By Wale Adebanwi
Was it the moment that found the man, or was it the man that found the moment? Perhaps, both man and moment were in a long, tortuous search for each other. They found each other on 4 November 2008 when a tall black man walked into an unprecedented blaze of glory on behalf of his race, in the stature of his great nation, and in the ambience of a common humanity.
It was not Barack Obama that won an unprecedented victory at the Presidential polls in the United States of America, as he readily admitted; it was the relentless human spirit that spoke out loud and clear beyond the evil of racism, the vice of ideological divisions, and the sheer terror of unremitting war. For a nation that had moved from being an almost unblemished beacon of liberty to the rest of the world represented in and by the Statue of Liberty which beckons the world “with silent lips” to “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore…”, to one which, under President George W. Bush, had become an arrogant, but despised and casually derided nation, the United States of America on 4 November again proved itself as a nation that has the greatest capacity to self-correct - and therefore the greatest nation in human history.
One afternoon on 19 November 1863, that is, more than four months after the Union Armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the decisive battle of Gettysburg - which was a turning point in the war - the President of the contested Union, Abraham Lincoln, delivered a speech that would go down in human history as one of the greatest and the shortest, and even poetic, rendition of the ideals of liberty and the triumph of the human spirit against every contrary spirit. In barely two minutes, Lincoln recaptured the core principles of human freedom and equality and gave to liberty the poetry of oration. “Four score and seven years ago,” Lincoln began, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.
“Now,” pursued Lincoln, “we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”The man, who would go down in history as one of the greatest American presidents of all times, stressed what was, and has always been central to the American idea captured in the stretching of English grammatical rule, “To make a more perfect Union”, by noting that what the 160,000 men who had died at Gettysburg had sacrificed themselves for and thus “nobly advanced”, was an “unfinished work”. He therefore asked “that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion”, so that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Long after Lincoln spoke, America was still in the full embrace of its shameful history of slavery which blighted the lives of millions people of colour and constituted an unmitigated assault on the very foundations of the United States. Even though Lincoln had signed the executive orders of the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil War which declared freedom for all the slaves in any of the states of the Confederates States of America - which was fighting the United States of America – this freedom only applied to slaves that did not return to Union control by January 1, 1863. This “emancipation” was, therefore, derided as one that freed only slaves over which the Union had no power.
A century after Lincoln spoke, even though the universal adult suffrage was becoming a major phenomenon in the democratic march to form a “more perfect union”, the black people of America were still not considered by many white people to be even at par with their pets. As the Deep South rendered and constantly performed its ideology of hate and bigotry, as the Ku Klux Klan, KKK, reigned with supreme impunity and terror, the Statue of Liberty was reduced in stature by the infinite injustice of racism and a big lie was given to the superiority of human freedom proclaimed as core to the American nation.
It was in this context, that a young Baptist preacher and a descendant of slaves, Martin Luther King Jr., delivered, at the centenary of Lincoln’s speech, what will again go down in history as one of the greatest speeches. On 28 August 1963, on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom by the black people of America, King said to over 250,000 civil rights supporters, and indeed the world then and beyond, that he was glad to join “what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation”. But unlike those who derided the Emancipation Proclamation, King spoke glowingly of Lincoln at the beginning of his speech almost with the same poetic opening as Lincoln’s speech: “Five score years ago,” stated King, “a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.” However, King was no one to overlook the crippling realities that assailed the Lincolnian ideal: “But 100 years later,” proclaimed King, “the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity…. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned.”
The greatness in the speech and the greatness of the speaker were, however, not so much in the analysis of the injustices of the era and the articulation of the bigotry that manacled the blacks, more important, the greatness was represented in the undying hope for a better tomorrow and the unquenchable belief in the inherent capacity of the United States to self-correct and therefore do justice to her citizens. Thus King affirmed: “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.” He told perhaps a sceptical people that they were standing “on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice”, declaring unequivocally that: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’… I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Forty five years after King expressed a hope more than revealing a dream, precisely on 4 November 2008, the hope manifested in the election of Barack Obama. And as King predicted, in the validation of that hope and the realisation of that dream, the United States of America not only took a giant step to make “a more perfect Union”, but restored and re-confirmed its greatness. Fifteen thousand people were present when Lincoln spoke; two hundred and fifty thousand listened to King; Obama spoke to the whole world. He was the genuine answer to the question that was long asked of the American Dream and America’s ideal of Liberty.
In Barack Obama is the cardinal fulfilment of Martin Luther King’s dream; therefore, for every King’s “I have a dream today”, Obama responded with the possibility of hope and the reality of American perfection: “Yes, we can.” Given the monumentality of her power, her inherent greatness and her representation as the pinnacle of human achievement in all ramifications, if Americans “can”, indeed, the world can. And this is where Nigeria, indeed, Africa, comes into the equation - beyond the enthusiasm and joy expressed in Kenya at the election of a son of the nation’s late son.From the desert of southern Sudan to the savannah of Nigeria, from the dry lands of Cote d’Ivoire to the valleys of South Africa, Obama represents a salvation for the black man, if only at the symbolic level. But at the practical level, Africans have to cure themselves soon of the “Obama effect” and rather than affirm like Obama, ask themselves, “Can we?”
As Nigeria and several other African countries grapple with existential questions in a global age, Obama needs to move from a symbolic possibility to a searching question. No need to be mealy-mouthed about this, as things stand today, a person of Obama’s unusual abilities and stupendous intellectual assets would never have emerged in Kenya or in Nigeria as president. Put aside his “minority” status as a Luo in the Kenyan political equation and just consider the integrity of his intellectual power and mental assets. Such assets are the most disqualifying criteria in the African context. As some cerebral minds have asked: what would throw up an Igbo (wo)man of similar assets as Obama as president of Nigeria? Even the very identification with such a person by his ethnic constituents, as African Americans identified with Obama, would have been a liability for other identities in Nigeria.
But beyond the recriminations of our inherent and contrived disabilities, what Obama’s election means for Black Africa, Nigeria in particular, is that, even in the face of the greatest odds, when every negative political reality has been entered into the equation, and beyond dispiriting idiocies of our ruling elite and the criminal proclivities of our reigning leadership, some day in this clime too can emerge a new spirit that would be embodied in some man or woman; that is, the spirit that verifies the fundamentality of human liberty and justice above every other claim. We can also dream such dreams in these parts, can’t we? Yes, we can! The possibility of a new dawn and the potential triumph of liberty over the obfuscating illogic of ever present realities connect us with the humanity that just triumphed in America. Beyond the Statue of Liberty, Obama’s victory, which he called “ours”, represents the stature of Liberty. Here him: “While we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes, we can.”
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