and the down and out whose personal efficacy in the civic space had been too often devalued. He had the capacity not only to build hopes but to sidestep and avoid the divisive issues that would take attention away from the problems that too many people wanted solved. He was too focused to be derailed. Indeed, the special quality to the personage of Obama and his organisational acumen lies in how he energised the extant culture until it surprised itself and the whole world. True, not until the defeat of one of the most hopeful presidential candidates in the history of American politics, Hillary Clinton, did many people including this writer take unwavering notice. All the way, however, the ringing tone to be heard, without question, was of the United States in history – full of surprise, always refreshingly new, something the world was being gruffly made to forget under George W. Bush. Again, it is true: although the United States could never learn to embrace all of her own within a common morality, she always managed a rhetoric that transcended her divisions. She did not have to brag about her wealth and her arms, her bigness and singularity as a complex of power for the rest of the world to bow down to her. No. She upheld her reflexes as the melting pot of all the nations of the earth. The very essence of her ideology was of herself as the workshop of the human spirit. Now with an African American as President, she could lay claim to a representative spirit that matched globality beyond mere symbolism. This was no longer mere rhetoric. This was it. Obama’s victory was always bound to be mould-shattering. But when it happened it did more than whatever the history of the United States had vouchsafed in the past. This is not just about newness. This is self-reinvention in one bold stroke.

Not that the mere election of an African American as President would wipe out the habit of the racist mind as it has always managed to blinker the land of liberty. The votes counted for Barack Obama in the South proves by its scanty denominations that there is so much that still needs to change before there can be change. Obama  has to learn how to be  a President to those who did not vote for him and to transcend the divide that is imputed by the geography of his victory. On this score it is easy to sympathise with the writer, Ishmael Reed, who has formatted a pattern of interrogating Obama’s victory that, I believe, will never go away. Reed packs all the cynicism of the past into the inevitable questions that must follow the rise of Obamerica. “Shortly after Obama is sworn in,” he enthuses: “the police, instead of subjecting blacks and Hispanics to capricious traffic stops, will only stop them to offer free tickets to the policeman’s ball. Throughout the country, they will address blacks and Hispanics as sir and ma’m.  The overcrowding prison problem will end, because all of the blacks and Hispanics who’ve been sent there as a result of prosecutorial and police misconduct - probably half - will be set free. And all of those police who have murdered unarmed blacks only to be acquitted by all-white juries will be retried.   Blacks will have the freedom to shop in department stores without being watched”.

If this happens, he wonders, would it mean the end of the work of the many black nationalist organisations from Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa Movement to the NAACP which have been the bulwark of self-defence for black people? Does it mean that Martin Luther King’s dreams have been realised and all the anti-racist barricades can now go down and everybody go home? Will white America now “apologise for the lynchings and the civil disturbances”, the denial of education, and the whitening out of the spaces that could have belonged to black people as of right in the media, in administration, editorial boards of mainstream journals, in motion picture departments etc. Ishmael Reed drives the expectations higher: He is actually asking a question when he says that “All of the blacks and Hispanics who have been driven out of New York, Oakland, and San Francisco, as a result of the policies of ethnic cleansing, advocated by Jerry Brown, Giuliani and Newsom, will be invited to return.”  What of  “The banks that aimed toxic mortgage loans to blacks and Hispanics, who would have qualified for conventional loans had they been white…” So, they… “will halt the foreclosure process and renegotiate these loans”(?). These are the questions being asked by those nationalists of the struggles of 60s and 70s who do want to see their children get what they could not. Would a black President make a difference?

We do not have to be Americans to take either the words of the Founding Fathers or Ishmael Reed’s interrogatives to heart. We come upon every possibility of realising the ideals of the Founding Fathers with a special obligation to appreciate the vastness of their human applicability. We need to look homewards with a sense of the possibilities we must seek to fulfil  as Africans, who have been so shabbily treated by history; people who have suffered and are still suffering from encrusted debilities across the global space; victims of hundreds of years of slavery and colonialism and the neo-colonial residues that are still the lot of all the states in Africa, we have a stake in every little advance that brings the world closer to the realisation of those ideals. What Obama’s victory enables the world to think is more powerful than certain forms of actuality. If it yields eventually a re-design of the national and global space so that all men and women could truly become equal within, between and beyond boundaries, then, we shall have truly arrived where the founding fathers, who were sometimes rigorous racists, wanted the world to be. Triumphant on behalf of all humanity, right in the marrow of their ideals as distinct from the weakness of their flesh and motives, is where Barrack Obama stood on the night of his victory .

The good part in all this is that we all know that Obama was not elected merely to balance the account books for the prophets of either side of the colour bar. At no time was  the significance of a role player less concerned with his identity than in the latest election of a U.S. President. Perfect timing it was when the parameters of world affairs began to change drastically, almost overnight so to say, as he began his bid for the Presidency. America’s focus and the focus of the world was more than ever before upon the question of survival. Even the most racist American appeared to want to defend his own future through whomsoever the cap fitted as the evangel of economic rationality. A civilisation in peril which served only the god of identity would have been too much in  love with suicide to vote right. People on Obama’s side may not have willed it, but the wish to thank the economic meltdown in the United States for taking the claws off the identitarian kit holders of the West is very strong. Beyond domestic issues: not even Hugo Chavez, the baiter of Uncle Sam, after initial twitching of his nose at the big brother up North, wanted to see the U.S. economy under water. He knew that it would mean the world would be under  water. He may be talking about the black man in the White House. But he, like most people around the world knows, that the United States, in more ways than one, is always everyone’s country. A country that is the  most adept purchaser of the world’s goods and services, a lender of last resort, the country whose currency serves as the reserve for other currencies, what could be a more tragic for the rest of the world than for her to go under. To task anyone with the management of such a country is truly to make him the prince of the universe. Obama, as the manager of  the world’s assets in a time of so much global peril gains added significance because it was as he admits because he was the most unlikely to become the President of the United States. The vote in this sense amounted to voting beyond identity? Or for the real identity. Human identity. The unvarnished truth is that the world needed a prosperity maker not a war monger, a binder of wounds, not a trasher of peace treaties, and a builder of community not just across the United States but across the world.

There was no doubt that it was also largely a reaction to the incumbent in the White House. If it was a blackman who had to be in the White House for the economy to go right, so be it. The world needed to get over the  division of the earth into plots for terrorists and hunters of terrorists. Latin Americans, in recent years, already indicated what kind of relationship they needed with Uncle Sam. Not a senior prefect who would break the knuckles of nations with iron rods, by imposing dictators on unwilling peoples, or damaging their life-chances by removing what Founding Fathers wanted for their own fellow citizens – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It comes with questions. Why would America the country that inscribed liberty on her forehead as moon of grace consistently support the removal of that very commodity from those with whom she comes in contact? Why would the beautiful dreams of a Cuban Revolution, or the Venezuelan one, not be something that the United States can identify with? By the same token, Africans who love America for opening roads to freedom for many in the world have looked with horror at her depredations. Why was the United States always against the interests of Africans: on the side of Apartheid against African liberation movements; on the side of colonialists, the Portuguese and the Spanish despoilers of African freedom during the wars of independence; on the side of the military dictators against many an African people? Why is it that the heroes of African liberation  - except Nkrumah briefly under John Kennedy -  Lumumba, Augostino Neto, Cabral, Mandela, Samora Machel, are never counted among America’s friends even where the United States provided their inspiration to fight for freedom? Why is the country of liberty never on the side of liberty when it touches other people? Or for that matter, why is it that in dealing with a people in what has always been, and remains the geography of hunger, American aid always conduces to keeping them poorer and in their place? What is there in it for America to further impoverish the poor rather  than be counted among savers of the world’s poor? Why wage war as the only human activity worthy of a free people.? Is it that Americans can only be free by making the world unfree?

No one who has ever attempted answers to these questions was bound to be indifferent to Obama’s message: that another America is possible. The outlines of that America may very well have remained hazy throughout Obama’s  campaigns. But the hope he has unveiled and unleashed has a power of its own, greater than blueprints. In a sense, although many would wish it were not so, it brings us back to the identitarian issues that we may all wish to play down. The truth is that part of the great attraction of Obama’s Presidency is that he is the child of an African/Kenyan father who never forgot his roots, who grew up among different races and peoples of the world, who had travelled widely enough to know how the world works, and how it looks up to America for what America was always able to do, but never did. All comers saw something in the quality of his person which touched what all human beings wished for: instinctively, it was felt he could solve the problems of the world without being overcome or overtaken more by the need to press the button as commander in chief of the most powerful country in the world. Especially, in the face of the current meltdown in the economy, it became a question of having a man of good sense who could see the world from more than one perspective, someone who could work from the bottom and look from the top,  to save the world. The whole world, as it appears, could see that Barrack Obama, having escaped the sharks of racism during his campaigns also managed to side-step the goblins of  left and right persuasions who, like yesterday’s  communists or modern Friedmanite capitalists believe in the withering away of the state.  This was no time for kalokalo economics. Those who fight from the bottom up know that the existence of democracy is itself predicated on the existence of a viable state structure as a means of exercising collective will. That the state should be democratic is the demand of all altruism. Not its dissolution.

The people of the United States, it must be said, would appear to have made a choice for the world that, even before it was effected, already forced a change of attitude at home and abroad. If truth be told the whole world voted for Obama before the United States did; from Venezuela and other Latin American countries to Japan and other Asian countries, to predictable Kenya and Africa, to Germany and other countries of Europe, there was a commonality of perception that would have sent people of the United States to Hades if they had had the rudeness to act against the rest of the world.  It was not only Jesse Jackson, he who once tried but never won his Presidential nomination, that cried on the night of  Obama’s victory. Many of us wept for joy that nothing of a personal nature could have made us do. That’s how personal Obama’s victory was for most people. Being African merely made many of us a little more emotional. But no election in world history ever attracted more positive vibes for a candidate. Obama-mania carried the high hopes almost as a secular religion as only the Founding Fathers could have inspired it. As his victory speech showed so well. Many people have brought to an appreciation of his victory near-millenarian expectations as if we all believed his coming to the Presidency would solve all problems.

True, he may not be Jesus Christ. But thinking now strictly about the economic meltdown, judging by his perfect sense of identity, his wishing his grandmother were around, and his having to valourise his Kenya roots, he has given enough notice that he may know better than any previous American President how the way the world ignores the poor is actually the reason that banks and financial institutions over-reach themselves and whole economies fail. And as for all us from among those countries, the wretched of the earth in the geography of hunger that George W. Bush would never have invited to the global confab for solving the crisis of the moment,  there is some twist to the tale of identify that cannot be ignored. Given the ways of power, we may still not be consulted in the world’s bid to re-orient the current Bretton Woods institutions. Or in creating a Second Bretton Woods. But it is a little heartening to know that in seeking solutions to the meltdown in the world economy, someone in the cockpit of global power, in the White House, would have a reason to consider that the unrepresented are also human. Not being among the chosen, being among those who will have to be spoken for in a world where self-interest and the competition between self-interests run the farm, we are having to celebrate Barack Obama not in search of charity or aids  but in the hope that we may henceforth be taken seriously. If that is all that  Africans may have from their son in the White House, to nudge into existence a special relationship that African Americans have dreamt upon for centuries, then it is possible that the world may yet hear a story that is not about the death but the rebirth of Africa in a world so bountifully renewed.