Obama; between race and civilisation (By Prof. Ali A. Mazrui )

Reactions to Obama's win: Athens , Greece (The picture is unrelated to the article.

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Obama; between race and civilisation

Prof. Ali A. Mazrui

When Barack Obama assumes the Presidency of the United States in January 2009, he will become the most powerful Black man in the entire history of civilisation. None of the above emperors of ancient and medieval Africa can compare in global scale of governance or in military reach with the powers of the President of the United States in the twenty-first century.

It is also worth remembering that by becoming a Black Head of State of the most influential Western country, Obama will have set a precedent of upward Black political mobility not only for the United States but for other Western countries with white majorities. It is now conceivable that the world may one day witness a Black Prime Minister of Great Britain, or a Black President of France, or a Black Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. By breaking the glass ceiling against Black ascendancy in the United States, Obama has increased the probability of Black Heads of Government in other Western countries before the end of this twenty-first- century.

Nobody had anticipated that the first Black person to be elected President of the United States would be a first-generation African American: somebody whose parents were not African Americans. Since Obama’s father was a Kenyan and his mother was a white American, it took him a while to be accepted by other African Americans as ‘black enough.’

At a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade at the National Museum in Washington DC in January 2008, an African-American woman spoke passionately against the presidential candidacy of Obama on the grounds that he was not descended from survivors of the Middle Passage (the Atlantic crossing by slave-ships from West Africa to the Americas).

The majority of the audience at the conference was African-Americans. When my turn came to speak at the conference I referred to the days when white Americans regarded it as a mark of nobility to be descended from the passengers of the Mayflower in the seventeenth century. White Americans had once regarded ancestry from the Mayflower as the ultimate elite status for white folks.

I expressed at the conference in January 2008 the hope that African- Americans would not regard ancestry from a slave-ship as the ultimate elite status for Black folks. Rejecting Obama on the grounds that his father had not arrived in America on a slave- ship would be unnecessarily divisive and would risk conferring on slavery the quality of nobility.

The woman scholar was allowed by the Chairman to respond to me. She used the culture card in her reply rather than the ancestry card. She claimed that because Obama was brought up primarily by a white mother and white grandmother, he was not endowed with African-American culture. He was black in colour, but not in culture. The lady and I agreed to disagree, but I wondered at the time if her position on Obama was typical of African- Americans.

This concern of mine was deepened when I learnt that Ambassador Andrew Young, the distinguished African-American who had once served as US representative to the Untied Nations under President Jimmy Carter, had been heard to say at a party that former President Bill Clinton was ‘at least as black as Obama.’ The Clintons were very popular with African- Americans. Indeed, Toni Morrison, the African-American Nobel Laureate in Literature, had once described Clinton as ‘the first Black President of the United States.’

Genealogically, Clinton was not Black. Morrison was referring mainly to Clinton’s underprivileged family background and his remarkable empathy with Black folks. But those two qualities were abundantly shared by Obama who was brought up by a single parent and grew up in relatively underprivileged circumstances. He showed his desire to be accepted by the sacrifice he made for the Black community after graduating Magna Cum Laude from Harvard, and being elected the first Black President ever of the Harvard Law Review. He was virtually the top Harvard law graduate of his year in 1991. He could easily have obtained a job serving under a senior justice and inaugurated a spectacular legal career.

Instead Obama went to Chicago to serve in Black neighborhoods, organised and mobilised the underprivileged in pursuit of their rights and civil liberties. That is how he first got involved with the Pastor Jeremiah Wright, whose friendship nearly destroyed subsequently Obama’s bid for the US Presidency.

Prof. Mazrui teaches political science and African studies at State University New York