THE BARACK OBAMA PHENOMENON: MEANING & IMPLICATIONS OF HIS EMERGENCE FOR AFRICA AND THE WORLD AT LARGE

By Dr. Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo

Leader and Presidential Candidate of the People’s Mandate Party (PMP), Chancellor, Eastern Mandate Union (EMU), Chairman Fourth Dimension Publishers, and Author of “Nigeria: Political Transition & the Future of Democracy”, “Nigeria: The Stolen Billions”, “Nigerians As Outsiders”,

The African Possibility in the Global Power Struggle, etc  

1. Backgroud to the Obama Phenomenon:

 There is no doubt that the United States of America is witnessing one of the most dramatic and intriguing presidential elections in modern times. This is even more so in the context of the emergence of Barack Obama as the presidential candidate of the Democrats. I want to state here that Barack Obama’s emergence is not accidental as some people are wont to write him off as a flash in the pan. Rather his emergence is the culmination of centuries-old struggle by the blacks in America, who in the first instance became American citizens by forceful induction as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

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Therefore, Barack Obama’s towering figure in the political equation of the USA is the product of a people’s determined struggle for about six centuries to overcome man-made historical impediments, notably slavery, racism, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism and their new variants and also the necessity to validate the black world's contributions to what black luminaries like Martin Luther King Jnr., Elijah Mohammed of the Nation of Islam fame, Farrakhan, Bob Seal, Angelo Davies, George Padmore, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, W.E.B Dubois, Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Léopold Sédar Senghor and even Nelson Mandela have described as the “renaissance of the African persona and psyche". This imperative of rehabilitating the black race and relocating it within the context of world civilization has taken such various routes as nationalist struggles, revolts, civil rights activism in America, Pan-Africanism, Négritude, decolonization, liberation struggles/wars, and the anti-apartheid struggle. While some of these routes of black emancipation may be largely academic, some were indeed praxilic, while some others were a combination of academic and praxis. What actually united these various struggles was the ability of the apostles to raise their struggle across global black communities.

The major shortcoming of these various struggles became very obvious at the point of independence at which point there was a crisis of identity and the politics of the new nation-states. It was not surprising therefore that the emergent African States soon fell into deep problems thus preventing it from maintaining unimpeded transnational affiliation and identification with the Africans in the Diaspora, as other people, which were organized around race and history. The nation-state, for instance, instituted an order of localized identities which was incompatible with the unifying impulses of a transcendental black world outlook. For example, pan-African nationalists of the pre-independence era increasingly became Ghanaian, Nigerian, or Kenyan nationalists as national narratives emerged. The postcolonial irrationalities of the African state, which considerably weakened its national identity and created room for the reinforcement of ethnic identities, did not help matters. The pressures of localization in the arena of identity had the principal consequence of undermining the seamless world outlook of black memory and history. In this context, Countee Cullens's "What is Africa to Me?", a question that the generation of W.E.B du Bois answered very unambiguously by projecting Africa as a romanticized ancestral home became, for subsequent generations of African Americans, the guilty location of greedy, venal, and inhuman ancestors who "sold our ancestors" to slavery. The romanticized Guinée of the Indigénistes, depicted so poignantly in Euzhan Palcy's film, Sugar Cane Alley, became, for subsequent generations of Caribbean blacks, an absurd collection of rickety nation-states whose sorry fortunes in the modern world make continental Africans look like subjects evolving into a Hobbesian universe.

These conditions inaugurated an order of conceptual de-linking from the idea of a black world outlook in ways so radical as to render the relationship between Africa and her Diaspora fractious at best. It is only in such invidious conditions that Paul Gilroy's project in The Black Atlantic could have had the resonance it had in the Academy. The book's subterranean ideology seems to be the idea of a black Diasporic world devoid of its roots in Africa. Paul Gilroy's logic is also implicitly at work in some of August Wilson's plays, where the idea of African American roots seems only traceable to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean - the mythical City of Bones - and not beyond. With Wilson and Gilroy, black history seems to start in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Alex Haley's Kunta Kinte for example, is advised not to look beyond the Middle Passage for his roots! But these are only the positive dimensions of the conceptual split in black world outlook.

Against this background, the emergence and rise of Barack Obama is arguably the single most important incident for the transcendence of this split and the resurgence of a new kind of black world outlook in the 21st century. This is basically so because Obama has become both the subject and sign. As the sign, Obama signifies the inauguration of the moment of a transnational black consciousness not necessarily anchored on contested memories and histories but on new, hitherto unimaginable possibilities and directions in the black race. Within the schemes of globalization and transnational capitalism, where subject-hood is increasingly determined by the dialectics of mutually assured connectivity, it is significant that the iconic sign around which a new global black consciousness has begun to coalesce is an ontological summary of the orders of the moment: black but biracial; at once African and African American; Westerner but Other; Christian born by a Moslem father; American with marginalized childhood localizations in Hawaii and Indonesia; elitist but rooted in the plebeian lore of Chicago's South Side.

The various trajectories of this sign, the mass appeal of its movement, its constantly unfolding dimensions, are what make it so apt a metaphor for the readiness of a race that has been despised and excluded for so many centuries to stake a decisive claim to the White House. The emergence of the Obama sign is situated upon the rallying cry - yes we as blacks can. Beyond its immediate function as a stimulating chant for campaign rallies lies a deeper implication in black aesthetics. Watching Obama declaim the yes-we-can chant in the frenzied cadence of black southern pulpit performance is to be in presence of the choric, antiphonal call-and-response morphology of black oral performance, especially in Africa. "No, you can't!" has, for five centuries, been the life-force of modernity's negation of black agency. The Obama sign offers a choric, antiphonal negation of an original negation. And the consequences here have been formidable, unlike past attempts by the black world to negate the negation. Over a century ago, one black man, W.E.B Dubois, posited that race would be the dominant question of the 20th century. In "yes we can!” another black man opens the first decade of the 21 st century with a dominant affirmation of possibilities. The historical significance of this sign explains why Obama-the-subject's pragmatic and politically necessary post-racial discourse and mien in the United States has cut no ice with his audiences in Africa and the black Diasporic world. These audiences are awed by Obama, the sign, as the site of a new black world outlook and a new black consciousness. And, for them, that sign is unapologetically black. It is not post-racial. It needs not be. The distinction between sign and subject is a crucial one to keep in mind in order to be able to engage the Obama phenomenon adequately. Recognition of this crucial distinction is what defines the responsibilities of the black intellectual as an interpreter of the Obama moment.

Let me make a crucial point here. I am aware that some black intellectuals have, pitiably, waved away, as wishful thinking, the impending Obama presidency in the USA. Such persons are quick to allude to the unapologetic nature of the white man’s aversion to the black race as a people incapable of cultivating higher values. And having been so completely fixated on this mindset, these so-called neo-liberal black intellectuals have consequently enunciated and championed such racial-based based typification and stereo-type which are ostensibly impressive academically but which generally confirm the omnipotence of the whites, but which, by and large, fail to dent the fact that “yes, we Africans can do it if given the right environment and leadership. I have no tolerant threshold or sympathy for sanctimonious claims to intellectual objectivity or non-partisanship by those who have failed, tragically, as I have explained above, in their duties as interpreters of black man's historical opening act in the 21 st century. Only the most absurd understanding of the nature of interplay of social and historical forces would blind anyone to the fact that intellectual enunciation and non-partisanship in the emergence of Obama is a kindergarten oxymoron. This clarification is essential as I attempt to shed some light on what a good number of African and black Diasporic intellectuals who chose to deride the Obama surge for vain glorification. As the Obama drama unfolded, the international media was awash with the demeaning insinuations of renowned African Americans who would not support Obama. Some African-Americans, especially Nigerian-Americans, were particularly hypocritical, weeping louder than the bereaved in their disavowal of Obama. They offered unsolicited explanations and rationalizations of their political choices even as it became obvious that Obama was on the high way to winning the Democratic nomination en-route to the White House.

What stood out in their submissions was the dubious assumption that their non-support for Barack Obama was evidence of:

• Their newly acquired sophistication as superior human beings who have transcended race as opposed to the black/African supporters of Obama who, in their estimation, are still slaves to the congenital trajectories of race and ethnicity;
• Their sophisticated status as objective, unbiased, non-partisan intellectuals, insofar as non-partisan is read as non-identification with their racial kind.

As they pushed these positions, they almost always concentrated on the individualized proclivities of politics and choice. They tragically misread the 2008 Democratic primaries as a mere political contest between two candidates. For these people I think it was a bad time to take a leave of clear understanding of political forces and from critical understanding of history and its processes. It was also a bad time to fail to see the obvious fact that one of the candidates had become subject and sign. They failed to see that what galvanized people from Nigeria, Kenya to South Africa and the black world was the sign and not the subject. In their histrionic quest to perform their subject-hood as post-modern African- American and American-African citizens of the United States who, unlike the rest of us, are above race, they failed to see that Obama-the-subject has little to do with, and absolutely no control over Obama-the-sign. Above all, they failed to understand the historicity of the sign. This sign is history, not politics. Whether Obama eventually becomes the first black President of the United States or not is a mute point. What is important is the historical moment and order, which the sign he unleashed has inaugurated for the black race. And the black intellectual is called upon to be the first interpreter of that moment.

2. The Emergence of Barack Obama

The excitement that followed Senator Barack Obama's emergence in the Democratic Party primaries in early June 2008 as the party's nominee in the presidential elections in November is now giving way to serious reflection on what his nomination and a possible Obama presidency might mean for the United States, the Pan-African world, and the world at large. There is little question that Senator Obama's campaign has been electrifying in its audacity and implications.

The historic appeal of Senator Obama's candidacy can be attributed to complex social forces in America's contemporary domestic and international political economies; not least the America’s complete exhaustion following eight years of the George W. Bush administration, perhaps the most eventful and controversial in American history. The Bush presidency has bankrupted the USA at home and diminished it abroad, left its economy in recessionary tatters and its international reputation terribly battered.

Driving the Obama phenomenon are other complicated dynamics, including generational, racial, gender, and class shifts in the ecology of American society and politics. Some of these forces are easily discernible, others barely perceptible, representing long-term and conjectural trends including the possible collapse of the Republican coalition and supremacy over political and policy discourse in America's post-civil rights and post-Cold War realignments. The Bush presidency has severely devalued Republican currency as the custodians of national security, moral values, and economic management.

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Structural forces cannot of course be the sole explanations. There is also the organizational prowess of the Obama campaign, combining old-fashioned grassroots community organizing, hard-ball party politicking, and digital mobilization into an electoral juggernaut that vanquished the indomitable Clinton machine. In this equation, we must add Obama's own complex biography, which taps into four narratives of historic and contemporary American political discourses. In other words, Obama's biography, as he himself states in The Audacity of Hope, serves "as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."

There is the son of a Kenyan father, the Obama of the migrant narrative, deeply etched in the myth of the American dream for non-black Americans. There is the self-declared black man married to a black woman, the Obama of the African-American narrative of longstanding oppression and marginalization. There is the person born in Hawaii and partly raised in Indonesia with a multicultural family on several continents, the Obama of the transnational narrative that America's cosmopolitan classes aspire to for their despised country. Then there is the son of a white woman, the Obama of the biracial narrative for those who dream of a post-racial America. Each Obama appeals to different constituencies at home and abroad: Africans and African-Americans seeking redress, biracials in search of recognition, whites desperate for redemption, and the rest of the world looking for respite from America's imperial arrogance and violence. "As such," Obama writes, "I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them." That has already started to happen as he is forced to spell out specific positions on the thorny issues facing America's domestic and foreign policy from the Iraq war to the price of gas.

We shall always see Obama as the signified and signifier of black citizenship and world outlook. The symbolic and substantive implications of his candidacy, the power of hope and the limits of structural change his presidency would represent, the quintessential Americanness of this eloquent, audacious and most gifted of politicians and the anxious Pan-African expectations pinned on him are all great expectations from a waiting world and especially Africa. But even while we are celebrating the historic achievement and possibilities that Obama's candidacy implies, there is need for caution against investing a possible Obama presidency with the illusions of transformational power.

For all the excitement generated by his candidacy, Obama is not a radical figure by any stretch of the political imagination. He is beholden more to capital than labor, to the elites than the poor, to neo-liberalism than social democracy, to American hegemony than global disarmament, to American supremacy than Pan-African solidarity. In fact, as far as the Pan-African world is concerned, it is remarkable how little he has spoken about Africa, the Caribbean and other countries with large African Diaspora populations.

Obama's Africa, as outlined in his book The Audacity of Hope, and on his campaign website, is the conventional pathological Africa of disease, poverty, corruption, dictatorships, and war that plunges him "into cynicism and despair," until he is reminded that charity, western philanthropy, not trade and partnership, can go a long way to help this benighted continent of his father. If Senator Obama is to develop a more progressive policy towards Africa and the African Diaspora at large including those in his own country who have helped catapult him to the dizzying heights of American politics that no African American has ever reached, we have to hold him accountable by keeping vigilant and offering critical support and principled criticism.

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