Uncle Jesse’s Wistful Tears of Anticlimactic Regret on the Cusp of the Obama Presidency - Part 6

It was the same “Hot-Mic” pickup of the Continental African Factor in Barack Obama’s parentage or, more appropriately, fatherhood that caused Harvard University’s Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to suppose that he had the license to cavalierly instruct the then recently elected President Barack Hussein Obama on the imperative need or necessity to tell Postslavery Reparation-Seeking Continental African Leaders to literally zip up such importunate and peevish demand, on grounds that it was the very ancestors of these African leaders themselves who, in retrospect, rather unwisely and self-destructively collaborated with the European and the latter’s European-American kinsmen and clansfolk to massively and wantonly enslave, exploit and thoroughly dehumanize their own people.

For the rabidly anti-African Professor Gates, the mere fact of the accident of then President Obama’s absentee father’s Kenyan nationality and ethnic identity as a Continental African, automatically and unimpeachably authorized the younger Mr. Obama with the requisite knowledge and scholarship to kill off the long-raging heretical debate on the question of the justifiable disbursement of a Post-Jewish Holocaust type of fiscal reparations, in pretty much the same manner as was determined by the United States and its Western-European Allies in the aftermath of World War II and levied on a roundly defeated Post-Hitler Germany and periodically remitted to the newly created State of Israel and its leadership and people.

The rancid and the unspeakable absurdity of such noetic Gatesian proposition, originally contained in an opinion tirade titled “Ending the Slavery Blame Game” that appeared in the New York Times’ edition of April 22, 2010, inhered in the author’s scandalous disregard of the fact that short of any convincing existing data that rendered the participation of Continental African Leaders any egregiously damning than the very well-known collaborative involvement and the active participation of a remarkable mass of German Jewry in the Nazi Genocide against the latter group of humans, obviously made the call by the Piedmont, West Virginia, native at once untenably blasphemous and heretical.

Now, Dear Reader, just precisely when did the mere racial identity or the ethnicity and the nationality of one’s absentee parent become an epistemic claim to scholastic authority on the foregoing subject? And on the latter note must also be significantly added that at the time that Professor Gates made the afore-referenced remark, the “DNA-cocktailing” self-proclaimed half-Irish and half-African-descended rabidly Anti-Continental African critic was widely known to married to an American-White Woman of Jewish heritage by whom he had also fathered two daughters. We highlight this fact because it is widely and indelibly on both Biblical and general historical record that just like their Continental African kinsfolk, some Jews sold some of their own brethren or kinsfolk to the Ancient Egyptian Arabs and other foreign slave traders at the time being historically referenced herein. And on the latter count, of course, the reference is squarely and specifically to the globally renowned Story of Joseph, son of the Biblical Jacob.

And yet, absolutely nowhere in any of his considerable corpus of writings has anybody that this writer knows or is familiar with, including himself, of course, come across any page or chapter of a book or an essay authored by the man who once offered the New York State University Community College where Yours Truly taught for nearly three decades, the humongous sum of $5-million (USD), to summarily expel the present author from its staff, in 2005. because he had dared to vehemently challenge the scholastic accuracy and integrity of Professor Gates’ hatchet documentary spoof on Continental African History comically titled “Wonders of the African World,” a multimillion-dollar BBC-TV and PBS-TV cosponsored project that was ostensibly intended to silence the Postslavery Continental African Reparations Campaigners once and for all.

In sum, as already hinted above, not once has the widely acclaimed authority on African American Studies been known or heard pooh-poohing the centuries old annual “Melodramatic and Mournful Celebration” of the purported Jewish enslavement in Ancient Egypt. Somehow, though, for the Yale and Cambridge, UK, trained scholar, it is only Continental Africans who deserve to be strictly and squarely held contemptibly accountable for 400 years of the Transatlantic Merchandising and the Chattel Enslavement of African Humanity in the Americas, in particular hereabouts in the United States of America, where this latter species of Global Humanity constituted a critical mass of the seminal creators of the greatest and the most powerful Civilization and Mega-Nation in the Modern World.

On the latter often ignored subject must be significantly and emphatically added that at the close or the conclusion of the American Civil War and the official declaration of the Emancipation of the hitherto Chattel-Enslaved African Americans in the United States of America, in 1865, approximately 20-to-25-percent of the total population of the United States was composed of Continental African-descended Heritage and Culture (See Lerone Bennett, Jr’s “Before The Mayflower” [1962 and any of the subsequent editions of the latter classic tome]).

Now, we highlight the preceding demographic data in response to those Make America Great Again (MAGA) latter-day Nationalists who so cavalierly and quixotically suppose that the foundations of this “Great” massive geographical and geopolitical entity has always been predominantly lilywhite. We are here, of course, referring to the so-called Replacement Theorists. You see, if any group of bona fide American citizens deserves to be inveighing against its systematic and precipitous numerical reduction as a strategic means of ultimate and thorough erasure, it is definitely African Americans, and not the Johnny-Just-Come-Lately second and third-generation “Neo-Fascistas.” We are also here, of course, alluding to the evidently and pathologically self-befuddled Donald Trumps and the Marco Rubios of our time.

Perhaps he would have been more truthful and accurate with his anti-immigration argument, if the current US Secretary-of-State had critically underscored for the benefit of his audience at the recent Munich Conference on Global Security, that it was the massive influx of Hispanics/Latinx like his own Cuban-originated parents that caused the seismic and the precipitous decline in the population of the real and the original Pre-MAGA, MAGA Builders of These United States of America.

At any rate, after having spent a remarkably extensive segment of his 9-hour travesty of an HDTV documentary titled “Wonders of the African World,” actually the Gatesian world of Continental African Degradation, literally blaming Precolonial Traditional Ghanaian Rulers for the bulk of the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and labeling nearly all the Akan States as “Slave Kingdoms,” the latter-day DNA-cocktailing and revisionist history-concocting Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recently discovered that there was absolutely no genetic fiber or material in his body that linked the 40-percent ethnic White American septuagenarian to the erstwhile Briish Colony of the Gold Coast. Instead, the genome of the “Distinguished” Harvard University Professor of the Humanities pointed the West Virginia native further east to Nigeria, which contains approximately half of the entire population of the West African Subregion, and which Professor Gates completely ignored during the shooting of his documentary on grounds that the reigning junta regime, led by the late General Sani Abacha, at the time had “White-Listed” (lol) Professor Gates’ longtime mentor and Nobel Literature Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka.

Which is why lately, I have been wondering whether Professor Gates will decide to travel to a Post-Abacha and constitutionally democratic Nigeria to correctively complete the bulk of his deliberately omitted coverage of the West African Subregion, now that the political environment and the climate of Africa’s most populous nation has significantly changed for the better, so as to give his seriously and significantly shortchanged audiences the lowdown on how his Yoruba or whachamacallits kinsmen got his forebears bundled up and callously chucked into the fetid and feccally perfumed slave ships on the sandy beaches of Lagos and Port Harcourt to where Professor Gates and his “godforsaken” relatives find themselves presently. And by the way: Any apologies for Ghana in works, Big Brother Skippy? I am, of course, not holding my breath, though.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]