World is waiting for the story of black man in White House

Barack Obama’s eight-year tour of duty at the White House has come to an end, leaving many people across the world — and Kenya in particular — debating what his tenure meant for them and the world.

Personally, I expect that as he settles into retirement, Obama will give us a memoir in which he will reflect on his years in the White House. Perhaps, he will then share with us motives of his omissions and commissions to help us make sense of his seeming helplessness in the wake of the Syrian war, the refugee crisis and the extravagant use of drones in the Arab world that led to the needless deaths of thousands of people, some innocent, in his war on terror.

Perhaps he will also explain to us what Africa meant to him when he was president. Africa’s struggles with democracies, the return of authoritarianism, the subversion of electoral processes, and his seemingly innocent decision to mute his middle name remain subjects of discussion in rating his presidency.

For Black people who are conscious of their blackness in a white dominated world, Obama’s departure from the White House invites us to reflect on the symbolism of his presidency in the historical and cultural sense and, for those so inclined, the spiritual too. 

“For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers” (1 Chronicles 29:15). This verse, the epigraph in Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father, condenses potent meaning for Obama’s tenure at the White House, and possibly the people of colour in America who are treated as strangers in almost the same way their forebears were. 

I TOO SING AMERICA

That many African-Americans in America live in the fringes of their country remains a troubling fact even to Obama who, in the twilight of his term, was confronted by a moral dilemma of whether or not to read racism in the seemingly race-motivated brutality of white police officers against black men.

The mass protests in 2016 led by the Black Lives Matter movement were an eerie reminder of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr, another Black American religio-political and moral leader, asked African-Americans to dream big, as Barack Obama did decades later, and appealed to the wider American nation to integrate more and blur the racial divide.

Of course, King’s dream was a continuation of a tradition of literary intellectual activism that is traceable to the self-educated Frederick Douglass and, later, poets like Jamaican-born Claude MacKay, whose poem “America” best captures the plight of the African-American now and, perhaps, the future.

By 1921, MacKay’s poetry expressed his love for and loyalty to America. “Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,” – the same bitterness that makes the Black Lives Matter Movement necessary nearly 100 years later – “stealing my breath of life” – as Michael Brown, Ronald Madison, Alton Sterling and many others who were wasted by White policemen cried out just before their deaths – Mackay also hinted at the imminent collapse of America.

“Darkly I gaze into the days ahead / And see [America’s] might and granite / wonders there/ Beneath the touch of Time’s / unerring hand / Like priceless treasures sinking / in the sand.”

It may not be time yet for America to “sink in the sand”, but it is facing an anxiety-ridden crisis of leadership. The post-Obama anxiety in America and beyond is compounded by the increasingly erratic mannerisms of his successor who, both on and off the campaign trail, threatens to negate many of the initiatives that Obama put in place during his two-term tenure, including the much-celebrated Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare.

It could have been different had Obama been succeeded by Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic Party nominations way back in 2008, who later agreed to serve as Obama’s Secretary of State and, later still, repeatedly invoked Obama’s name as she went on a circuit across America, campaigning to be President.    

Well, whether by actual democratic outcome or systemic tinkering by the Russian intelligence, as we have heard, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton lost, each in their own way, to the Twitter-wild Donald Trump, whose tenure begins at a time when the ideals of democracy and world peace are faced with the greatest threats of our times.

Obama’s personal loss could be seen in his strained smile as he hosted Trump at the White House a day after the latter’s victory became clear and intensified the feeling that, indeed, Obama had been only a sojourner in the White House, as had been many Black People before him in America.

I suggested earlier that Trump’s victory was a reclamation of the ultimate symbol of global power for the white male. The Black interlude in the White House was mocked by the bullish arrival of easily the least refined of white American presidents.

The enviable eloquence of Obama, tempered by the gracious elegance of Michelle and their daughters, have to give way to the snappy outbursts of Trump, who not only supports Brexit but also chastises Angela Merkel for providing temporary homes for refugees. Trump, in brief, has all the tell-tale signs of a white supremacist, and a beneficiary of right wing politics.

As Obama begins life as a former president, he recedes to the back-bench of a world that is increasingly straining the ideal of a global humanity, one that has progressively exposed the underbelly of free speech, democracy and globalisation – the personal values that he went round the world practising – casting them as merely lofty ideals that have been exploited by the political right to advance obnoxious ideologies.

WORLD PEACE

Not only do such ideologies threaten world peace and wider human interaction, in America at least, they immediately erode his legacy and cast Obama’s place in history as the president who was supposedly a mistake.

No fair judging person doubts that Obama was a great president, even though, if we think hard and look closely at his tenure, we shall surely find instances where he acquiesced rather easily to a long American tradition of self-serving insularity. His America-first policy, not always loudly pronounced, meant that he ignored, or did little to help address, some of the dominant problems of his time both within and beyond America.

The simmering tensions of race in America and elsewhere, about which he remained largely ambivalent, the pummelling of Aleppo by Bashar Al-Assad and his allies, the thieving of elections in Africa and the refugee crisis in Europe occasioned by rabid nationalism all over were problems that, I believe, Obama could have dealt with differently and firmly.

Perhaps, on Trump’s part, and despite his behaviour so far, he shall be contained by the bureaucrats around him and, like other Republicans before him, show more concern for Africa to ensure that the continent continues to rise economically, grows politically, and entrench the rule of law.

It is possible, indeed, that four years from now we shall be telling a narrative of Trump that is less laden with anxiety, and more with anecdotes of triumph for Blacks generally and Africans particularly. After all, Trump knows as any one does, that his “darker brother”, the African-American who is sent “to eat in the kitchen when company comes”, also sings America, as Langston Hughes so memorably captured in “I, Too”, a poem in his 1926 collection, The Weary Blues.