The second relay occurred after the Civil War when the freed slaves struggled to overcome prejudice and persecution. One black leader stood boldly against discrimination with an inseminating movement – the Negro Improvement and Conservation Association (UNIA) - that developed black nationalism and black pride. He was Marcus Garvey (1887 – 1940). [Garvey was the guiding spirit behind the Black Star motif in the Ghana flag, Ghana’s soccer team, and the now defunct Black Star Shipping Line established by Nkrumah after Ghana’s independence in 1957.]
The third relay began in the 1960s, with a strong civil rights movement that forged ahead in two divergent directions: Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s civil disobedience, and Malcolm X’s militant posture.
A fourth relay can now be claimed, from 2009, in the advent of Barack Obama’s inauguration as the 44th president of the United States. Obama traverses the dark groves (what he termed “the barracuda silences”) in America’s racial history, the open wounds of slavery and colonialism, the self-perpetuating bondage of the victim, and then, suddenly, the major racial shift in the mindset with the discovery that Yes, we can be, and are all free, after all.
Obama and W.E.B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963) share unique landmarks. Du Bois was the first “Negro” PhD graduate from Harvard; and Obama - the first African American President of the Harvard Law Review. Du Bois’s assertion, at the tender age of 28 years, was that “ignorance was the cause of racial prejudice and that scientific truth could dispel it.” That notion incited his doctoral dissertation “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade” at Harvard, in 1896. Events as they unravelled got him to change his mind.
In 1903, he came out with “The Souls of Black Folk” asserting that “truth” alone did not “encourage [or] help social reform”. The theme fixed that moment in history as the period of enlightenment where American Negroes began to see their proper roles in the bigger world, and rebuff the idea that the world belonged to one suppressive race only. Said DuBois, “By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men”.
Soon after these words were printed, the famous Niagara Movement was formed, to grow into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): “for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy, and for reasonable and persistent attempts to gain these rights and realize these ideals.”
By 1910, DuBois had assumed the editorship of the Crisis paper, as the intellectual wing of the newly formed NAACP. So, during a quarter of a century, the Crisis espoused racial consciousness and pride, pacifism, and integration. Additionally, the Pan-African themes in the Crisis opposed colonialism, violence in the colonies, and economic exploitation by the imperial powers.
The renowned and innovative scholar marked his life by an unwavering pursuit of freedom and justice for all, and supplied the intellectual firepower for black liberation ever since his glorious youth. Today, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research continued to bubble as a major intellectual arm of Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
That DuBois opted to naturalize as a Ghanaian and live and die in Ghana was no accident of fate. Nkrumah shared a vision with the grand old man, and when he relocated, at the ripest age of 91, Ghanaians and the Osagyefo embraced him warmly as an indigenous father of all Africans and the diaspora.
It was quite revealing that Obama’s historic visit to Ghana coincided with the 100th anniversary of Kwame Nkrumah’s birth - September 21, 2009. Equally telling is the unanimous resolution passed at the 13th Ordinary Summit of African Union in Libya to celebrate Nkrumah’s centenary ahead of the Obama visit. The linkages are extraordinary; and it all feels like a brand, new day. The time seemed to jive with Obama’s own recall of William Faulkner - the American novelist awarded a Nobel Prize in 1949 - that the past is never dead and buried; it isn’t even past.
The life of Nkrumah is modern Africa’s history. He was the battle hardened mover and shaker and the cornerstone on which the continent’s future depended. African and Pan-African issues were his issues. No matter what lightnings flashed, he knew exactly where he stood with every thunder that jolted any part of the continent. You would not think that he came from a small, poor village, Nkroful. Universal as his attraction has been, he is best understood and prized through particulars, and they are too many to recount.
Be they Algerian nationalism, the French government’s testing of the atomic bomb in the Sahara, the pawning of Africa in the East – West cold wars, apartheid in South Africa, support for the frontline states (Namibia, Mozambique, Angola, etc), Patrice Lumumba’s murder during the Katanga impasse in the Congo, the (North and South) Rhodesian debacles, support for African freedom fighters, the African union, the Ghana-Guinea-Mali coalition, civil rights struggles in America, the Non-Aligned Movement: one man stood astride the cross fires, undaunted, steadfast, without a stagger, without fear.
Every bone in his body radiated a contempt for the absurd principle which asserted the superiority of the European and hence the nerve to hold the African in bondage. His heart filled with an equal measure of disgust for the acquiescing local elites – the petit-bourgeoisie - that fanned this oddity.
His university education and experiences in America (in the racially explosive 1930s and 1940s of Jim Crow laws) exposed him to hardcore white racism, slavery on the plantations, and the strange fruits of lynchings of Negroes in the American south. Returning home to the Gold Coast, he saw another heart of darkness in the poverty and misery of the African masses – amid a weird potpourri of colonialism, fiefdoms, and local elite.
Tom Mboya, the brilliant African loyalist whose promising life was cut short in Kenya, reiterated in 1963: “in Ghana it was ‘Free-dom,’ in East Africa it is ‘Uhuru’ and in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland ‘Kwacha’ (the dawn)”: all in the full glare of “one goal” – one united Africa.
Africa’s freedom was not earned with striped suits, and cherries in crystal platters as some local elites tend to think. The struggle was deadly! In the hands of his collective imperial and native foes, Lumumba, for one, suffered a slow, barbarous, torturous death. Steve Biko and countless others were beaten to death or hanged in apartheid prisons. The defiant Mau Mau freedom fighters were hunted down from the East African hills. Jomo Kenyatta brandished his “burning spear” defying a ruthless imperial army.
The celebration of Ghana’s independence in 1957 sported the presence and deep emotions of the likes of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, Richard Wright; and equally telling, the then vice-president of the U.S. Richard M. Nixon.
Nkrumah’s unwavering sense of mission continued to define Ghana, and inspire Africa and the diaspora in the 21st century. This is the Africa that welcomes Obama into our midst. We’ve come a long, long way. And it is refreshing that Obama, in his autobiography, acknowledged Nelson Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Gamel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta (the Burning Spear), Tom Mboya, and Odinga Odinga. Were there an index to “Dreams from my Father”, the reader - at a glance - will have access to the historic personalities who enthused this legend of our times.
The Obama list will serve as a collective tribute to conscientious freedom fighters and personalities, and a prelude to the 44th U.S. President’s historic visit by to Ghana (the cradle of Africa’s liberation struggles) from July 10, 2009.
They say there are those who are born great, those who have greatness thrust upon them, and those who achieve greatness. However way they are sliced, both Obama’s autobiography and the keynote address heralded the great things to come from this enigmatic man, wise beyond his years, to join in this great enterprise as did our fathers before us.
Their lives are our collective lives. They represent “the who is who” of the freedom struggles of the black race emanating in Pan-Africanism - and in both our colonial experiences culminating in the independence of Ghana, March 6, 1957, and in the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 led by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hear Obama: “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, Dubois and Mandela.” This perhaps settled the central explanation of the man. Welcome home.
A natural mystic blows in the air (as the legendary Bob Marley sang it) when writing about Du Bois, Nkrumah, and Obama. They won the relays in their respective tracks for the world at large. Today, we merely hold on to the strings of the larger tapestry they wove. How refreshing it is that Obama’s not here in Africa to trade suspicions about reductions in nuclear stockpiles, and MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). We meet as dear hearted brothers with malice towards none, but with the absolute need to elevate this giant continent of ours in education, green agriculture, good governance, one clean planet, security from drugs, and peace for all. America’s successes in these areas are our successes too.
The best minds have always been those capable of intelligently farming hidden, and unimagined landscapes. It is sobering to approach greatness with humility, by knowing that life itself is a mystery, as is the source of great leadership. For this new century, Obama’s image soars like a halo. And who knows what the end will hold? I remember talking with an African American don of Theology at Harvard University on June 4, 2009, the day of Obama’s Cairo speech: “And to think this is just the beginning,” he quipped assuredly.
Some say that history does not repeat itself: it merely recycles the same personality types. If we are lucky, we get those who fight for freedom and enlightenment. They do so in their various strengths, to undo the pain that others, in their devious devices, have set in train: hence our resolve to cherish our nobler souls, for now and ever more. Obama, Akwaaba to the motherland.
Anis Haffar’s email: gateinstitute@yahoo.com
Website: www.gateinstitute.org |
