To Obama, we owe the debt of helping others believe in their dreams

US author Paul Beatty, whose book, The Sellout, about a slave-owning black man, won the Man Booker Prize last year. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • Martin Luther King Junior may have had a dream. Generally, dreams tend to remain just that, dreams. However, Obama challenged traditions; he scaled walls that had appeared insurmountable before; he bet and won big; he got millions of people in the world to almost find the answer to one of the great questions of the 20th Century.
  • Just as it is a question that Obama had to answer, and will still be answering in the next instalment of his memoirs, the narrator of The Sellout spends most of the time in the story telling us the background to his predicament. And what is his dilemma?
  • Obama was right when, in his last address to Americans, he said that individuals need to “remain engaged” even when forces that wish to erase all the gains against discrimination and injustice are on the rise.

History appears to love irony. Or how does one explain that Barrack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother, a symbol of what multi-culturalism is for millions of people in the world, is handing over power to a man who officially questioned his American identity?

How ironic that even though he was forced to publicly confirm that his birth certificate is American, even in his last address to Americans, Obama remained magnanimous to detractors, among whom Donald Trump ranks high up? Did Obama become wiser as the hair on his head grew greyer? Or is he just being economical with words in public? Or is Obama, perchance, a sellout, as some people have suggested?

In the coming years, there will be acres of newspaper pages and books written about the Obama legacy. We haven’t even started thinking, leave alone debating, what the Obama presidency has meant and will mean for future generations of Kenyans.

Who would have imagined even at the beginning of the 21st century that the son of an African, Kenyan, student would be nominated by the Democratic Party – the party of slave-holders – to gun for the presidency of America?

Martin Luther King Junior may have had a dream. Generally, dreams tend to remain just that, dreams.

However, Obama challenged traditions; he scaled walls that had appeared insurmountable before; he bet and won big; he got millions of people in the world to almost find the answer to one of the great questions of the 20th Century; what W.E.B Du Bois described thus, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the colour line, the question of how far differences of race — which show themselves chiefly in the colour of skin and the texture of the hair — will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilisation.”

As Paul Beatty’s satirical tale in The Sellout (the Man Booker Prize for Literature winner 2016) reminds us, Obama barely scratched the surface of that conundrum. This satirical novel joins a long list of Americans writing on the question of race and its implications for people with black skin. As comical as it is, often the comedy is too dark, too serious and too troubling. African-Americans, Black Americans, Negroes, people of colour, non-whites — whatever description you have for people deemed not to have enough Caucasian blood flowing through their veins — continue to have to answer to the question, “Where are you from?”

Where you are from is about your identity. In other words, it is about what language you speak or how you speak it; what you eat and how you eat it; how you dance or what you dance to; who you love and how you do it; where you went to school or what you learnt there; who do you live or fraternise with; who do you vote for and why. Just as it is a question that Obama had to answer, and will still be answering in the next instalment of his memoirs, the narrator of The Sellout spends most of the time in the story telling us the background to his predicament. And what is his dilemma?

REMAIN ENGAGED

Well, he is accused of keeping a slave. Owning a slave in 21st Century America? Yes, that is the charge against our tragic hero, a man who tries to retain the traditions of his community by insisting on continuing to stay and work on a farm, right in the city. As far as he is concerned, “…since when did a little slavery and segregation ever hurt anybody …?”

For his act, a man who claims to never have committed any of the several transgressions, indiscretions, acts of misjudgment or sins that are generally associated with black American men, he appears in the Supreme Court of America to answer to the charge of holding another man a slave (the ‘slave’ in the story volunteered to be enslaved, by the way).

Weaving tale after comical tale of the narrator’s attempts to reclaim the identity of his neighborhood, city, community, people and race, Beatty reintroduces the old questions that believers in and followers of multi-culturalism, liberalism and globalisation have eschewed. So, instead of acknowledging differences (racial, ethnic, class or religious) where they exist, tolerance is promoted. But people can only tolerate to a certain degree; they are too lazy to find out about and understand the cultures and lives of others.

What about the claims of the so-called global citizens that the later years of the 20th century into the 21st century carried in their wake a ‘post-racial momentum’ or that we now live in a world in which national borders are not important?

Obama was right when, in his last address to Americans, he said that individuals need to “remain engaged” even when forces that wish to erase all the gains against discrimination and injustice are on the rise. Indeed, more effort will be needed to turn back the tide of racism and anti-immigration in America and Europe. There is no doubt that new ways of thinking about and responding to the question of racial, ethnic, economic or religious differences have to be formulated.

So, for instance, here at home, we have to think harder about how we deal with the question of ethnic supremacy claimed by politicians who in the same breath can’t tolerate people from communities other than their own. We have to seriously ask why it took so long to recognise the Makonde in Kenya as Kenyans; or why Asian/Indian-Kenyans are requesting to be recognised officially as a community; or why Muslims continue to cry that the State discriminates against them.

Or why many Kenyans claim that they have suffered historical injustices. These are questions that the triumph of Trump and the kind of thinking he represents, the success of Brexit, global financial uncertainties, and increasing political instability in Africa, make very urgent for Kenyans and Africans.

PURSUIT OF DREAMS

Ironically, Obama leaves power in America at a time when African-Americans probably feel more fearful than they have been in a long time. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement is both a testimony to the power and intransigence of racism but is also a legacy of a man who, through sheer personal effort, has demonstrated that where there is a will there is a way, if you allow the cliché.

The ‘Yes We Can’ call may not have turned out to be wholly so, for in Obama’s way were just too many obstacles. In fact, there are too many people who think that he “sold out” to the bankers and political influence peddlers in Washington. Many think that he never delivered the peace that he had promised during his first presidential campaign. Some people in the Muslim world may not wish to hear or pronounce his middle name, Hussein, for the horror of Syria, the tragedy of Iraq and the scar that is Guantanamo prison, are reminders that the dream didn’t come true in every respect.

However, if the son of K’Ogello is a sellout, if Barrack Hussein Obama betrayed many of his fans, could it be because many of us are implicated in not pursuing the dreams that he stood for.

We may stand accused in not celebrating the symbolism of a man who was audacious enough to hope that for a moment Americans would remove the blinkers of racial lenses and elect him to the highest office in their land. Many of us fall short too for holding onto our prejudices that still lock out of public office or jobs women, the youth, the disabled or people from other communities, just because of their identity.

Obama represented what was possible if we all start to see the human in the other instead of just “an other”. What his legacy stands for is a matter of personal interpretation, in different places, at different times and for different reasons. For now, the pessimism of the narrator of The Sellout at the end of the narrative is worth holding onto: We still owe too many people a debt; the debt of them realising their dreams too.