allAfrica.com: Africa: Insight - Barack Obama As the Post Coldwar Dividend (Page 1 of 2)

Courtesy of Cold-War machinations, Barack Obama didn't grow up in the same conditions as black Americans and wasn't born in Africa either. Is he therefore, the right man for Africa and Black America? asks Abuja-based commentator on African Affairs OKELLO OCULI

US Democratic Party presidential candidate Barrack Obama is a post-Cold War dividend in several shades. His father was flown away from Kenya to participate in a silent war-game between the capitalist West, principally the US, and the communist East as lead by the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and The Peoples Republic of China in that order.

Barack Obama and his Kenyan grandmother. Photo/File

The Soviet Union's Vladimir Lenin, and later China's Foreign Affairs Minister Chou En-lai, had both waged an indirect war on Western colonial empires, their neo-imperial spheres of influence and Euro-American capitalism. Kenya was a prized piece of colonised space where Britain had used a combination of loud military violence to grab land from various communities in the hinterland of the Indian, and silent violence - through holding on to robbed lands and forcing former black landowners to rely on labour wages for their livelihood. Where force was not used, the British grabbed land through dubious treaties with mesmerised chiefs and kings whose territories were now "protected" by the grabber.

Then came the Second War in which Kenyans fought on the side of the British against the Japanese, who colonised huge chunks of South East Asia. Back to Kenya after the war, the soldiers preached the gospel that it was possible to fight the British and kick out settlers out of the fertile volcanic soils of Kenya.

In the early years of independence, Kenya found itself torn apart by rivalries between the greed of the British Empire (and its most famous former colony, the United States of America), on the one side, and the roaring of an angry Russian-Chinese communism on the other.

That geo-political situation rendered US President John F. Kennedy most receptive to a proposal by a Kenyan politician and trade unionist, Tom Mboya, to breed future friends for America in an independent Kenya, after 1963. The way to do it was by airlifting several hundred African - not Asian or white residents in Kenya - secondary school graduates to go and study for degrees in American universities.

It came to pass that under that scheme, Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama would study in the University of Hawaii where he met the white girl Ann Dunham (later to be known as later as Ann Sutoro) from Kansas State that he would marry and beget Barack Obama. Some African students tagged such adventures as "Uhuru revenge" presumably as reprisals against the rape of Africa's natural and human resources by European invaders. Uhuru is the Swahili word for political freedom from colonial dictatorship. It is a legacy which Obama could not share with African-Americans whose ancestors had been captured and exported to the Americas.

Obama's ancestors in Kenya might be accused of deporting the ancestors of current African-Americans, which has been invoked by some to claim that he is not black enough.

The transplantation of Obama's father to Hawaii was a show of diplomatic love by a white American ruling class that was also meant to weaken an emerging thrust by black American politicians (both by reformers like Martin Luther King and "communists" or radicals like W.E.B. Dubois and Malcolm X), who saw the emerging African nationalism of the 1960s, against white domination, as a new weapon to be used to break the yoke of racism on the necks of black people in America itself.

At the founding of the Organisation of African Unity, OAU (now AU), on May 25, 1963, Uganda's new Prime Minister, Milton Obote brutally rebuked John F. Kennedy for sounding like a friend of Africans while his government was oppressing black Americans. Subsequently, State Department officials would keep the cynical game of creating a diplomatic rift between Africa and African-America by ensuring that African visitors to the US were, as much as possible, kept away from visiting slums in major American cities or share-cropper rural slums in the southern States of the country. The anger, despair, desperate poverty, drugs and alcohol addiction in the "black ghettos" did not make good diplomatic tourist sites for visitors from newly independent Africa. Now, this would explain why echoes of the social distance, built over the decades, resonate in doubts about Obama not being a typical part of the historical experience of African-Americans.

Hospitality measures like attaching African students in white American universities to white families who regularly entertained them as guests in their homes during weekends and during holidays became the norm.

Ironically, the scholarships were not available to black Americans.

This engineering of social relations also served to amass clouds of ignorance that covered the visibility of US racism, which was similar to apartheid South Africa's, the two colonial Rhodesias (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), Angola, Mozambique, Malawi and Namibia.

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