Obama in Ghana: The Return of a Native Son

As expected, President Obama delivered a powerful speech in Accra yesterday, which was at once a sermon, a lecture, and a call to arms for Africa to take charge of its destiny, for Africans to assume full responsibility for their future. He presented it with his trademark eloquence and earnestness, combined with the rhetorical intimacy and tough love that he reserves for African American audiences.

"I have the blood of Africa within me, and my family's own story encompasses both the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story," he declared as he discussed Africa in concrete personal terms rather than abstract pathological ones. He boldly outlined Africa's ills and squarely laid their cure in African agency: "We must start from the simple premise that Africa's future is up to Africans." What would have been patronizing and provoked racialized anger coming from a Euroamerican leader was instead largely greeted with glee and cheers of approval.

Every so often he talked about his father and his generation. He was the returning dutiful son who sought to right the wrongs that derailed the dreams of his father's generation for true decolonization, democracy, and development. The audience understood, embracing him with eager affection. This is what allowed President Obama to talk to Ghana's parliamentarians and other dignitaries at the Accra International Conference Center and through it to the larger continent in a way that Africans often talk among themselves. It was as if he was entering a family conversation informed by his perspectives as a son of the diaspora.

Many Africans passionately discuss and heroically struggle daily to create strong and sustainable democratic governments that promote development capable of providing opportunity for more people, strengthening public health, and avoiding conflicts or seeking to end conflicts, the four themes of President Obama's address. The president indeed acknowledged and paid homage to these struggles and the aspirations for African peoples to realize the enduring and unfilled dreams of the liberation struggles of his father's generation.

But progressive African activists don't stop there: their trenchant critiques of the failings of postcolonial Africa are often accompanied by equally sharp appraisals of the unequal global system that has made the task of realizing the dreams of independence harder. This is not simply blaming colonialism, as the president said. Colonialism in Africa is no more an irrelevant relic of history as slavery and racial segregation are in the U.S. 

Those who urge Africans or African Americans to forget their histories of oppression and exploitation often do so because they don't want to face up to the culpability of their communities or countries in the continuing reproduction of inequalities at national and global levels. They are of course not averse to invoking history when it suits their purposes, especially when they seek to celebrate their eternal cultural or national superiority.

Africa's contemporary structural and institutional systems reflect complex intersections of the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, and the deformities of postcolonial political cultures. It is analytically difficult, even if it is politically tempting, to separate ‘internal' and ‘external' dynamics behind Africa's challenges and crises, for what often appears as ‘internal' already embodies the ‘external' and vice-versa.

This is not an argument for absolving Africa and its leaders of responsibility for the democratization and development of their countries. It is simply to call for an equally honest evaluation of the role the West including the United States have played in Africa not only during the slave and colonial pasts but continue to play now. The contemporry dynamics of African-Euroamerican relations continue to be conditioned and informed by the structures and ideologies bequeathed by those very unsavory histories.

Nowhere in the president's speech did he refer to the sordid records of the U.S. government and corporations in undermining democracy and development across Africa by supporting dictatorships and corruption. Unfortunately, old habits die hard for the U.S. is still supporting dictators who suit its strategic interests, for example in Ethiopia and Uganda, not to mention Egypt, which was ‘honored' with the president's first visit to Africa.

In the Cairo speech ‘democracy' was largely avoided as the president was preoccupied with weightier matters concrening the frayed civilizational relations between Islam and the West. But in the Cairo speech he at least acknowledged some of the U.S.'s misguided policies in the Muslim world including Iran. And, no less important, he reminded the world what it owes to Islamic civilization.

How many more progressive governments were overthrown in Africa with the connivance of the CIA beginning with Ghana's own first independent government under the indefatigable Pan-Africanist, Kwame Nkrumah, while the U.S. cavorted with dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko, not to mention apartheid South Africa? And there was no reminder in the president's speech of Africa's massive contributions to the world.

Incidentally, the fact that the president himself and the media presented the visit to Ghana as his first to ‘sub-Saharan Africa' is a testimony to the enduring power of colonial discourse itself. Indeed, the speech was largely framed in colonialist terms in so far as Africa was presented as the source of its own problems and the U.S. as the unproblematic partner for Africa's advancement. Given Africa's tragic history with Euroamerica, that is the language of patronage, not partnership.

This is not to question the brilliance of the speech or its resonance with Africans who indeed aspire to establishing democratic developmental states which provide greater opportunities for improved material and social and even moral lives. After all, that is what the struggles for the ‘first independence' in the 1950s and 1960s and for the ‘second independence' since the late 1980s have been all about.

There can be no question, as the President himself said in an interview before the trip, "I'm probably as knowledgeable about African history as anybody who's occupied my office. And I can give you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that were uneven emerging out of colonialism." He is also well versed about many other problems including the duplicities of tied aid: "One of the concerns that I have with our aid policy generally is that western consultants and administrative costs end up gobbling huge percentages of our aid overall."

But this is not about President Obama's personal understanding of African realities, which I believe are as good as one can find among the continent's leading intellectuals and politicians. Nor is this about President Obama's sincerety or likeability, both of which he has in abundance. It is about the policies of the U.S. government that he heads, whose record inspires caution, even suspicion, among many informed Africans.

I was quite moved by the story of President Obama's father whose career was derailed by tribalism in Kenya, and the fact that Kenya "which had a per capita economy larger than South Korea's when I was born, [has] been badly outpaced." But one could also point to millions of Africans who have had successful careers since independence or African countries that have outpaced some countries in Asia. Lest we forget there are still more poor people in Asia than in Africa.

I am sure many ordinary Africans and activists were thrilled to hear an inspiring American president, whose own story personifies the triumph of audacious hope, lend his support to their struggles for sustainable development and democracy notwithstanding the previous policies of his country's successive governments. His attack of venal leaders and autocracies despite the farce of periodic elections was certainly music to my ears.

But more critical observers may have been disappointed by the lack of concrete policy pronouncements signaling noticeable shifts in U.S.-Africa relations. He only made an oblique reference to the elephant in the room: the African Command which is widely opposed by governments and civil society groups across Africa because they know from bitter experience how militarization has undermined democratic governance.

Also, while the president stated categorically that he saw "Africa as a fundamental part of our interconnected world," which he sought to underscore by coming to Ghana immediately after his visits to Russia and the G8 summit instead of the obligatory end-of-term whistle political safaris of his predecessors seeking some adoration and respite from low approval ratings at home, there was not a peep about transforming the institutions of global economic and political governance from the World Bank and IMF to the United Nations Security Council which would bring Africa into world councils of power for its interests to be more fully articulated and represented.

Nor did the president say anything about debt-servicing to the disappointment of many. As one commentator had written in anticipation of the trip, "Obama should support the UN's call for a debt servicing moratorium using the US bankruptcy legislation as a guide... Secondly, there is a crying need for a structural solution. This should be in the form of an independent debt-arbitration panel operating under the auspices of the UN to mediate between debtors and creditors, rather the current system in which debtors are totally at the mercy of creditors. This is not only fair, but it is also necessary for a stable international system benefitting rich and poor alike."

The same writer also wished Obama would announce an overdue radical review of the eligibility criteria for the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the Millennium Challenge, which "discourages and undermines Africa's capacity to produce by imposing US intellectual property, imposing privatisation and insisting as a precondition that governments are not directly engaged in economic activities. It also discourages them from using industrial policies to move out of commodity dependence and by using technical assistance as a means to cajole governments to implement trade liberalisation policies which directly undermine the goal of diversifying their economies.... If Obama really does mean to promote value-added production in Africa he should indicate that the era of the extremes of economic ideology is over, that Africans are unlikely to ever break out of primary commodity production and joblessness without an active but balanced role of the state in investments, manufacturing and in enhancing their share of the value chain. Such a strategy already exists in Africa."

And for all the railing against corruption, the president was silent on tax-dodging and the practices of US corporations that perpetuate corruption. For example, earlier this year Halliburton was charged $559 million to settle a bribery case involving Nigeria. If the U.S. was serious about stopping tax-dodging and encouraging corporate transparency one estimates suggests this would put US$50 billion or more into the African economy annually. It cannot be overemphasized that corruption in Africa, a bane on development, is often facilitated by western corporations and oiled by western banks. Remember Africa's looted wealth sits in western not African banks and until the recent financial crisis which has forced western governments to tighten banking regulations they were happy hoarding such ill-gotten riches from the continent in the proverbial names of corporate freedom and banking secrecy.

But focusing on the speech itself misses the larger import of President Obama's visit. As one Ghanaian journalist cheekily noted, Egypt may have been Obama's first visit to Africa as president, but he didn't go there with his wife and children, so this was the real thing! Ghana was chosen for more than its democracy and development, for there are many other countries among the continent's 54 nations ahead of Ghana on both scores such as Botswana and South Africa. Some commentators even see the sinister hand of oil behind Obama's visit since Ghana is set to join the club of African oil exporters next year, and the U.S. is expected to get 25% of its oil from the continent by 2015. Strategic interests are always behind any American president's forays into foreign lands, but symbolic veneers are sometimes required.

Ghana combines two poignant symbols of some of the momentous events that the continent has experienced over the last few centuries: the slave trade and decolonization. Coastal Ghana was a major shipping center in the Atlantic slave trade and it became one of the first countries to get independence (Libya was the first in 1951). Added to this is the fact that Ghana is also an English-speaking nation, all of which have given the country a special place in the African American imagination. It is now home to thousands of repatriated African Americans.

Ghana's independence in 1957 electrified the Pan-African world. As President Obama reminded his audience, the power of Ghana's march to freedom inspired none other than the then "young preacher named Martin Luther King [who] traveled here, to Accra, to watch the Union Jack come down and the Ghanaian flag go up. This was before the march on Washington or the success of the civil rights movement in my country. Dr. King was asked how he felt while watching the birth of a nation. And he said: ‘It renews my conviction in the ultimate triumph of justice.'"

The parliamentarians and the multitudes beyond across the continent listened intently and excitedly, overwhelmed not necessarily by his message, which was quite predictable, but at the historical eloquence of his very presence as an African American president whose father went on the Kenyan Airlift program to study in the U.S. during the turbulent and euphoric days of decolonization only some fifty years ago, not as human cargo in the horrific days of the Atlantic slave trade centuries ago.

This partly explains Africa's Obamamania. He is celebrated with unadulterated joy because he is a member of the new diasporas, the millions of Africans who have migrated to the U.S. and around the world in recent decades, while he simultaneously connects them through his wife to the historic diasporas in the Americas descended from kidnapped, shackled men and women who went through the evil doors of no return at Cape Coast Castle and other slave forts along the West African coast.

The visit to Cape Coast Castle was the true highlight of the visit, an emotionally wrenching experience that rattled the ever cool President, reminding him and the world of the inhuman cruelties out of which the Atlantic diasporas were born, and the deep and painful bonds and memories that tie him, the son of a Kenyan migrant student, and his wife, Michelle, a descendant of the enslaved Africans, and their two daughters, Malia and Sasha, children who, he poignantly noted, are "descendants of Africans and African Americans."

This was a symbolic return of a native son with his spouse from the historic diaspora and two lovely children who are products of both. It is this story, the marriage of the new and historic diasporas, the connection between Africa and its diasporas, that enthralls, energizes, and empowers Africans on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

First Written July 12, 2009