How Obama Wept In Ghana
Air Force One has carried President Barack Obama and his family out of the skies of Ghana back to Washington, after a whirlwind visit to the first sub-Saharan country he has gone to since he became the first black President of the USA.
He received tremendous cheers from Ghanaians when, in a speech to Ghana’s Parliament, he acknowledged that yes, the blood of a Kenyan runs in his veins.
But I suspect that in the private apartment he and Michelle Obama shared on board Air Force One. the President would have noticed that; despite their bravery, something other than cheer was present in the psyche of his in his wife and two daughters.
Their unhappiness, not too difficult to decipher, was captured in a photograph which shows a grimfaced Obama with his arms around his eldest daughter, as they emerged from Cape Coast castle.
Why did he take them inside the castle? It is a whited sepulcher that does justice to Christ’s depiction of hypocrisy and true evil.
In there, the President and his family would have undergone the indescribable trauma of having to imagine what conditions were like on the spot where they stood, for millions of African-Americans, who were chained together in the dungeons of the castle - sometimes made to sit in their own excreta, the women washed and raped – before being shipped across the cruel sea, from Ghana to North America and the Caribbean, on a journey that took them into chattel slavery.
A chattel slavery that condemned them to endless labour, planting and harvesting cotton, tobacco, sugar and other crops, on plantations that yielded the wealth upon which the West’s prosperity and industrial might was built.
I am told by one of the Ghanaians who organized the trip for the Obamas that “in the dungeon, the tears of the President of the United States were flowing freely, Michelle Obama just broke down.
I figured the experience had taken her to the lowest point a human being can reach. The kids were asking many questions and registering the answers with shock.
It was a terribly distressing emotional moment for all of them.”
In truth, the slave trade was the most inhuman trade ever carried out in the history of mankind.
And it went on day after day after day for almost 300 years.
Of course, history written by westerners does acknowledge it (even if briefly} as The Atlantic Slave Trade.
But published accounts by freed slaves, such as that by Olaudo Equiano and slave-ship crewmen, such as Robert Barker, show that it was so horrible that descriptions of it were by Europeans, was either muted or suppressed..
In Cape Coast castle, everything that was bestial The Atlantic Slave Trade comes together – there is a door there labeled
“The door of No Return’, which was the slaves’ last exit from Africa.
From the forests of the African interior and the savannah, men and women who had once been the most unfettered creatures on earth, in both body and mind, were carted off to a perilous journey of no return.
At least a quarter of their number perished at sea, dying through disease and hunger, and being gifted to the fishes of the sea.
Personally, even before I heard an eyewitness account of the Obamas” experience, I just could not see how Mrs Obama, a descendant of a couple of the surviving slaves, could stand in that Door of No Return and look into it to the wide cruel sea that ate up millions of her ancestors, without needing to suppress an outflow of tears.
Roberta Flack, the African American singer; broke down at a similar moment in 1974, while touring a castle in Ghana during the shooting in Ghana of the film, Soul to Soul.
Her song, “Freedom” attests to her distress.
President Obama is reported to have said that he took the kids there because he wanted them to learn that sometimes the world could be “very cruel”, and certainly, one can’t fault him for that.
But before going to Cape Coast, he was rather dismissive, in speech to Ghana’s Parliamentarians, of the historic processes of economic manipulation of Africa by the West, that have brought Africa to this pass, He dwelt mainly on the need for good governance and the elimination of corruption – all very relevant indeed but hardly anything new.
Ghanaians and Africans, he continued, should stop blaming colonialism and get to work to build up democracy and economic strength for themselves.
Democracy wasn’t oppression “sprinkled with an election now and then”, he said. What happened “in between elections was also very important”.
When he added, “Africa needs strong institutions, not strong men”, the cheers were deafening.
Obama also showed that he was aware of Ghana’s economic weakness, due to its dependence on cocoa, which makes it a mono-crop economy.
Oil, newly discovered in Ghana, should not, he warned, be allowed to become “Ghana’s new cocoa”.
But on the practical and sensitive issue on which Africans need help the most – investment from the developed countries aimed specifically at adding value to African raw materials on the continent, before they are exported abroad – he was silent.
Without a strong movement in the West away from exporting unprocessed food and raw materials into the production of finished goods, whatever aid or schemes conceived by Obama and his administration in good faith in Africa, will leave the continent still treading water.
Obama compared the relative gdps in history of Kenya and South Korea and drew attention to the fact that South Korea is now very rich, whilst Kenya has remained poor.
But he failed to point out that South Korea had benefited from the establishment of manufacturing industries there by both the Americas and the Japanese and that this was done a s deliberate political ploy to show up the economic bankruptcy of North Korea’s communist regime.
“Obama, do something before you go!” sang the women of Ghana as the President left the grounds of the Accra Conference Centre after his speech to the people of Ghana and Africa.
But if he is to do anything meaningful to address their hopes in his presidency, he will have to unlearn a lot about Africa himself, as well as reeducating his fellow G8 heads of state too, For what Africa needs, and asks for, is an overturning of an economic system that gives a Kenya coffee grower 0.2 percent of the proceeds from coffee, whilst Starbucks and other Western coffee traders pocket the rest.
It is a second slavery that Africa is suffering and its effects: widespread hunger, killer diseases like malaria and HIV.
Aids, are every bit as devastating to the African population as chattel slavery.
Can Obama even begin to conceive of how to change that? Africa will watch and see whether his presidency is a mere chimera, and that the evils that white people have inflicted on Africa throughout history will continue, irrespective of the colour of the skin of whoever is elected to lead the richest and most powerful leader of the pack of wolves who have cleverly rigged world trade in such a as to ‘legally’ steal the food out of Africa’s mouth;
“Obama do something before you go!” the women said in song, before he boarded his helicopter to fly to Cape Coast to face the reality of Africa’s true and naked past, un-airbrushed by the by the hand of the perpetrators turned historians. .
They didn’t mean before he left Accra for Cape Coast. They meant before his presidency ends.
Will he quite understand what they meant, and if he does, can he do anything about it? The call is, once again, for Obama to make.