adminJohn Nagenda
People are sometimes said to be afraid of their own shadows, not a pretty state! But it makes it easier to understand those who quail at the shadows of their ancestors: who, however close, are at least a step farther away.
Melancholic as it would be for president Barack Obama to be afraid of his own shadow, big as that is in his position as the single most important human on earth, by the same token it would be worrisome if he were frightened of association with his ancestors. Or, to put it another way: his ancestry.
In 1965, I travelled all over the United States on a contract from Life magazine. It had somehow entered my mind to find out what the relationships in America were between Africans and American Negroes, as the latter were then called.
The quest would almost certainly never have happened had I never set foot in that country. One had heard of these black folk of course, as an American sub-group of little importance, and once or twice of Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) who had obviously risen above the common heard to merit personal recognition. But consider this: of lack activists like Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), an escaped slave before blossoming into a notable writer and leader (in some pictures looking remarkably like our own Wole Soyinka), of W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), we were never told.
Du Bois had presciently written: “ . . . the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the colour line” and indeed famously fell out with Booker T on how to solve it.
Washington favoured a more cautious approach where the blacks were subservient to their White masters, but industrious and with some (but not competing) education. Du Bois had no patience with this.
In many ways this foretold, a century later, the relationship between Martin Luther King (1929-1968) and Malcolm X (1925-1965): one seemingly slower, the other faster. But both died before middle age, assassinated. I arrived in New York and saw Negroes, spoke to some and even ventured into Harlem, at that time a big area in New York inhabited by “people of colour” (therein law a wholly unintended compliment, by implication meaning that non-Blacks were utterly colourless, insipid).
By the end of the trip, some spent in the Deep South, I had found out who I really was — for the first time —and how close I was to those I was studying.
In 1967, my article that came out in Race journal in Britain. I had failed to make Life’s deadline because the political strife back home in Uganda had blocked my writing capacities. If you peruse my website www.onemansweek.com, you can see the result in the left-hand corner.
Others came to radically different conclusions; for example James Baldwin, the Black author of the then stormy The Fire Next Time polemic, went to Ghana and felt not a tremor of recognition with its people; his loss in my view. How different from Du Bois, who moved to Ghana, aged 93, took its citizenship and died there a couple of years later: the work of his long life done. Back to president Barack Hussein Obama.
His mother, to whom he was very close and with whom he lived in different parts of the world, was white, mostly of English stock. His father was Black. They hardly lived together as a family, except for the first seven months of Barack Jr’s birth.
He next saw his father when he was 10, when the father came to visit for about a month and then returned to his native Kenya, where in 1982, he died in a motor accident.
Nevertheless usage rules and white. Does he feel black? Years later president Jimmy Carter, 39th to Obama’s 44th as US president, told him: “there is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president . . . I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man that he’s African-American.”
Interestingly, Obama did not appear to agree with Carter’s line on racism, although probably of his race, as described above, 99 percent would have sided with Carter. In fairness to Obama, the strongest of the problems facing him as US president at any one time is not necessarily race. But neither was Carter limiting it to racism.
Obama is the president of all the United States, including the recalcitrant Republican Party (the GOP). That Party has sunk to new levels where everything brought up by the Democratic Party and its leader, Obama, must be torpedoed, hopefully ensuring the GOP’s return to power.
However, this unpatriotic GOP behaviour might bring about the reverse, ordinary American voters are becoming increasingly weary with Tea Party negativism and the Republicans having decided to wear many of its garments.
It is a case of the tail wagging the dog. By a strange twist of history, most Black Americans now favour the Democratic Party: in the time of the original Black activists they preferred the Republicans: an interesting subject for another day.
Race is still one of the most divisive issues in the world today, as when Du Bois mentioned it. It still divides, perhaps more subtly, how nations behave towards each other. — New African.
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