Beyond Obama’s Accra Call

At Barack Obama's inaugural ceremony on 20 January 2009 as President of the United States of America, he sent a clear warning to the oppressors of the world that their end had come. Most Africans started jubilating that perhaps their time had come when one 'wretched of the earth' had emerged to liberate all the oppressed.

This message of liberation was crystallized in Accra Ghana, six months later, when Obama called on the young people of Africa to take over their destiny.

Obama's call came at a ripe moment in Africa's quest for liberation from its 'sit-tight' presidents or life presidents. In fact, Obama arrived in Africa when Africa was still mourning one of its longest serving presidents, Omar Bongo Odimba.

Africa was at a point of resigning itself to its fate. There were Christian positions that it was God himself who had placed such leaders at the helm of power in African countries and that every people deserved the leadership they had. God in his omniscience decided to free Gabon from the grip of its long serving dictator, Omar Bongo Ondimba.

It has been a full 45 years since Paulo Freire started his education to end the 'culture of silence', crowned by his seminal work titled “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. Paulo Freire was born and experienced the great economic recession of 1929, concluding that man's state of mind was probably responsible for his predicament. The peasants were kept illiterate so as to oppress them in ways unbeknownst to them.

Today, so many years after independence, Africa prides itself with a burgeoning intelligentsia, distilling knowledge in Western universities, from the USA through Canada to France. The African cannot be simplistically compared to the peasant of the 1950s. Today's African is an intricate being, capable of pondering on his freedom and predicament.

Africans, in all facets, desire to be free and to be human. Unfortunately, in Africa's quest for freedom and humanity, she adopts an attitude of adhesion to the oppressor. Feeling so unsecured, the African thinks that the powerful with his ill-gotten wealth is a source of security.

In the process of understanding and fraternizing with the oppressor, the oppressed starts identifying with him and learning his antics to hold on to power. They grab the wealth of the people and reduce them to the wretched of the earth. The African oppressor seizes the wealth of the people and controls the minds of the less critical.

Every once in a while an African sub-oppressor emerges with messages to liberate its people. They start preaching things like rigour and moralization, and eventually end up being the most corrupt and lethargic of regimes. Beyond their political platitudes, there is no corresponding will to take the people out of oppression and misery.

Oppressors start behaving as if without them; the fate of their collaborators is sealed. Such collaborators, even without prompting from the oppressors, go out to campaign for them to be at the helm forever as life-presidents.

We may recall how far my namesake the other Christopher, Nsahlai went to Jakiri to get the life-presidency for his friend, Paul Biya. He slapped quite a few of his subjects and ensured that life-presidency, but unfortunately collapsed and died before the imagined fruits of such a political dispensation became ripe.

Another of such pseudo leaders, the Fon Doh Gah Gwayim II of Balikumbat was convicted for killing one of his subjects opposing his politics. He too died suddenly like Nsahlai. We have witnessed the same political gerrymandering in Zaire, Zimbabwe, Cameroon and today Niger.

Most African Heads of State are afraid of political alternation because of the oppressive situations they themselves put in place. They are no longer sure how to extract justice from their own follies and dread becoming its victims.

Obama's call from the Independence Square in Accra is welcomed as Ghana is seen as the beginning of African consciousness. Independence came to Africa through Ghana, and when Kwameh Nkrumah thought that he had to work only for his Egyptian mistress, the peasants rebelled and overthrew him.

From then on, Ghana has yanked itself free from the yoke of the oppressor by progressive coup d'états. When Flight Captain Jerry Rawlings seized power, Ghana was about the most corrupt and poorest country in Africa. Thanks to the vision and fist of strongman Jerry Rawlings, he swung Ghana around to being a prosperous and progressive democracy.

The United States of America itself, just like the French Republic, were not born at corrupt and fraudulent ballot boxes. Democratic as they are today, America and France are both products of radical bloody change. And as George Hegel (1967) puts it, 'It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained;… the individual who has not staked his life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” There is no having omelets without breaking eggs.

African youths, according to Obama, must be ready to break eggs to have a savoury African omelet. The messages from western capitals can be confusing at times as they rally to condemn coup d'états.

It will seem, the condemnation of those who un-sit sit-tight presidents falls within the context of some questionable international constitutional doctrine. Those who are condemned are embraced after a few months in power as the best things to have happened to their countries, until they themselves start oppressing their people.

From Accra, Obama called on young Africans to metamorphose into Jerry Rawlings. They should free their countries from the oppressors in the sheaths of Paul Biya, Robert Mugabe, Ahmadou Tandja, Idriss Derby, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Laurent Gwagbo and the new Ali Bongo who will want to outlive Africa.

After Obama's Accra Call, I retraced his paths from Independence Square in Accra to the Cape Coast Castle from where the great grandparents of his wife Michelle had been taken into slavery. While the commemorative plaque on the wall of the Male Dungeon unveiled by Obama and Michelle on 11 July 2009 has as neighbor another plaque with the following message;

“IN EVERLASTING MEMORY OF OUR ANCESTORS MAY THOSE WHO DIED REST IN PEACE, MAY THOSE WHO RETURN FIND THEIR ROOTS, MAY HUMANITY NEVER AGAIN PERPETRATE SUCH INJUSTICE AGAINST HUMANITY WE, THE LIVING, VOW TO UPHOLD THIS.”

more crimes are still committed through Ghana and Africa against humanity.

I left Accra Ghana on 25 July 2011 determined and inspired to carry Obama's message and implement it in Cameroon.

As Obama starts his second term as President for four more years, he has to look back and count how many Africans understood his message. The old regimes of Tunisia, Egypt, Lybia and Cote d'Ivoire have been relegated to the annals of history.

Is this the only extent to which Obama intended his Accra Call to be heard? Sit-tight presidents still abound in Africa. How he sets about pursuing his dream for Africa as a continent of strong institutions and not strongmen is to be seen in the next four years.

Karl Marx pointed out that 'there is no historical reality which is not human. There is no history without men, and no history for men; there is only history of men, made by men and in turn making them.' Africans must join in making their history and not resign to history. Obama will not make our history, we will make it and be judged by it.

Fon Christopher Achobang
(Senior Translator)
Social Commentator,
Rights Consultant
The Cameroons
Tel, (237) 99365954
(237) 33160489