There are many for whom this election may just exemplify another reason why America is great and unique. But it is far more than that.

It is that a people choose consciously to be great and unique by such acts of renewal as is fundamentally reflected in the election, at a very critical juncture in American history, of a Black president.

Barrack Obama’s story is not simply the story of an American dream, but of the American possibility. But let me tell a little story before I return to Barrack Obama.

A few weeks ago I was sharing fine Malt Scotch, some Italian sausage Pizza and Buffalo wings with my colleague, Dr. Bob Mielke, professor of English at Truman State University, at the back of his rambling house. There were a few more of us. It was a slow evening with a bit of a chill.

So we lit a fire. We lathered stories, and talked about a great many things. And played Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. I had an out-of-body experience in that moment: Here I was, listening to these Americans sing Fela in perfect pidgin in a small university town in the middle of America.

This would have been impossible to imagine in 1961, the year Barrack Obama was born to a Kenyan father and an American mother. That story itself is the story of all of us.

Obama’s father came to the United States in 1960 through a scholarship secured by the nationalist politician and pan-Africanist, Tom Mboya, by his contacts in the United States.

These early surge of Africans through these programmes also saw many Nigerian students in that era coming to top American schools in search of education with which to man a post-colonial society.

It was in that period in 1960 at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu that Obama’s father, a Luo from Kenya, met his mother, Ann Dunham, a quiet but intellectually curious girl originally from Wichita, Kansas.

They got married in February 1961 and their son Barrack Obama, the younger, was born that August of 1961. It must have been unimaginably tough for these two students to raise a family, particularly given the circumstances of an immigrant Kenyan with an accent in a thoroughly segregated America with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X thundering in the background about change, about equality, about justice either peacefully or bloodily.

Obama’s father was offered admissions to New York University with full scholarship and Harvard with partial scholarship, and he chose to go to Harvard, noting that it would be an impossibly difficult choice for him to forego “a great education.”

Indeed he got his great education; a doctorate in Economics from Harvard, about the same time as our own Chu Okongwu, possibly was doing his own doctoral at Harvard; he was certainly in the same time as Charles Njoku was studying economics as an undergraduate at Harvard; about the same time that people like Chukwuma Azikiwe was at Harvard; about the same time as Ifeanyi Menkiti was studying philosophy at Harvard, or Chinweizu had arrived at the neighbouring Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study Mathematics, or even the Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah who had moved from Achimota to the Groton School, and then to Harvard.

Barrack Obama’s father certainly was not unlike many of those African students, his contemporaries in the heady 1960s, with a dream of Africa, to return and rebuild the continent following the independence movements that had led to the end of colonialism. Many did return certainly, and many were wasted.

Barrack Obama’s father returned to Kenya, a freshly minted Harvard doctorate in economics, in the year when his mentor Tom Mboya, then minister for economic development in Kenya was assassinated. Obama the elder, returned to an earlier marriage, and in the fullness of time to ruin in Kenya. His is the story of what Africa has done with itself and its talents.

He worked as an economist with the Ministry of Transport, but his increasingly forthright position on the Kenyan situation led to clashes with authority, and to the stifling of the career of this brilliant economist who died in poverty in the Kenya to which he returned.

This story is familiar: many of those who returned also to Nigeria were either destroyed, subdued, or ostracized because the dreams were far higher than the possibilities of renewal in these countries suffering from what Biodun Jeyifo has called an “arrested decolonization.”

In the event, nevertheless, Obama had sired a son in America, left behind with his mother, who soon also remarried, and moved to Indonesia with the child. And in time Barack Obama returned to his white grand parents in America from Jakarta, and began his journey towards his fortune.

In the conscious emergence of youth, in the tense, race-defined situation of America, suffering from the “double-consciousness” of many bi-racial children, Barrack Obama consciously chose to identify himself as essentially black. He made a symbolic first return to his fatherland, Kenya, in 1988 after graduating from Columbia and working briefly in Chicago.

His induction into his Luo family is fundamentally, it must now be seen, a process of reconciliation and reconnection with a sacred past; to enact the completion of the self following a quest, and following a sense in which the new president felt himself potentially inhabiting a black skin in a white mask. It was a search both for origin and for healing.
It was also at a crucial moment, in that period in which the World Bank and IMF induced panaceas had completely ruined Africa, and so Barrack Obama saw the poverty first hand, and the difference in circumstance between himself and his half brothers in Kenya.

He had worked among the poor in the notorious Chicago Southside. So he knew what poverty really looked like.

He returned to America, attended the Harvard Law School, where he was soon elected the first black president and editor-in-chief of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. It was from then that he came to the full attention of his mentors, and for those who know such matters, his recruitment to public life began. Barack Obama’s story is the story of an African child left by destiny in America to heal the wounds of history.

To renew the black race’s lost compact with God who has allowed this formidable race of people to suffer slavery, wars, disease, violence, ecological disaster, dispersal, because, perhaps there was a time in history when Africa once felt the pride of its own transcendence. It is significant that Barack comes from the seed of the Luo, one of the original of what we now know as Egypt.

Out of the union of this black seed and white womb, a new face of the world is emergent: it is the promise of harmony. The healing which America so terribly needs to erase the fear and the guilt of a violent slave heritage that led to segregation, fear, injustice, and anger.

It is a new day in America. It is one which my own children, the new faces of this America, will inherit and build upon.

Let me then sketch out the full implication of Barack Obama’s victory in America: it means this, that it is possible today for my son or my daughter to be president in America far more than it is for them to be president in Nigeria where ethnic hatred, fear, injustice, ignorance, and sheer cant prevents us from using our finest instincts to recruit our finest people into public service.

As a friend of mine in Texas said to me the night after the election, “this is the one reason why many of us in the Diaspora will never return, America offers home and security to our children.” That may indeed be so. But it is a sad truth, that those whom Africa drives away, and destroys, may be the salvation in other lands.

It is also important that African leaders begin to map a new way of relating with America, for now, their own son is the president of this great nation, and there must be something in it for Africa. Let us make Barrack Obama’s election a new day for Africa too.

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