Ascent into the Ages: Mikelle Antoine, In Memoriam

On Sunday 22^nd November, Facebook reminded me of a picture I had posted six years ago, in 2009. In the picture is Mikelle Antoine, her husband, Nii, their two young children, and myself. The picture was taken on 21^st November 2009, on the campus of the University of Ghana at Legon, in Accra. In the background is the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of African Studies. I had just arrived in Accra, to attend a Third World Studies annual conference in Elmina, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was a nice memory. I shared it, and wrote in the comment: “Do you remember this day?” I tagged Mikelle, and hoped she would see the tag and be reminded of the memory. A thought ran through my mind. I hadn’t seen updates from Mikelle in a long time. I went to her page to see what she had been up to lately. 

Somebody wished her a happy birthday, on 7th November. Beneath that comment somebody wrote: “Rest In Peace Mikelle. You were an inspiration to many and sorely missed.” That was very strange, I thought. Just because somebody hadn’t been active on their Facebook page lately, and you write on their page "rest in peace"? Below that was another birthday message; all of them posted on the 7th of November.

Another earlier message also said “Rest in Peace.” And another one. Several more. By this time my heart was pounding, and I was beginning to sweat. I started inboxing the people who had written the condolence messages, asking them what they were talking about. I got one reply within a few minutes. “Unfortunately, Mikelle died in July. She had breast cancer.” I was shattered.

I got to know Mikelle Antoine around 2003, in East Lansing, Michigan. I was a PhD student in the Department of Teacher Education, in the College of Education at Michigan State University. She was a PhD student in the History Department. One semester I took a history course in alternative modernities in African history, and that was when I got to know her. She was in the same class. Around the same time, I got to know about the Blueprints Book Club (BBC), which Leketi Makalela, then a PhD student in Linguistics also at Michigan State, and Walter Sistrunk, another PhD student, had initiated. It brought together ten or so of us, PhD students from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States, studying various aspects of Africa. Mikelle was a key member of the book club.

It was an exciting period of my life as a student. The idea behind the BBC was that there was a history of Africa that was not being taught in mainstream academia. This history, we believed, presented a form of knowledge about the Pan-African world that would have a liberating effect on African peoples. So we hungered for this knowledge. We drew up a list of books and read one book every two or so weeks. We read the work of Ivan Van Sertima, Molefe Asante, Jacob Carruthers, Cheikh Anta Diop, Marimba Ani, and others.

The recommendation to read Marimba Ani came from Mikelle, who got her first degree from Hunter College in New York where Marimba Ani was a professor of African Studies. Professor Ani taught Mikelle at Hunter. We read Marimba Ani’s 1994 book Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behaviour.

Other topics we read and discussed were Afrocentrism, ancient African science, ancient African philosophy, Pan-Africanism, among others. One weekend a replica of the slave ship The Amistad was brought to Detroit and was docked on the shore of the Detroit River. We drove to Detroit to see it, and read and discussed its history. We also saw the movie The Amistad.

Back in the classroom, the history course I took in the History Department proved to be a turning point in my intellectual itinerary. Throughout my graduate school career, starting with the University of Iowa where I had studied English Education, there was a nagging question at the back of my mind. What was there in Africa before the coming of the Europeans? Although both my programmes at Iowa and at Michigan State were in teacher education, for the questions about Africa, I looked to other disciplines in pursuit of the nagging question.

For the term paper in the history class, I decided to give the nagging question a go. One evening I entered the MSU library around 6pm, and went to the stacks. By the time I decided to take a break, it was 6am the following day, and I had a huge pile of history books on Africa. The most fascinating discoveries were Cheikh Anta Diop's The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, Ivan Van Sertima's They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, and Martin Bernal's three-volume Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. They opened my eyes to what was there in Africa beyond the colonial experience.

There was a lot to learn and to unlearn. Exploring this new terrain with minds like Mikelle and others was a fascinating experience. We attended African Studies conferences. We presented papers. We talked and debated for hours. For me this meant bringing these new perspectives to the African school curriculum and the education of African teachers, which I looked forward to engaging in full time after my studies.

Mikelle was born and grew up in Haiti, and later came to the United States. As an undergraduate student at Hunter College she studied abroad, and it happened to be at the University of Ghana at Legon. There she met Nii, who was studying Theatre. They fell in love, and later got married. Nii joined Mikelle in Michigan, and I drove Mikelle to the airport in Detroit to welcome him.

When Nii finished his masters’ degree at Michigan State, they moved back to Accra and started raising a family. Enroute to Accra, Mikelle donated a huge chunk of her library to a South African university, where she stayed briefly for part of her research.

When I landed at Kotoka International Airport in Accra on 21^st November 2009, Mikelle and Nii, and their two young children, were there to welcome me. I had told them, as I prepared for the trip, that for me this would be a pilgrimage to the capital of Pan-Africanism. Thus during my visit they took me to Kwame Nkrumah’s Memorial Park, where the great Pan-Africanist leader and philosopher rests. They also took me to the W.E.B. DuBois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture where the great Pan-Africanist scholar and pioneer is reposed.

Mikelle finished her PhD dissertation in 2010. She defended it on 4^th June at Michigan State University, and it was titled The Rise of Asante Women within the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, 1960-1983. It was a study of how Asante women pursued liberation by becoming Muslim between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Mikelle was very involved intellectually, socially and communally. She was a history professor at Ashesi University, where she also taught gender, Islam, media and film, and museum education. She was director of fundraising at College for Ama, a non-profit that supported girls’ education in Accra.

She was an independent-minded and original thinker, not easily satisfied with received knowledge and accepted beliefs. I remember her one day disputing the claim that capitalism was a Western phenomenon, foreign to Africa. Disillusioned with the quality of education both in public and private schools on the continent, she strongly advocated for home-schooling. She even wrote an e-book on the topic, titled 30 Steps to Homeschooling Successfully in Africa. She was an active blogger and wrote numerous articles on homeschooling, parenting, education and other topics on her blog, Mikelle on Education. 

In 2014 Mikelle and her family moved to South Carolina in the United States. In an email, she told me it was going to be for a year. On her blog she wrote about her visit to the US, and the historical research she was pursuing. She said South Carolina and North Carolina were “an extension of the West African coast… a continuation of El Mina, Cape Coast and part of the slave dungeon history.”

Ever the historian, she said the two Atlantic states answered the question “what happened to those Africans? What did they become? Did they thrive? The coasts tell one part of the story and SC/NC tell the other half.”

She shared a fascinating piece of living history she had stumbled upon in South Carolina: “While here, we learned what became of some of our ancestors. We recently learned about a 100 year old former share cropper woman with a second grade education. She is still living and grew up with knowledge of an African language.”

It was to be her last blog post, posted together with another one on cancerous tumours. In hindsight, that was the closest hint she ever let on that she was terminally ill. Mikelle died on 30^th July this year, in South Carolina, where she was buried. She was a Pan-Africanist who lived and breathed mother Africa. She was a loving wife to Nii, a caring mother to their three children, a sweet-hearted friend and a gifted intellectual. A beautiful soul through and through. She would have turned 40 today, November 24^th. She has joined the ancestors, and now belongs, to borrow an Obama phrase, to the ages. 

Towards Agenda 2063: Pan-Africanist Education and the African Renaissance

The drama of the ICC’s determination to arrest Sudan’s president Omar Al Bashir played itself out exactly three weeks after the commemoration of this year’s Africa Day. That fact epitomises the thorny, rocky road Africa’s renewal will have to go through. Six weeks later, I am still basking in the after-glow of this year’s Africa Day commemorations, which was my first time to actually actively participate.

On May 25^th I attended an Africa Day Expo at the Kara Heritage Research Institute, in Tshwane, South Africa, where African pride and determination were in full display. In the evening, I attended the 6^th Annual Thabo Mbeki Africa Day lecture at the University of South Africa (Unisa), delivered by Nobel Peace Laureate and former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei.

Young Africans performing at the Africa Day Expo, 25th May 2015,
Kara Heritage Institute, Tshwane, South Africa

The day was observed and commemorated in several African countries. In South Africa, several cities and towns put on celebrations. The day set alight social media and the hashtag #AfricaDay2015 was trending in the African twitter-sphere. Across the continent, several conferences preceded the day, focusing on all things Pan-African. The watch words, in many of those conferences and commemorations, were Pan-Africanism, the African Renaissance, and Agenda 2063.

Taken together, these three ideas represent the conceptual landmarks guiding the path to the future Africa we want. I attempt to share, in this article, my reflections on what lies ahead in the gargantuan endeavour to shape an educational agenda for the kind of future that Africans are currently working on. This year’s Africa Day commemorations, and the conferences held in the lead up to 25^th May, provide much of the impetus for my reflections.

One such conference was the 5^th African Unity for Renaissance (AUFR), held on two campuses of the University of Johannesburg (UJ), Kingsway and Soweto, in South Africa. The conference’s theme was “2015 and Beyond: Engaging Agenda 2063”. I went to the conference looking to network with fellow educators on bringing the three concepts of Pan-Africanism, the African Renaissance and Agenda 2063 into classrooms in the Pan-African world. That means on the continent and in the diaspora.

I came back from the conference, and the Africa Day celebrations, with a zest and determination to play a role in making Agenda 2063 successful. Africa’s future is too important to be left to the African Union alone. The AU has ostensibly engaged high gear in taking on the enormous challenges the continent faces, but much more work needs to be done for ordinary Africans to own the process of Africa’s renewal and work side by side with the Pan-African body. For this to happen, it means every African has to decide what they are best able to contribute, and identify others with similar convictions. The bottom line is that the renewal of Africa, as expressed and articulated in the African Union’s Agenda 2063, must be driven by the people.

The opening night of the 5^th AUFR provided a catchphrase that remained on the lips of everyone for the rest of the conference. Dr Elizabeth Rasekoala, founder and co-chair of the Pan-African Solidarity Education Network, argued that calling the new African Union’s vision “Agenda 2063” sounded as if the continent would have to wait until that date. That was too far away. “We need Agenda Now Now!” she declared, to loud applause from the audience. To be clear, Dr. Rasekoala was not dismissing the idea of a 50-year plan. She was just stressing the urgent need to get started with the agenda and use every single day to work toward it. The AU itself is not waiting until 2063.

Although it was Al Bashir who dominated the news at the 25^th African Union Heads of State summit in Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa, the actual agenda of the summit was women’s empowerment. The AU has designated 2015 as the “Year of Women’s Empowerment and Development Towards Africa’s Agenda 2063.” A significant part of the summit was expected to get started with developing the first ten-year agenda toward 2063, and placing women’s empowerment as a pillar for the agenda.

The role of women as being at the heart of Africa’s renewal is what Dr. Rasekoala says is the single most important thing for the continent. She confirmed this in the opening plenary session of the 5^th AUFR. As the session was drawing to a close, director of ceremonies for much of the conference, Professor Chris Landsberg, UJ’s SARCHi Chair in African Diplomacy and Foreign Policy, had one question for all the three speakers on the plenary. “Is there one thing you think the AU needs to do as the single most important thing for the continent?”

In addition to Dr. Rasekoala, an engineer, the other two speakers were Professor Mammo Muchie, SARCHi Chair in Innovation and Development at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT); and Professor Adebayo Olukoshi, Director of the United Nations African Institute for Economic Development and Planning in Senegal.

Dr. Rasekoala did not hesitate to mention gender as the single most important thing. She said it was of pivotal importance to enhance women’s participation at the highest levels of public service, politics and business. For Professor Muchie, the most important thing was to stop the negative narrative about the continent. He said it was time to start focusing on the historical greatness of the continent, on what is working today, and on the Africa we want for the future. For Professor Olukoshi, it was to “open the borders. Let Africans move freely.” He added that he had been consistent on this for a long time.

The call to open up African borders seems to be growing in intensity. Speaking to South African youth on Tuesday 16^th June, which is celebrated as Youth Day in South Africa, President Jacob Zuma singled out the borders issue as one of the major things discussed at the 25^th AU Heads of State Summit. He tied the idea to the importance of South African youth learning about the rest of the continent and being proud of their African heritage. Following the continental outrage in the wake of the Afro-xenophobic attacks in South Africa in April, the country seems to be galvanising a new resolve and reconsidering its place and influence on the continent.

This was evident at the 5^th AUFR conference as well. In his welcoming remarks, UJ’s Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor Tshilidzi Marwala evoked Pan-Africanism’s ancestry when he spoke of the importance of teaching young Africans what Kwame Nkrumah used to say that Africa was one people and one nation. That meant, said Professor Marwala, no African was a foreigner on African soil. And those sentiments were repeated by South Africa’s Minister of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigaba, who gave the conference’s opening keynote address. In a wide-ranging and frank accounting of the complexities of South Africa’s place on the continent, Hon. Gigaba said South Africans needed to respect all immigrants, including those in the country illegally.

Although xenophobia has openly manifested itself in South Africa, anti-foreigner sentiments are evident not only across the continent, but across the globe. The onus falls on every African country to deal with this problem and promote an African identity before a national one, as Professor Mammo repeatedly pointed out. Much of this work lies in school curricula and classroom pedagogy. It means teaching a different type of African history, one that digs deep into the contexts that have created the kind of Africa we have today. 

This is what was on the mind of Professor Adebayo Olukoshi on the opening night of the 5^th AUFR. Professor Olukoshi situated his remarks in the opening plenary in Walter Rodney’s pioneering work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Olukoshi argued that Rodney had provided empirical proof that before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Africa’s socio-economic status was at par with the rest of the world.

Not only did the slave trade depopulate the continent and set its economic progress back, it also robbed Africans of their dignity and self-worth. Africa was the only continent, observed Professor Olukoshi, where the world felt it had a God-given right to demand a seat at the table and dictate to Africans how to solve their problems. The argument being that Pan-Africanism is too important to be left to the Africans alone. And the ironies of Africa’s situation today are startling. In one perplexing anecdote, Professor Olukoshi noted how African leaders go to Europe and America for medical treatment, only to find that the doctor attending to them is a citizen of their own country.

What all this means is that knowing where Africa is today and the history that made the present is an inescapable part of the charge to chart the continent’s future. “We must begin with the children,” said Professor Mammo Muchie. But beginning with the children means changing the way the African Union’s Pan-African University idea is being implemented, an argument made by Professor David Horne, Chair of Africana Studies at California State University at Northridge in the USA. The focus needs to start with African children from their earliest education and be sustained all the way up to university education.

And young Africans must not be shielded from this history, a lesson shared on the second day of the conference, by Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni. He is Executive Director of the Archie Mafeje Research Institute at the University of South Africa. Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni was responding to a question as to whether this type of African history does not entrench an inferiority complex and prevent young Africans from actively participating in global discussions. Knowing who you are and being grounded in your history is what builds a foundation for the future, said Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni. He added that he grew up in an African village, but he does not feel inferior.

For educators, the issue of what type of African history to teach is of central importance. Scholars such as Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Pitika Ntuli have argued over the years that the history taught in African schools does not reflect the scholarship generated by African historians. The thrust of the curriculum remains Eurocentric, this in spite of the available knowledge of Africa’s history going back several millennia.

A compelling example of the kind of African history that is not reflected in the curriculum came from Dr. Diran Soumonni. A senior lecturer from the Wits Business School, Dr. Soumonni presented on Africa’s history and philosophy of science and technology, digging deep into Africa’s intellectual past, going to 4,000 years BC to when the Egyptians are known to have used a 30-day calendar. Dr Soumonni’s research demonstrates the feasibility of developing an education agenda at the heart of Africa’s renewal. 

Which brings me to what I see as the most urgent steps that those of us working in education, and those interested in the future of the continent broadly, must provide direction with.

A survey conducted by Jean Chawapiwa, Founder and Managing Director of Win Win Solutions 4 Africa consultancy firm, and presented at the conference, found that very few people have heard about Agenda 2063. Out of 327 respondents across the continent and beyond, 63 percent had never heard about Agenda 2063. Chawapiwa’s suggestions for how the AU can spread the word about the initiative need serious consideration.

Reaching out to as many Africans as possible will enable ownership of the agenda by ordinary Africans. It will enable grassroots participation, and will address the deeply felt grievance that the African Union is a dictators’ club out of touch with the needs of African people. It should be emphasised that there can be no grassroots ownership and participation if there is no translation of Agenda 2063 into local African languages.  The respondents in Chawapiwa’s survey made this clear.

African intellectuals have been unequivocal about this. 

Ngugi wa Thiong’o has spent more than three decades making this argument. Ngugi has said “African intellectuals must do for their languages and cultures what all other intellectuals in history have done for theirs. This is still the challenge of our history. Let’s take up the challenge.” The educational implications of such an ambitious agenda are, no doubt, enormous. It requires educators, teacher educators in particular, to participate at every stage. And this is why I argue that Agenda 2063 is too important to be left to the African Union alone, the one occasion when it is legitimate to say this. It is also why I suggest that African educators need to consider making Agenda 2063 required reading in their courses.

Al Bashir is not the only hot coal gnawing away at the AU’s cauldron. The very concepts of Pan-Africanism, the African Renaissance and African Unity arouse intense debate amongst Africans and Africa watchers. There are multi-layered historical and contemporary grievances, internal and external. There are intricate webs of elitism, exclusion, collusion with Western capital and global influence, deep inequalities, and simmering injustices. It requires a spirit of hope, optimism and determination to see the problems as surmountable rather than intractable and impossible. Education is a good place to start.

Governments on the continent and in the African diaspora need to adopt Agenda 2063 into their national plans, as the African Union has already pointed out. In addition to the agenda, contemporary Pan-Africanism and the African renaissance need to be integrated into national educational policies, and into school curricula and classroom pedagogy from primary to university. 

The three concepts also need to become part of teacher education programmes for new teachers, and continuous professional development programmes for practising teachers. The AU needs a unit specifically dedicated to education. If there are deans of schools or faculties of education on the continent or in the diaspora, who feel a passionate sense of urgency about this, there begins Agenda Now Now. 

Note: A version of this article first appeared in Pambazuka News on 19th June, 2015

Was the Bingu Africa Saw the Bingu Malawians Knew?

Several comments made about the departed president by a number of Africans from various countries, and a few non-Africans, seem to paint a picture of a man Malawians do not seem to recognise. He has been called a visionary leader, a Pan Africanist, and an anti-imperialist, among many other colourful adjectives. Is that the man Malawians knew?

Landing at Chileka International Airport for the funeral of the late president on April 22^nd, Tanzanian president Jakaya Kikwete gave a glimpse of how differently Mutharika appears to have been perceived by Africans outside Malawi, particularly in his last days. Kikwete said Mutharika was a visionary leader. He said every time they met, Kikwete learned something new from Mutharika.

Speaking at the burial, the Dean of the diplomatic corps in Malawi, Zimbabwean High Commissioner to Malawi Thandiwe Dumbutshena, repeated the statement about Mutharika being a visionary who had big ideas for Malawi and Africa. She said Mutharika liked to question conventional wisdom, and asked for evidence before accepting anything, a trait also mentioned by Raphael Tenthani in his ‘Muckraking on Sunday’ column (Sunday Times, 22^nd April).  Dumbutshena said this made Bingu look as if he never listened to other opinions.

On April 12^th the state-run Zimbabwean newspaper, The Herald, ran an opinion piece by two Zimbabwean academics, Darlington Mahuku and Bowden Mbanje. Mahuku and Mbanje wrote that Africa had lost “one of its illustrious sons.” They found it “disturbing and shocking . . . that some sections of the Malawian population celebrated his demise.” To them, Mutharika was a “radical Pan-Africanist” who sought to wean Malawi out of donor dependency. For his part, American academic and advocate of more aid for Africa, Jeffrey Sachs, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that pointed out Mutharika’s first term achievements and second-term failings. It ended with the sentence “Mutharika helped put Africa on a path out of poverty and hunger.”

How did Mutharika manage to create such contrasting images between Malawians and other Africans? Even in his last days he talked of how outside Malawi people stopped him to ask admiring questions about how he had transformed the country. What was it that other Africans saw in the man, that Malawians didn’t? And what did Malawians know about Bingu that other Africans didn’t? Some have opined that he lacked diplomacy in his public speeches. Others have said he had a very poor public relations machine. Yet others feel that he blundered in choosing to directly respond to each and every criticism leveled against him, instead of letting his cabinet and other officials do that for him.

All three explanations risk being interpreted to mean that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Bingu’s presidency, it was all a matter of appearance. A lot of the debate on Mutharika’s leadership style has been characterized by a bifurcation of two extremes; either he was Malawi’s worst president, or he was Malawi’s best president thus far. Dualistic views are always unhelpful in trying to understand a complex problem, but they are an easy resort in the absence of handy explanations.

Mahuka and Mbanje are correct to observe that Mutharika preached an end to donor-dependency, but they seem unaware that Mutharika only started talking about this after he had exposed Malawi’s pathological aid dependency himself. Mutharika was rightly concerned about the extreme vulnerability of the country to donor whims, but such notions made little sense to people losing relatives because hospitals had no drugs, and to motorists spending weeks at fuel stations without getting any.

But perhaps Mutharika’s biggest failure was his inability to engage his fellow citizens in a discussion on his deepest beliefs, and to lead a life that reflected those beliefs. A few months before his death his outbursts grew in ferocity. He said donors could “go to hell” for all he cared. He appeared deeply angered. This came in the wake of a foreign relations offensive in which his own brother, Professor Peter Mutharika, and a few high ranking cabinet ministers toured Western capitals, including London and Washington. They were on a mission to make amends for the diplomatic spat that resulted in the expulsion of the British High Commissioner to Malawi, Fergus Cochran-Dyet, and to restart negotiations with the IMF.

It appeared that Malawi’s donors had said they were willing to resume aid, but not with Bingu in office. Mutharika saw that as a coup plot against him, funded by donors. Attempts to make deals with non-Western countries such as Qatar, Angola and Nigeria yielded nothing. The Nation newspaper of 2^nd March, 2012 reported, in an article by Kondwani Munthali, that the president was incensed by high profile sabotage of his plans to obtain relief for the country. Some Malawians speculated that Qatar, Angola and Nigeria may have abundant oil, but not many Malawians seem aware of who controls the oil companies in those countries. It is not the Qataris, the Angolans or the Nigerians.

Mutharika had trouble communicating his frustrations in ways that would have endeared him to ordinary Malawians. Instead, he issued threats to Malawian civil society, shouted down donors, and spoke with careless abandon. Whatever Pan-Africanism he may have believed in never became a topic of cordial, educative debate in Malawi. Talk of weaning the country out of donor dependency was not matched by a personal lifestyle that would have shown Malawians how to live within their means. He shopped in Hong Kong, holidayed in Australia, and flew in a presidential jet believed to have been bought using diverted donor money. Days after his death the Malawian cyberspace was awash with unsubstantiated rumours about the extent of the looting and plundering Mutharika was alleged to have perpetrated.

Many leaders preach Pan-Africanism abroad, while promoting a parochial, ethnic nationalism at home. This creates a convoluted understanding of a concept that once powered a movement that set a continent free. The future of Africa is sorely in need of a twenty first century Pan-Africanism not preached from lofty capitals, but grown from the grassroots, uniting Africans on the continent and around the globe. Few African leaders since the era of Nkrumah and Nyerere have walked the talk on Pan-Africanism. Mutharika wrote brilliantly about Pan Africanism in his books, but put very little of it into practice.

There is something about political power that brings out the best and the worst in people. Until we start questioning how power changes people, we will not find lasting solutions to the problem of politicians starting out very well, and ending up tragically.

The Vuvuzelization of world football: Ghana & the real story of SA2010

With Ghana as the only remaining African team at the ongoing 2010 World Cup, as I write, the question for many people inside and outside Africa has been about the miserable performance of the five other African representatives. The 2010 World Cup was billed as the African World Cup, and hopes were high that a good number of African teams, amongst the six, would do better than in previous World Cup tournaments. These hopes thrived notwithstanding the facts of the official FIFA rankings, in which no single African team featured in the world’s top eighteen. Running up to the start of the tournament the highest ranked African team has been Cameroon, at number 19 in the world, with Ivory Coast coming in second, at number 27^th, according to Jeré Longman in the New York Times (June 5^th, 2010). Among the more interesting explanations for the failure of all but one of Africa’s representatives has been the observation that with the exception of Algeria, the rest of the African teams have European and Latin American coaches. Now Algeria themselves, under an Algerian coach, Rabah Saadane, have also been eliminated in the very first round. As per the heading of a June 21^st New York Times article by Christopher Clarey, Africa has hosted the Cup, but has imported the coaches.

The foreign coaches argument takes on a curious tone when we note that South Africa, the host country that has had six years to prepare, have themselves exited the tournament, also in the very first round. This has happened despite being coached by none other than Carlos Parreira, a Brazilian who coached his own country to World Cup victory in 1994, according to Piers Edwards (The New African, African Football insert, May 2010). Meanwhile, Ghana have reached the quarter finals with a foreign coach, the Serbian Milovan Rajevac. The foreign coaches argument does have merit, but the fate of African teams at the 2010 World Cup has been determined by a host of other factors, including political interference, bureaucratic indifference, and perennial diffidence.

Nigeria and Ivory Coast replaced coaches with three months to go to the 2010 kick-off. According to the New York Times’ Jeré Longman, neither coach met the full team until late May. Nigeria dismissed a local coach, Shaibu Amodu, who was being paid US$13,000 a month, and hired Swedish coach Lars Lagerback who had failed to qualify his own country Sweden into the 2010 World Cup tournament. He is being paid a handsome US$300,000 per month over a five-month period ending in July 2010, according to Osasu Obayuiwana in African Football (April 2010). As I am putting finishing touches to this article, England have exited the tournament in the second round, at the hands of Germany. The Germans have a German coach, Joachim Löw, while the English have an Italian coach, Fabio Capello, according to the South Africa 2010 World Cup blog.

In the concluding part of this article I will discuss the issue of the sheer randomness and unpredictability that many times offer upsets and turn conventional expectations upside. But the main point I want to make is about Ghana and how its football triumph goes beyond the football pitch and the 2010 World Cup. I make this point regardless of the outcome of Friday’s forthcoming quarterfinal match between Ghana and Uruguay.

The more compelling story worth telling about the global tournament in South Africa this year has two sides to it. First is the story of what Ghana’s triumph symbolizes, at the center of which symbolism is Africa’s past and future. This symbolism is embodied in the vuvuzela, the cheering trumpet. Riding on the success of Ghana is also the story of how the 2010 World Cup has thus far proved wrong most of its critics, detractors, pessimists and doubting Thomases. The vuvuzela, much like Ghana’s Black Stars, has beaten odds to become more than a cheering instrument. It has now attained the status of an African metaphor for the unacknowledged ways in which Africa determines particular discourses at the global level. There are three narratives intertwined here. First, Ghana is carrying the hopes of the continent, and the larger Pan-African world. Second, this tournament has been remarkable for the bigger presence of players of African descent in many of the teams, especially those from Europe and Latin America. Third, the phenomenon that has become the vuvuzela takes on a significance that elevates the symbolization of Ghana’s performance thus far, as well as the widespread presence of African influence in the ancestry of the players on the field.

That it has been left up to Ghana at this point to carry forward the hopes of the African continent may look inconsequential in casual circumstances. But to a serious student of Pan-Africanism and of Africa’s place in the world, it is more than a coincidence. Ghana is the de facto center of 21^st century Pan-Africanist ideals, and it is unfortunate that this knowledge remains unexplored amongst the majority of ordinary Africans. This is due to the failure of Africa’s political leadership, as well as the disconnect between Africa’s intellectual elite and the African wanainchi. As I have argued elsewhere, these problems are not unsolvable. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has pointed out that there is a gap between the knowledge that African scholars produce in the academy, and the knowledge that makes up the school curriculum in many African countries (Zeleza, 1997). Even in Ghana itself, where the awareness of the country’ central place in 21^st century Pan-Africanist throught exists amongst political thought leaders and intellectuals, the political discourse still poses challenges. A recent article by Sharon Hemans in the April-June issue of the BBC’s Focus on Africa magazine laments how very few Ghanaians visit the resting place of the 20^th century father of Pan-Africanism, W.E.B. DuBois. When I visited the DuBois Memorial Center for Pan-African Culture in Accra in November 2009, I found only the staff who manage the place, on a Saturday afternoon. It was not much different when earlier in the day I visited the uniquely designed and aesthetically inspiring Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, also in Accra.

My hosts, themselves Pan-Africanist thinkers, enlightened me about the difficulties surrounding perceptions of the relevance of Pan-Africanist ideas in Ghana today. I know these difficulties to exist in my own country of Malawi, and in the rest of Africa. As I have written elsewhere, and as is widely known in African scholarship, Sub-Saharan Africa owes its legacy of independence to the pioneering role played by Ghana’s first president, the Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah took a personal interest in supporting Malawi’s own independence, in his prescient conviction, 60 years ahead of his time, that the independence of Ghana was meaningless, unless it was tied to the independence of the rest of Africa. It is a lesson that ought to resonate with those African countries today that are undergoing an economic renaissance: the economic progress of Malawi, Botswana, South Africa, etc, is meaningless unless it is tied to the economic progress of the rest of the continent. The disconnect that divides African intellectuals, political leaders, and the wanainchi makes it very difficult for ordinary Africans to understand the significance of this exhortation. The acrimony and bitter negativity that greets the idea of a United States of Africa (notwithstanding the uninspired unoriginality of the term) amongst ordinary Africans is testimony to this difficulty.

Yet tied to the role that Ghana is playing in this tournament is the remarkable widespread presence of players of African descent in many teams, especially European and Latin American. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has called this the “globalization of African football and the Africanization of global football” (The Zeleza Post, June 12^th, 2010). For Zeleza, “the African presence in world football has actually been astonishing.” He remarks on the number of players of African descent in teams from North America and Latin America, Europe and Western Asia. Zeleza observes that the Saudi Arabian team at the last World Cup tournament in 2006 was “predominantly black.” He points out how Latin America is “home to Africa's largest diaspora,” and that both “Western Europe and Western Asia [are] also homes to millions of people of African descent.” Many of these teams, especially the United States, England, Brazil and France have several players of African descent. In particular, Brazil has the largest population of people of African descent outside the continent of Africa. And the complexion of its national team reflects this.

Writing for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s World Cup blog on June 16^th, the South Africa-based analyst of African football Mark Gleeson listed Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States as European and North American teams with “sons of African soil in their ranks.” Gleeson attributed this to the “global village and modern migratory patterns,” adding that “most major European sides [now] represent much more their immigrant communities than they do old national stereotypes.” Particularly fascinating was Gleeson’s comment on what was going to be a historical first for two brothers to face each other in a World Cup tournament playing for opposing sides. That happened on Wednesday June 23^rd when Kevin Prince Boateng of Ghana played against his blood brother Jerome Boateng of Germany. A comment on Gleeson’s story insisted that these players were not African at all, as their cultural mindset and upbringing were European and had nothing in common with Africa. Were it that easy to dismiss the concept of diaspora consciousness and the search for one’s roots and identity! In the England team that crashed 1-4 to Germany in the second round, no less than seven of the players featured were black, three of them coming in as substitutes. For France the presence of players of African descent has been even more visible going back to the last two World Cups.

It is this phenomenon then that gives us the metaphor of the vuvuzelization of world football. The vuvuzela’s adoption by football fans from various teams participating in the World Cup has been fascinating. Trevor Ncube, publisher of South Africa’s weekly newspaper Mail & Guardian tweeted on June 20^th about how even at matches involving non-African teams, the vuvuzela could still be heard above the din. Fans from Europe, Asia, Oceania and Latin America have also taken to the vuvuzela. And the utility of the instrument has now gone beyond the football stands. According to an article posted on the website African Aristocrat on June 25th, Taiwan’s opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, had ordered 200 vuvuzelas for a protest rally against a trade pact between Taiwan and mainland China. The article went on to report that a trade union in Poland, Solidarity, was also considering purchasing vuvuzelas, also for use at protest rallies.

Writing in the Mail & Guardian Online’s Thought Leader blog on June 24^th, Sarah Britten quoted Peter Aspden of The Financial Times as describing the vuvuzela thus: “It is a joyous, life-affirming sound, of a nation entranced in pride and celebration, and expressing it through its own culture.” The word “vuvuzela” sounds very much an African word, but there has reportedly been a dispute as to its invention. Several web sources attribute the invention of the vuvuzela to an Afrikaner businessman, Neil Van Schalkwyk, co-owner of the Masincedane Sport Company, said to own the trademark for the instrument. The BBC reported in January that a black South African religious congregation, the Shembe Church, threatened to take FIFA to court over the use of the vuvuzela. The church claimed that the vuvuzela was invented by the church’s founder, Isaiah Shembe, in the early 1900s. To this day, the church conducts an annual ceremony retracing the footsteps of Isaiah Shembe, to the sound of the vuvuzela. The South African newspaper The Sowetan reported on June 22^nd that Neil Van Schalkwyk and the Shembe Church had reached a settlement in which the Masincedane Sport Company had acknowledged that the church were indeed the original inventors of the vuvuzela.

The instrument is also known to have irked quite a few people. European coaches appealed to FIFA to ban the instrument, saying it was disrupting coach-player communication on the field. The British newspaper Daily Mail Online reported about one woman said to have torn a part of her windpipe after blowing on the instrument too hard. A US Army civilian employee in Germany is said to have been driven nuts by the trumpet, and to have threatened a vuvuzela-blowing neighbor with an axe. Such is the intrigue of the vuvuzela that it has created its own narrative alongside that of the 2010 World Cup. The vuvuzela has secured for itself an important legacy at this year’s tournament, Africa’s World Cup, creating a following of its own, according to Ndesanjo Macha of Global Voices Online. Now to return to the issue of randomness and unpredictability as to who gets to win and who gets to lose in any given FIFA World Cup tournament.

Commenting on developments at an ongoing event like the World Cup tournament is like aiming at a moving target. The failure of the majority of African teams to progress beyond the preliminary round has caused much anguish to supporters and sympathizers of African football. The various explanations that have been offered carry elements of accuracy, but there’s also the inevitability of chance that is always present in football. Much of this chance is inexplicable even by FIFA rankings, and by recent World Cup triumph history. For example, the two teams which competed as finalists at the last World Cup, in 2006, Italy and France, exited the 2010 tournament in the first round. How does one explain this, especially for Italy who were the reining world champions going into the tournament?

And watching the African teams play, one is hard placed to see distinct differences between them and their European, Latin American, Oceania and Asian counterparts. Ivory Coast held Portugal to a 0-0 draw, and lost very narrowly to Brazil. South Africa drew against Mexico 1-1 in the opening game, and beat France in their last group match (albeit arguments that the French team had been dispirited by internal squabbles). Nigeria, Cameroun and Algeria all held their own against high ranked European, Asian and Latin American teams. There’s a randomness, an unpredictability to the final result in many of these games not easily explained by FIFA rankings and recent success among the traditional favourites. It’s only when one throws into the equation the tactical and bureaucratic mistakes made by countries such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, that the odds add up and militate against the African representatives. This is what has to be taken into consideration and added to the soul searching about what exactly happened to the African teams at South Africa 2010. Aren’t Italy, France, England and many other teams also doing the same soul searching?

Another point worth considering is what I discussed back in 2006, about the imbalance in the number of representatives per region, and how that imbalance skewers the probability of succeeding or failing in World Cup tournaments. The continent of Europe has 51 national football associations, and this year has had 13 World Cup finals slots (15 in 2002, 14 in 2006). Africa has 52 member associations, and this year has had 6 slots, with the sixth, South Africa, being included only because they are the hosts. The Latin American continents, combining North and South America and the Caribbean have a combined total of 50 associations, and this year they have had a combined total of 8 World Cup places. With these kinds of numbers and unequal representation, is it much wonder who gets eliminated early in the process, and who proceeds to the final rounds, as has always been the tradition?

For now, the action continues for another two weeks. Histories have been made. Critics, detractors and perpetual pessimists have been proven wrong. There are legacies that will shape the coming decades, on and off the football field. Long after the 2010 World Cup tournament has ended, the sound of thousands of vuvuzelas blowing across the South African veld will remain an indelible, identifiable symbol of this historic moment. Ghana’s possible success in the coming match will be pregnant with even more significance, but the greater meaning of what the Black Stars have already achieved will have resonance beyond footballing circles. This meaning will reinforce the historical legacy that Ghana has already given the Pan-African world, connecting an emancipatory past with the aspirations of a different African future both on the continent and in the diaspora. The sound of the vuvuzela will for a long time to come be the soundtrack for the 2010 World Cup anthem, performed by Shakira, and emblazoned in the words “This time for Africa.”

Son of the Soil? Pan-Africanism & Third World Prospects in a Possible Obama Presidency

The exclamatory commentary that has accompanied Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the nomination of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate has excited, beneath it, the question of what the nomination itself, and a possible Obama presidency, might mean for the Pan-Africanist world as well as the Third World. While much of the commentary has been laudatory, there have also been cautionary tones, not to mention ambivalent ones. Beyond the excitement, caution and ambivalence of what a possible Obama presidency might entail for Pan-Africa and the Third World, what Obama himself has said in his writing, and has not said, might prove to be revelatory in attempting to explore the discussion that has exercised many minds around the world. 

We take this exploration by examining some of the issues that have been raised by editorialists and columnists, bloggers and other commentators in Africa and beyond. We also delve into what Obama himself has said in his two best-belling books, as we ponder how the significance of a possible Obama presidency may be realized more in the symbolic transformation of perceptions of race, racism and racial identity in the US and in the world, than in what the office of the US presidency itself is capable or incapable of achieving.

First, a word about my use of the terms “Pan-Africa” and “Pan-Africanism.” The Pan-Africa I am referring to here is the one that builds on the ideological consciousness of the global historical experiences and identities of people of African descent, and others who share that ideology for political and solidarity purposes. It is a Pan-Africanist consciousness that draws from DuBois’s hope, back in 1897, that if Africans were to be a factor in the history of the world, it would have to be through a Pan-African movement. Thus when Ghana became independent from Britain in 1957, Du Bois, unable to attend the epochal occasion due to his passport being impounded by the US government, handed over the mantle of the Pan-Africanist movement to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, through a letter that he wrote and had delivered to Nkrumah.

The 1966 military coup that overthrew Nkrumah as Ghana’s president dealt a big blow to a Pan-Africanist movement that had achieved a great deal for people of African descent, especially in Africa. The shared African identity and global consciousness spawned by Pan-Africanist ideology played a key role in mobilizing support amongst African and Third World regions in overthrowing colonialism. In the United States, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both looked up to the Pan-African world for solidarity in overcoming American racism. With Nkrumah gone, the ideals of Pan-Africanism began atrophying, to the extent that in the 21^st century today there is no discernible movement that concerns itself with the problems that afflict Africa and people of African descent around the world. But there is no question that such a movement is as necessary today as it was in the 1950s and 60s.

In his autobiography Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama has demonstrated his awareness of both a Pan-Africanist and Third World consciousness, but for the nationalist demands of American politics today, he has not made that awareness a part of his campaign platform. But those who know Obama’s autobiographical instincts in guiding his best judgments know that his upbringing and struggle to identify himself are a core part of who he is. And it is his autobiographical narrative that has appealed to people around the globe. Thus while heeding the call to be cautious in speculating what a possible Obama presidency might do for the Pan-African world, it is worth discussing the extent to which Obama’s narrative in itself has the potential to influence new visions and energies in the study of the Pan-African world and its future prospects. Those energies have been on display in many places around the world, not least in Kenya, where Obama’s father came from.

A June 5^th editorial in The Daily Nation of Kenya, where Obama’s father, a Harvard Ph.D., hailed from, offered three reasons as to why Africans were celebrating Obama’s victory. The first reason had to do with Obama being “the first African American ever to win nomination to vie for the presidency of the world’s sole super-power.” Second, Obama was considered “a son of Africa” who has excelled in the world. And thirdly, Obama was “a son of Kenya,” since Obama traced “his roots” back to his fatherland, Kenya, in “the present-day Siaya District.” The three reasons culminated into one huge hope: Africans were hopeful that “with this win, ‘their son’ will implement Africa-friendly policies that could uplift the continent from poverty.”

In the June 8^th edition of The Sunday Times of Rwanda, columnist Frank Kagabo also reflected Obama’s blood connection to Africa, observing that Obama had “relatives living in third world poverty,” a fact which would help African people feel “good and know that nothing is impossible no matter where you come from.” In the Malawian parliament, The Daily Times quoted opposition Malawi Congress Party member of parliament Boniface Kadzamira as congratulating Senator Obama, paraphrasing the parliamentarian as saying Malawi was “likely to benefit if he wins the presidential election this August” [sic]. Hon. Kadzamira was also quoted offering a snippet of how Obama’s foreign policy might look like “He says he is likely to move away from the policies of sanctions, which has hurt countries like Zimbabwe, to negotiation. He says he will have tough aid conditions and will move away from the weapons of mass destruction to mass reconstruction”.

The Harvard University-based blog aggregating project, Global Voices Online, housed in the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has been culling blog commentary on the American elections from outside the United States, on a website called Voices Without Votes. Amongst the blogs the website is aggregating is The World Wants Obama Coalition, from where a link to the Caribbean World News announced a news item titled “Caribbean United Behind Obama”. Another linked blog, Globamania, sported the self-description, “Because the world believes in real change, too.” A round up of Kenyan bloggers by Global Voices author Rebecca Wanjiku was titled “Kenyan bloggers on Kenya’s most famous son, Barack Obama”.

But even amidst the hopes, adulations and expectations for what a “son of Africa” in the American White House could do for the continent, there have also been voices cautioning the hyped praise, and posing some searching questions. The Daily Nation’s editorial mentioned above asked: “But what is there for Africa in the American elections?” It went further still, asking: would Obama manage to “overcome the strong lobby groups that control American foreign policy and that have very little time for Africa?” More unflattering commentary came from Rasna Warah, writing in the June 9^th edition of The Daily Nation, who wielded a sharp knife over the blood ties everyone was happy to evoke. Warah’s title was upfront and blunt: “We cannot lay claims on Obama; he’s not one of us”. Warah went on to state: “What everyone seems to be forgetting is that Barack Obama is an American, not a Kenyan. His roots may lie in Kenya, but he was born and raised in the United States, and his loyalty lies with that nation, not with ours.”

As evidence for her argument, Warah cited Obama’s own words spoken when he visited Kenya as a United States Senator, in August of 2006. She quoted Obama as saying: “As a US Senator, my country and other nations have an obligation and self-interest in being full partners with Kenya and Africa. And I will do my part to shape an intelligent foreign policy that promotes peace and prosperity.” As for Obama’s autobiography Dreams From my Father, which Obama wrote after returning from Kenya and graduating from Harvard Law School, Warah suggested that “curiosity about his roots” was the real reason Obama visited his fatherland for the first time ever, in the summer of 1988. It was “not deep love for this country,” said Warah.

By far the most authoritative statement of caution if not negation came from Dr. Makau Mutua, Dean and University Distinguished Professor of Law at State University of New York at Buffalo, and chair of the Kenyan Human Rights Commission. Writing in the Daily Nation of June 5^th, Dr. Mutua started out by quipping that the reaction to Obama’s clinching of the Democratic nomination was as if Obama was “poised to become” the president of Kenya, or indeed Africa. The reasons, Dr. Mutua said, were three-fold: “national, racial, and ethnic pride that a black man can become ‘king’ of the empire.” Dr. Mutua then set out to demolish the expectations edifice by pointing out “the nature of the US as a state, and the character of the American presidency” as the reasons why he was urging caution to the hype of what Obama would do for the continent. 

Dr. Mutua contrasted between the way Africans and Americans see the office of the president as being responsible for the mounting expectations on Obama. “Africans think of presidents as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent”, wrote Dr. Mutua, saying that in Africa that perception gave the president enormous powers which ultimately determined what citizens could gain or lose. It was what created what Dr. Mutua called “tribal barons.” Not so with American politics, in which “the American presidency is a highly circumscribed office that is subject to larger national interests on which there is consensus about the purpose of government.”

What would prevent a President Obama from being helpful to Africa then were the two core functions of the American presidency: to “develop and implement a foreign policy to enhance US interests and pursue a domestic policy that will bring economic prosperity to the nation.” It was in the service of those two functions that America’s role in the world had been historically shaped, and continued to be, limiting the scope of what an individual president could do, even as he or she brought his or her personality and individuality to what is considered the most powerful leadership position in the world. 

Here Dr. Mutua went deeper than anybody has been daring to, to expose America as an empire whose wealth and might have been built on a foundation that has dialectically entailed the exploitation and destruction of Africa. “Why am I pessimistic about the prospects of an Obama presidency for Africa?” asked Dr. Mutua. The answer, he offered, lay in America’s “structurally racist and exploitative relationship with Africa. In slavery – the brutal capture, transportation, sale and exploitation of Africans to build America – and the support by the United States of Cold War despots in Africa, lies the destructive relationship between black people and America.”

As an analytical insight, Dr. Mutua’s explanation went to the heart of a historical truth that has largely been avoided by most commentators, including Obama’s own positioning of himself vis-a-viz his identity. “It is partly because of these traumas,” explained Dr. Mutua, “that Africa is so underdeveloped and marginalised in global politics. That is why to America Africa has either been an afterthought or an object of pity and charity. It would require an ideological shift by the US to change its relationship with Africa to base it on equality, fair trade and investment, and a voice for Africans in global institutions.” As such, no individual American president can achieve the kind of paradigm shift that would turn around America’s image of Africa: “These are not steps that a president can take alone because they affect fundamental American interests, and would call for a realignment of US foreign policy so that it is not simply Eurocentric.”

Dr. Mutua’s realistic analysis of what the American presidency looks like and how its foreign and domestic policy mandates shape the scope and limits of what the American presidency can achieve points to an important distinction that has to be made between the president as an individual and the president as an institution. As an individual, we only have to hark back to Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father. As I pointed out in my recent blog article on Obama, the personal importance of Africa to Barack Obama is not only evident in the book, it is profound to Obama’s own identity. The way Obama treats Kenya in Dreams From My Father leaves us in no doubt about this. 

In the book, Obama takes 450 pages to offer an intimate look into his life, from early days in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, to an epochal homecoming in Kenya. The amount of detail Obama dedicates to his life in the United States and Indonesia, where he lived all his life hitherto, contrasts sharply with the one third of the book that he devotes to Kenya, where he only spent three months. His days at Harvard Law School are given a mere two sentences (p. 437).

Contrary to Rasna Warah’s suggestion that Obama went to Kenya more out of curiosity than love of the country, the answer to Obama’s deep search for identity is finally consummated and revealed in Kenya, right from the moment he steps foot on the soil. It is worth reproducing, again, the paragraph that puts Obama’s quest for identity to rest, when somebody recognizes his name in an instant:

“That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A., or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, ‘Oh, you are so and so’s son.’ No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand” (p. 305).

However the reasons for caution in imagining what an Obama presidency may do for Africa and the Third World are equally sobering. By the time we get to the US senate and to his next book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), Africa has pretty much disappeared from Obama’s narrative, replaced by distant references that characterize much of mainstream Western attitudes about Africa. Missing even from the Index, Africa is mentioned only perfunctorily, no longer as the place Obama spent a lifetime yearning for, but rather as the known poster child for the world’s worst maladies and disorder. “There are times when considering the plight of Africa—the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old guerillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s—I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair” (p. 319). 

But Obama is also aware of the progress Africa has made, citing Uganda’s success with the AIDS pandemic, and the end of civil war in countries like Mozambique. He observes that “there are positive trends in Africa often hidden in the news of despair, while at the same time clinging to an Afropessimism that warns: “We should not expect to help Africa if Africa ultimately proves unwilling to help itself” (ibid.).

Obama is also able to go beyond the average politician in his candidness about the ravages brought on Indonesia and other parts of the world by the ideological juggernaut of US foreign policy. In a chapter titled “The World Beyond Our Borders,” Obama dwells on how Indonesians find it puzzling that “most Americans can’t locate Indonesia on a map,” given the role that US foreign policy has played in the fate of Indonesia “for the past 60 years” (p. 272). Providing a brief historical account of this role, Obama describes how the CIA provided “covert support to various insurgencies inside Indonesia, and cultivated close links with Indonesia’s military officers, many of whom had been trained in the United States” (p. 273). The military then went ahead and “began a massive purge of communists and their sympathizers,” leading somewhere between 500,000 and one million deaths, “with 750,000 others imprisoned or forced into exile” (ibid.).

Obama’s candor continues throughout the chapter, noting that “our record is mixed—not just in Indonesia but across the world” (p. 280). He calls American foreign policy “a jumble of warring impulses,” at times farsighted and serving the mutual interests of both the United States and other nations, and at other times making “for a more dangerous world” (ibid.). His take on Iran ought to be enlightening in light of the current saber-rattling and familiar drum beat toward another a possible military strike: “Occasionally, U.S. covert operations would engineer the removal of democratically elected leaders in countries like Iran—with seismic repercussions that haunt us to this day” (p. 286). 

Yet Obama is no dogmatic ideologue, finding himself “in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview” in debates with friends on the left. He charges that progressives were eager to indict US complicity in the brutalities that took place in Chile, yet were less so in criticizing oppression in the communist bloc. Nor was he persuaded that US corporations and global trade “were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people” (p. 289).

Needless to say, such candor is as rare amongst US politicians as is knowledge of what US foreign policy has been up to around the world, in the general populace, according to several writers and thinkers, including John Perkins, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Carl Mirra, Stephen Hiatt, amongst others. Many of these thinkers have also pointed out how while some Third World leaders are indeed corrupt, Western multinational corporations, backed by a deliberate, strategic foreign policy, create the very infrastructure that facilitates the corruption, and are actually corrupt themselves. 

According to Perkins, Hiatt, Patrick Bond, John Christiansen, Amit Basole, Leonce Ndikumana, James Boyce, among others, this is done through debt ensnaring, off-shore tax havens, trade mispricing, and dubious advice from the IMF and the World Bank, whose complicity with foreign policy and multinational corporate interests has led to trillions of dollars being emptied out of Third World countries and poured into Western economies. This is the corruption and the looting of the Third World that has best been captured by John Perkins’ term “corporatocracy” in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Stephen Hiatt’s 2007 edited collection of essays, A Game As Old As Empire shows how pervasive the nexus of economic hitmen has become, and how closely aligned the system is between foreign policy and corporate interests.

In the final analysis, the significance of an Obama presidency for Pan-Africa and the Third World will lie less in what Barack Obama may or may not be able to do for people of African descent than in the symbolic message that his ascendancy to the most powerful office in the world will do in changing black people’s perceptions of who they are in the world, and how others view them. That has been the underlying, implicit cause of the renewed hope in what has been said by the Kenyans, the Malawians, the South Africans, the Nigerians, Caribbean commentators, and in fact every one else around the world who has joined in the celebration. 

While the office of the US presidency may limit Obama’s actual impact on Pan-Africa and the Third World, as Dr. Mutua warns, the symbolic importance of the achievement is what has the potential to go much further in offering a paradigm shift in the self-perception of a people whose destiny, according to Frantz Fanon, represents the possibility to refashion a new vision for the world, one beyond the limits set by European rationality and the consequences, both good and bad, that the Third World has reaped there from.

For that to happen, Obama’s own notion of what race and racism still mean in today’s America and how some minorities are overcoming it could shine some light on the path this transformation might take. Obama devotes a chapter in The Audacity of Hope to the topic of race, in which he offers both a stinging and sensitive portrayal of the bane of America’s ethnic identity, as well as the prospects of what can be achieved in breaking down racial barriers. Obama’s philosophy of race indicts residual and institutional racism, but also celebrates white people and black people alike who are able to overcome the vice and chart a new path for society. Those lessons ought to apply not only to America, but to the rest of the world as well, in the apt description of the global face of Obama’s extended family as a miniature portrait of the world:

“As the child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and a niece of Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe” (p. 231).

Beneath Obama’s rebuke of Jeremiah Wright: Is a new global consciousness afoot?

When I learned that the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright was going to give a speech at Michigan State University on February 7^th, I spread the word to friends and colleagues I knew would love to hear Barack Obama’s pastor speak. Of the half dozen or so people I mentioned his name to, none of them had heard of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, let alone his spiritual connection to Barack Obama. I prepared a question to ask Rev. Dr. Wright, but as it turned out, I did not need to ask the question. Such was the freestyle nature of the luncheon with Rev. Dr. Wright that the topic came up on its own. Rev. Wright said one of his grand daughters came home from school one afternoon and immediately asked: “Grandpa, you and Barack cool?” To which the reverend responded, “Me and Barack cool.”

The grand daughter had overheard conversations at school in which media reports were said to have described a parting of ways between Obama and Rev. Dr. Wright. In fact the question I had prepared for Rev. Dr. Wright had been prompted by a March 6^th 2007 New York Times report in which Barack Obama had reportedly picked up the phone and disinvited Rev. Dr. Wright from Obama’s February 10^th 2007 launch of his presidential campaign. Obama was said to have told Rev. Dr. Wright that it would be advisable if he were not to show up at the launch.

The hue and cry that arose from the mainstream corporate media’s attention on the sermons of Rev. Dr. Wright appears to have died down, and the same media has reported that Obama appears to have weathered the storm with his ship more or less intact. But Obama’s campaign also carries hopes and aspirations about the image of Pan-Africa, aspirations captured in Paul Tiyambe Zeleza’s February 21^st article on The Zeleza Post. Thus almost a month after Obama’s public denunciation of Rev. Dr. Wright, it might be time to ask whether the challenge that Obama threw to the American populace about a frank discourse on race has been taken up or not. In denouncing his former pastor in the realpolitik terms he did, Obama was forced to sacrifice a part of his intellectual ideology in order to curry favor with a mainstream white America hell bent on turning a deaf ear to black America’s narratives. In so doing, Obama confirmed fears about the political compromises a black candidate is forced to make in America’s presidential politics, compromises that pit a viable black presidential candidate at odds with the aspirations of Pan-Africa and the Third World.

That Obama had to make the denunciations he did also characterizes the stubborn refusal in mainstream white America to engage with the painful discourse on the repercussions of US foreign policy, an exercise described as curiously absent especially amongst US peace educators, in a new book by Carl Mirra, a former marine and First Gulf War veteran, now associate professor at Adelphi University in New York. As we learn from Bill Fletcher Jr.’s and Manning Marable’s recent speeches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in the African American PeaceMakers as Agents For Change series, mainstream white America’s refusal to engage with the painful aspects of US foreign policy goes back to the days of African American peace leaders such as WEB DuBois, through to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Further to that, the whole episode of the anger expressed against Rev. Dr. Wright also puts the spotlight on the schizophrenic contradiction between America’s perfunctory commemorations of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s activism versus the excoriation of Rev. Dr. Wright, both of whose views have been critical of US policy and practice at home and abroad.

The March 6^th 2007 NYT report had seemed credible to me, seeing how Obama was shirking any talk of race and black people’s issues in the campaign. It was also disappointing; a sad, sobering parting of ways with a man Obama describes in such a profound, touching way in his autobiography Dreams from my Father. It was a confirmation of how to become a credible black presidential candidate with the majority white voters in American, one has to make a break with the facts and truths of the majority of black Americans’ perspectives of their lives in America.

But in his luncheon talk at Michigan State on February 7^th 2008, Dr. Wright said the New York Times report was a misrepresentation, and that everything was alright between him and Obama’s campaign. He went as far as saying until four months previously, as recent as October 2007, he did not believe mainstream America could embrace Obama’s candidacy the way it had happened in Iowa and other white majority states. He said the success of the Obama campaign was making him believe that the current generation of young Americans possessed a quality he was not aware of, and he realized that he was from a generation that may not have moved on the way young Americans, of all races, had. He said going by the support Obama was garnering amongst white college students, he was very hopeful for the future of the country.

On one hand, the speech Obama gave in Philadelphia on race in America makes one wonder whether Rev. Dr. Wright was always aware of what Obama really thought about the pastor’s views on race in America, and US foreign policy. On the other hand, one is left unsure as to whether Obama always found his pastor’s views on race and US foreign policy as “offensive” as he put it in his speech, or if he was indeed toeing a line a black presidential candidate in America needs to toe in order to become viable. Nothing in Obama’s Dreams from my Father suggests any slightest whiff of the latter position, leading one to wonder the extent to which a black presidential candidate in the United States has to go walking the tight rope of denouncing “radical blacks” while acknowledging the existence of racism in America.

The more authentic parts of Obama’s speech would appear to be the exhortations he made about the need for mainstream America to make the effort to understand the reality of life for black Americans. Said Obama: “. . . the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed.” He added, in a rare moment that marked a remarkable coming to terms with an issue he had hitherto put great effort into avoiding, at least on the campaign trail, that the concerns of black people in America needed to be addressed in a real way. His frankness on this was refreshing, inasfar as this campaign. “But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

But Obama still had to appear to keep standing on mainstream ground so as to appeal to the white majority votes he can not do without. And he seized the opportunity to tell the truth about the indicators that demonstrate the depth of the experience of black America: wealth and income gap between black and white; concentrated pockets of poverty in urban and rural communities; a lack of economic opportunity among black men; the lack of basic services in urban black neighborhoods. Starkly missing was the stunning statistic that there are about 900,000 African Americans in prison, while there about 600,000 in college, figures presented by Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr. in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s PBS TV series African American Lives.

The reaction to Obama’s speech was unprecedented. Getting online on the evening of March 20^th from Dowa district in Malawi, I read in a New York Times article that the speech was being discussed in university classrooms across the United States, and churches were spreading word that the speech would be the subject of Easter Sunday sermons. Among the numerous listservs that I subscribe to and participate in, four were actively discussing the speech, including one on which matters of race are normally not talked about. Suddenly, it appeared as if this was the first time that white Americans were being told that black Americans do have a legitimate concern with historical and contemporary racism. That this is exactly what Obama’s pastor, Rev. Dr. Wright, has been saying for years was made even more obscure by Obama’s politically strategic disowning and criticism of Rev. Wright, even as he urged an appreciation of where the pastor’s anger and that of many blacks came from.

But unlike the discussion on the four listservs, which was earnest and eager in accepting Obama’s exhortation, the mainstream media has been obsessed with relegating Pastor Dr. Wright to the fringes of incoherent radicalism. In the days following the speech, with the exception of the New York Times which demonstrated some rare open-mindedness, the mainstream corporate media revealed a deep-seated denial of the existence of the anger that Obama acknowledged. Instead, some in the mainstream media sought to further isolate Rev. Dr. Wright and paint him as a rabid radical who could only be touched with a nine foot pole. The attempt was to marginalize Dr. Wright as unrepresentative of any constituent of American society, expressing amazement that Obama associated with him for a whole twenty years. Such sentiments came from the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ward writing in the print edition of the Financial Times of London (March 22/23), Daniel Nasaw and Ewen MacAskill in the print edition of The Guardian of London (March 22), and an editorial in the Europe print edition of The Wall Street Journal (March 20-24).

The Guardian article reported that white voters in Pennsylvania and North Carolina were deserting Obama in the aftermath of the Pastor-gate issue, with one poll showing Hillary Clinton leading at 56 percent to Obama’s 30 percent in Pennsylvania, and 43 to 42 percent in North Carolina (p. 7). Two respondents interviewed in Philadelphia were quoted as saying by not leaving Rev. Dr. Wright’s church for another one, Obama shared his pastor’s opinions. It took an African American respondent to put a reality check to the gravy train, pointing out that it was only white America that found Pastor’s Wright’s anger new, “but these things happened to us” (ibid.). If white people felt uncomfortable with the pastor’s sermons, said the respondent, well, black people have felt uncomfortable for centuries in America. That punch line, left unqualified, ought to have pricked at the conscience of those in the mainstream who get alarmed when they hear a minority perspective they have always been shielded from.

Tim Wise expressed it sharply and squarely in an article originally published in Lip Magazine, and widely distributed on various websites. Wise, a deeply thoughtful and prolific anti-racist campaigner, exposed the inaccuracies involved in the claims that Dr. Wright said America deserved the 9/11 attacks, and that blacks should sing ‘God Damn America.’ Wise systematically and categorically laid a litany of the truths of black Americans’ lives that many white Americans refuse to hear about. Wrote Wise:

We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it.

Amongst his examples, Wise mentioned white people’s shock when Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall refused to celebrate the 1987 bi-centennial of the constitution, arguing that most of those two hundred years had been years of “overt racism and injustice.” Wise also wrote about the disbelief amongst whites that a racist white police officer could frame a black man; white people’s shock upon learning that most black people viewed the US as a racist nation; white people getting “stunned to the point of paralysis when they learn the truth about lynchings in this country,” among numerous other “shocks.”

Thus it was that many white people (not all) were shocked to hear what Rev. Dr. Wright had to say about racism in America, to the point of expecting Obama to publicly disown him.

So what can we say about a nation that values lies more than it loves truth? A place where adherence to sincerely believed and internalized fictions allows one to rise to the highest offices in the land, and to earn the respect of millions, while a willingness to challenge those fictions and offer a more accurate counter-narrative earns one nothing but contempt, derision, indeed outright hatred?

Wise’s exhortation to his fellow white Americans will most likely go unheeded, as he himself is probably written off as being on the fringes of radicalism as well. But his understanding of black America and its place in American society is as intimate as it is passionate. His choice not to excoriate Obama for his rebuke of Rev. Dr. Wright signifies the depth of that understanding. The question that persists for Obama now is what remains of his Pan-African identity, an identity he profoundly craved and beautifully constructed in his former life before politics. Clearly, the Obama who wrote Dreams from my Father is a much more authentic, deeply feeling, rigorously reflective intellectual, a far cry from the Obama campaigning to become president of the United States of America.

Despite the pretensions of the presidential campaign, Obama knows who he is, probably more so than many people in this world, a truism expressed by the New York Times columnist David Brooks on the PBS Jim Lehrer News Hour program earlier this year. Not only is Obama an exceptionally gifted writer, he is a very brilliant individual, a globally conscious intellectual, and, going by his 1995 autobiography, a Pan-Africanist, Third Worldist, and global cosmopolitan at heart.

For starters, Dreams from my Father is about 450 pages long, spanning his early days in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, ending with his long-sought reunion with his fatherland in Kenya. The book was published in 1995 when Obama was 34 years old. Obama was in Kenya for only three months, the summer before his entry into Harvard Law School, yet out of those 450 pages, his three months in Kenya occupy about 155 pages, a whopping one third of the book! He went to Harvard University, where he probably spent no less than four years, yet his Harvard days warrant a pitiful two sentences, buried inside a nine-line paragraph (p. 437).

The most persuasive evidence about Obama’s global Pan-African identity can be found in what he writes about his three months in Kenya. On arrival at Kenyatta International Airport, the very first time that he lands on African soil, he immediately develops a powerful sense that he has arrived home, a home he has spent a lifetime searching for. His bag has not arrived with him, and he asks about what to do. A Kenyan woman, donning a British Airways uniform, notes the name on the form he has filled out, and asks if he is by any chance related to Dr. Obama. Obama responds: “He was my father.” That recognition of his name was the moment he had spent his conscious life hitherto longing for. He writes:

That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A., or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people’s memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, ‘Oh, you are so and so’s son.’ No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand.

More than a Pan-Africanist, Obama also carries sharp Third World instincts, aware of and in tune with the global solidarity that unites peoples of the world colonized and exploited by Europe and America. This is in evidence when a week or so later after his arrival in Kenya, he encounters the tensions that exist between black Africans and Kenyans of Asian origin. His cousin Auma calls him naive for imagining that everything is well between the two groups, reminiscing about his close friends from India and Pakistan in the United States, “who had supported black causes. . .” (p. 347). Obama muses, “My simple formulas for Third World solidarity had little application in Kenya. Here, persons of Indian extraction were like the Chinese in Indonesia, the Koreans in the South Side of Chicago, outsiders who knew how to trade and kept to themselves, working the margins of the racial caste system, more visible and so more vulnerable to resentment. It was nobody’s fault necessarily. It was a matter of history, an unfortunate fact of life” (p. 347-8).

Indeed, as Vijay Prashad reminds us in his recent book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (2006), there used to be such a thing as a Third World project, which alongside other anti-imperialist projects such as Pan-Africanism, were part of the struggles that effectively ended political colonization around the world. Obama is fully conversant with this history, but is forced to avoid it for purposes of his presidential bid.

These then are the burdens thrust upon a black presidential aspirant in the United States, burdens few would happily shoulder. Obama appears to have the capacity to shoulder these burdens, although he must pretend to represent a parting of ways with such expectations. It is a balancing act tough enough to tire out the most seasoned athlete. For some, this parting of ways warrants little more than subdued ambivalence that an Obama presidency would do anything for black America, Pan-Africa and the Third World. For others, the demands of realpolitik require that Obama plays as close to mainstream white America as possible, including his public views on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Regardless of the true reasons for which Obama publically rebuked Rev. Dr. Wright, Obama’s candidacy does indeed represent something new in not just American politics, but also in the global discourse on race and identity. And Obama seems to be aware of this much more than perhaps many of those supporting his candidacy. It is in that awareness that hopes arise for a fundamental shift in global racial consciousness and the future of America’s place in it.