Oh What An Obama Day Today Is! By Cameron Duodu

When Barack Obama is inaugurated today, 20 January 2008, as the first black President of the United States, I would have seen 'everything' that should matter to a black man of my generation.

I saw Kwame Nkrumah declare that "Ghana, our beloved country, is free for ever" on 6 March 1957. He added that "The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the liberation of the whole African continent."

At the time, I doubted whether my feet would ever touch the soil of such white-dominated African countries as Kenya, the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola. To say nothing of South Africa, where the horrors of racist rule had reached its apogee.

But in my lifetime, all these countries have become free. Some have been ruled well, others, not so well. But that's not the point. As Nkrumah pointed out, their people had the right to "manage or mismanage" their own affairs. Indeed, colonialist Britain, France and Portugal, were particularly unsuited to declaring any country incapable of managing its own affairs, having, in the 20th century alone (forget about their early histories), so mismanaged their own affairs that they had caused two world wars which had respectively resulted in 16 million deaths (World War One) and 72 million deaths (World War Two), in the space of a mere two decades (1914-1918 and 1939-1945).

However, as I grew into maturity, history began to bring justice to those oppressed by European imperialism and racism inch by inch. To me, personally, it all began in 1962, when I was able to visit Kenya and talk to Jomo Kenyatta, who had been the world's most famous prisoner of colonialism, after being detained by the British for leading his country's revolt against colonialism. The British had demonised the Kenya revolution as the 'Mau Mau' uprising and had widely disseminated propaganda against Jomo Kenyatta as a 'Communist' and, in the words of one Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, a "leader unto darkness and unto death"! But I found him a gentle and kindly soul, who impressed me by calling on the attendants at the Kenya Parliament to come and dust our tables before we sat down to coffee. Eventually, the British realised their mistake and appointed him Kenya's first African Prime Minister on 1 June 1963. He became President on 12 December 1964 and promptly turned Kenya into a capitalist country ruled by a clique. So much for Kenyatta's 'communism'!

After Kenya, I was able to visit Southern Rhodesia, and grill the white Prime Minister of the Central African Federation, Sir Roy Welensky, on why he thought the Africans there were not fit to be allowed to rule themselves, when Ghanaians had proved, five whole years earlier, that they could govern themselves. My interview with Welensky, published in Drum Magazine, moved the head of President Nkrumah's office, Mr Michael Dei-Annang, to telephone me to congratulate me and remark that "it was like wringing water out of a stone."

But Welensky couldn't hold the Federation together on the basis of what he called "partnership" between white and black, but which the Africans deftly diagnosed as a "partnership between rider and horse". Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), led by Dr Kamuzu Banda (who had acquired his political craftsmanship whilst working as a doctor in Kumase, shortly after Ghana achieved its independence) was the first to wriggle out of Welensky's hands. It gained its independence on July 6, 1964. Northern Rhodesia, led by Kenneth Kaunda, (whom I was privileged to listen to at Flagstaff House in Accra) followed Malawi and gained independence in October 1964.

Southern Rhodesia alone, of the Federation's three component territories, remained in racist hands. When it looked as if it too would be allowed by the British to go the way of its northern former "partners", its white minority government unilaterally declared itself independent of Britain in November 1965. But its African population were having none of it and engaged the white minority in a guerrilla war. They fought the government of Ian Smith to the negotiating table, achieved victory at the negotiations and turned Southern Rhodesia into Zimbabwe on 18 April 1980.

This heroic victory over the whites is partly the reason why so many Africans continue to cut President Robert Mugabe a lot of slack, despite his undoubted flouting of the Zimbabwe constitution, which provides that the country should be a democratic state.

Unfortunately for Mr Mugabe, he has compounded his disrespect of the constitution with incompetence in running the economy to the ground, and he has lost a lot of sympathy even from among Africans like me, who enthusiastically supported his leadership during the guerrilla war.

Even before Zimbabwe became independent, two of the most important countries to be ruled by racists in Africa -- Mozambique and Angola -- had won their nationhood (Mozambique on 25 June 1975 and Angola on 11 November 1975.) So, after Zimbabwe, only South Africa remained under minority rule, as stubbornly racist as ever.

And then, against all expectations, it happened there too! On 11 February 1990, the racist authorities released the leader of South Africa's main liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC), Mr Nelson Mandela, whom they had incarcerated for twenty-seven years, from prison, and began negotiating with him and other ANC leaders. For a transfer of power from the minority government to the African majority,

So, finally, on an unforgettable day, 10 May 1994, I enjoyed the privilege of sitting among a crowd of heavyweight names from all over the world, in front of a dais at the Union Building, in Pretoria, to watch Nelson Mandela sworn in as the first black President of South Africa!

I cried buckets. Was I dreaming or seeing reality? WHAT?!! South Africa? I mean I just couldn't believebelievebelieve my own eyes. When it finally sank in, I gave thanks to God that like the Prophet Simeon in the Bible, he had allowed my eyes to see the 'final act' in the liberation of the black race. I came back to London still in an unbelieving daze, till I was brought down to earth by the reality of having to go and buy Ghanaian foodstuffs at to Peckham market. As soon as she saw me, the food seller said in excitement: "I saw you on CNN! At Nelson Mandela's swearing in!" Oh well, if CNN had said so, then it must have been true.

Little was I to know that the choicest morsel of the black political dish was being prepared for me in the United States of America. This is a country where institutional slavery of the black man had been replaced with a false emancipation, under which the black man, although nominally "free", was still subjected to all manner of racial discrimination and insults. Yet this country, despite being denounced regularly by a succession of black writers including James Baldwin, and fiery speakers such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm , hypocritically claimed to be the leader of "the free world".

Well, as 4th November 2008 merged seamlessly with 5th November 2008 in the early hours, the world simply stopped moving -- or so it seemed. Suddenly, the American TV stations carried by satellite, where "talking heads" had been boring the daylights out of their world audience, flashe3d across their screens: "BREAKING NEWS: OBAMA ELECTED."

I flick from one channel to the other, fearing that the one on which I had first seen the news flash might have made a mistake. But it wasn't a mistake. All the networks were saying it now and it was 100% clear that: A black man like me, fathered by a Kenyan, Barack Hussein Obama, had been elected President of the United States of America!

Say that again? What do I do? It is too early in the morning to shriek out an African yell. So I just scream inside my head! I scream and scream and scream.

Finally I go back to bed. But I toss to the right. And I toss to the left. I can't sleep. The reason? My whole body knows that the situation in the world has changed dramatically overnight. Every black person in the world can now hold his or her head high, anywhere in the world, and without saying a word, proclaim to all and sundry, "We are all truly equal." The crazy war in Iraq that had killed so many innocent men and women and children would end. The war in Afghanistan would also end.

It wouldn't matter whether an American was poor or rich -- he/she could be proud of his or her country again. There are also poor and rich people in the rest of the world. It would make no difference whether someone who loved Obama only lived in a 'developing country'. Because a developing country, Kenya, had played a part in giving America a President who, by his education and his demonstrated ability to unite people, could turn out to be one of the greatest Presidents ever, in American history.

Don't get me wrong -- it does matter a great deal that Obama should do great and good things and make everyone proud who prayed for him to win. But it doesn't matter even if he were -- perish the thought -- to fail. There have been bad white Presidents before him. Besides, success or failure in an American administration depends not on an individual, but upon a whole bunch of people selected to serve their country because their President believes that they too love their country as much as he does, and from whom he expects extremely hard work and enormous integrity. No individual can guarantee these qualities to come fully to fruition in an administration manned by human beings.

So, with those qualifying clauses in mind, please don't let anything come between you and the joy that you should be feeling today that Obama is being sworn in to become the 44th President of the United States. If you are disappointed by some of the appointments to his Cabinet, please remember that he is a politician and that politics being "the art of the possible", he must have cogent reasons for doing what he has done. Remember also that if he has been over-careful over the Israeli-Hamas issue, for instance, he has done so because not having yet been sworn in, he had to observe the protocol that "there is only one President of the US at a time" and that there are a host of neo-conservative people in the media, hoping he would fall into traps they have pre-laid for him, so that they can jump on his neck and undermine his government from day one.

No, a journey of a thousand miles, begins with one step. Yes, the world is looking up to Obama to solve the US economic crisis; to prevent the disaster affecting the world's climate from worsening; to lessen the differences between the rich and poor -- both amongst nations and amongst peoples.

But it can't be done with a magic wand. Obama needs your support and if he does something that you think he could have done in a better way, remember that this is the great age of communication. Do drop him a line. Someone will read it, and those in charge of the particular policy will be made aware of your view.

Yes -- when Obama said, "Yes we can!", he meant the "we" to include you. So make use of the opportunity. Yes --America has come back home to the rest of the world. And our own Obama is the one leading it there. So open your arms wide and welcome it home. Oh, what a ;lovely Obama Day today is. If I were an African President, I would declare "Obama Day" a national holiday. But I would wait a bit to see some of the things he does when he's fully in power, first!