The Obama Presidency and the Decline of the Narrative of Racism

In my last entry, I spoke of a "post-racial world" in which I hinted that Obama's imminent victory signals the demise of the moral authority of the discourse on blacks as victims of 400 years of racism and slavery. With Obama as president, the high moral ground on which people of African descent worldwide attacked racist disenfranchisement and impoverishment will all but crumble, even though the reality of black disempowerment may not significantly change. While most black thinkers are lamenting the decline of this discourse, I think that loss is not only inevitable, but also welcome.

There are two reasons for my desire to follow Obama in limiting the evocation of racism and our difficult history as we confront the social issues of the 21^st century. First is the simple truth that like human beings, human ideologies and historical narratives also die. The dependence of the African liberation ideology on the history of slavery, colonialism, racism and other horrors that African peoples have suffered was bound to meet its inevitable destiny, just like the human beings who created it. This natural decline can compared to the decadence that is afflicting the academic disciplines, and which Lewis Gordon decribes in his book as follows: "Living things grow, and eventually they begin to decay and then die...as social conditions for the for the life of disciplines decline, so, too, do disciplines, but they do so, I contend...primarily through treating their decay as evidence of their health."* By the same token, one can argue that the fact that the moral authority of the racism narrative is on the decline does not mean it was useless from the very beginning. Rather, it was alive and powerful for African peoples and helped them to shake and uproot the pilars of racism such as colonialism, Jim Crow, lynchings and apartheid. However, new challenges have replaced these old ones. And so we have to heed Obama's call for fresh thinking about the human issues we face rather than regurgitate the increasingly limpid narratives that lament racism.

The second reason for letting go of the racism narrative is more complex than the first, and I hope I am able to explain it clearly. Our focus on Africa's painful past as the primary ideology and motivation for action in the 21^st century has caused some of the most scandalous and violent events over the last 20 or so years. In 1994, the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda was driven by the ideology that Tutsis were colonialists from whom "Rwandans" needed to be liberated. In the Rift Valley this year, the eviction of "Kikuyus" - a euphemism for Kenyans who have settled in areas that are not considered their "ancestral" homes - was justified as a repeat of the Mau Mau war which symbolically, but not in reality, led to the eviction of white settlers and the resettlement of the Kikuyu. Months later, mobs of youths chanting Zuma's apartheid liberation theme song "Bring me my machine gun" killed about 40 African foreign immigrants for supposedly benefiting from the fruits of the post-apartheid era which are still inaccessible to most black South Africans. The violence was closely followed by the debacle of the Zimbabwean elections during which the violence meted on opposition supporters was covered by the ageing president Mugabe under the cloak of anti-imperialism.

The common narrative running through all these events is that of a white colonizer who is triumphantly fought, killed and evicted by the African liberators. However, in each case, the "colonizer" is not a powerful white man but poor Africans, usually identified by their real or imagined ethnic group. In Rwanda, the Tutsis were even branded as having European physical features! In the case of Zuma and Mugabe, the song and rhetoric became oppressive and deadly because they were imposed on the current era, removed from the apartheid and colonial contexts from which they emerged. In my commentary on the xenophobic violence in South Africa, I referred to this phenomenon as arising when "a group of Africans is isolated and adorned with the mask of the colonial masters for the performance of a deadly ‘liberation' ritual in which the poor majority ‘drives out' fellow blacks in white colonial masks." In other words, hanging onto the glory of military liberation struggles, at the expense of struggles that occurred in the social, political and intellectual realms, has caused independence in Africa to be synonymous with rabid militarism and violence that expel all notion of intellectual thought and ethical considerations.

The deadly "liberation" ritual is accompanied by a psychological handicap that maintains Africa in the quagmire of mediocrity: the replacement complex. In many countries in Africa, replacement has become a substitute for creativity and vision because independence was seen as the replacement of whites by blacks in the corridors of power. Subsequently, the liberation narratives portray Tutsis as the replacement of the Belgian colonialists who had to now be replaced by "Hutu power," and "Kikuyus" as those who had replaced the white settlers and now had to be replaced by "indigenous" groups in land and businesses. Rather than use their imagination and energy to create jobs, the youth barely out of university clamor to replace "ageing" 55 years olds in seats of management, while instead of dismantling patriarchal oppression, women leaders call for the replacement of male beneficiaries of the system by female ones.

The other malady that has afflicted Africa for the last 40 years is the limitation of her peoples to their physical and economic needs while stunting their intellectual and cultural growth. This imbalance has perpetuated the racist distortion of our humanity that limited us to the biological and material, yet human beings are also spiritual, cultural, intellectual and emotional. The glorification of military liberation struggles has further perpetuated the disdain for intellectual pursuits. Africa currently commits more resources to weapons and consumer goods than it does to scientific research and development in the arts, while politicians (both the schooled and the unschooled) mock those who are dedicated to intellectual pursuits as living in ivory towers and out of touch with "the people."

The perception that "the people" is synonymous with the illiteracy of the majority and the lack of material resources contradicts and silences Africa's contribution, from antiquity to present, to ideas and scientific discoveries. It hides the fact that Africa has had empires and kingdoms where the pre-colonial elite (oh yes, they did exist) commissioned work in the arts and sciences, and had libraries and universities. African literature was not exclusively oral, nor were Africans unexposed to the written word before the advent of colonialism.

The simplification and trivialization of "the people" also ignores the fact that there is no society where radical artists and intellectuals have been mere populists. Even the saints of revolutionary and peasant movements such Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Thomas Sankara were professionals - one a lawyer, the other a doctor, the other a soldier - who spent time reading and thinking in order to articulate and refine their ideology. Once they were in power, they continued to study the challenges they were confronting and they made decisions that were not always popular. It was Thomas Sankara who said that "A soldier without political education is a virtual criminal." Anyone in doubt about the need for sustained intellectual engagement should consult Fidel Castro's column which reveals a physically frail but intellectually robust elder who, undoutedly, eads widely.

By contrast, the idealist narrative of the Mau Mau struggle does not reveal such conceptual depth and tends to leave particular questions unanswered: if the primary struggle was for land, did we have a vision for what would happen when the population size eventually outstrips the land available for agricultural use? How would we redistribute land while implementing a land and economic policy that allows us to feed ourselves? This is not to trivialize the dedication of men and women who paid the ultimate price for Kenya's struggle against oppression. Rather, it is an assertion that without an ideology that transcends military struggle for land and that proposes options to earn a livelihood that are not directly tied to land and farming, Kenya now finds itself in petty but deadly squabbles over land use.

Behind the absence of radical and transforming intellectual development in Africa is the maintenance of the mentality that we will always be rescued from our misfortune - even that which is caused by our own recklessness. Of course the Mercy Industrial Complex has given institutional, historical and economic structure to this mentality, but we Africans have also participated in sustaining it. We have internalized the mentality that it does not matter what we do, someone else - be it a relative, a politician, the government or the West - will always pick up the tab. Thus parents nearing retirement continue to bear children and expect their young married children with their own children to pay the bills, communities and individuals expect the government to intervene in matters which they can easily tackle, we expect the African "Diaspora" to finance the continental deficit in leadership at both family and national levels, and African leaders wreck havoc, cause mayhem and lay the ground for famine, hunger and illiteracy in their own countries, knowing that the West will step in to save Africans from the brink of death through food aid, conflict negotiation and peace keeping. And when the West fails to intervene or when it intervenes as it wishes, we hope to blackmail it with the guilt of 400 years of racist crimes against humanity.

One of the pillars of human dignity is responsibility, but responsibility seems to be very weak in Africa. Yet if we cannot take responsiblity for own our destiny, then we are no longer human. Ironically, we are spurred on in this dehumanizing behavior by those who claim to be the defenders of humanity: the humanitarians and human rights organizations. The problem with the human rights discourse which funds many NGO's in Africa, and a discourse which I will not cease to attack, is that the agent in this framework is always the government on a national level, and the West at a global level. To monitor human rights, one must monitor the government according to the bible of human rights charters formulated in the West and in the hope that Western governments will bear upon our national ones to "respect human rights." Human rights activists do not address the citizens - they address both national and Western governments. And even when they do address the citizens, it is with the intent of drumming support to raise a defeaning voice which the government cannot ignore at the risk of raising the eyebrows of the West.

The moral, intellectual and economic poverty in Africa over the last 40 years confirms Fanon's warning in The Wretched of the Earth that Africans would encounter serious obstacles if they clung to the moral victory of independence struggles without engaging the "brains and muscles" of Africans in building new societies out of the ashes of colonial rule. Contrary to the Eurocentric distortions of Fanon's classic which seem to be solely based on the book's first chapter, Fanon did not glorify violence as the sole weapon of liberation. Rather, he argued that armed liberation movements became inevitable because colonialism was already a situation of extreme violence which could only crumble under even greater violence. In the subsequent chapters of the book, he highlighted the economic, intellectual, cultural and ideological mediocrity of the bourgeoisie as the main obstacle to Africa's economic and political recovery. In the celebratory conclusion to his final book, he calls for a new humanity guided by justice rather than the European model of "development" governed by exploitation, murder and obsession with technology at the expense of human wellbeing.

Obama's presidency will bring African America and the entire African world to crossroads similar to the ones that we faced in the 1960's all to the way the 1990's when apartheid was finally dismantled. While we celebrate his entry into the White House, as we did Mandela's release from prison and the independence of Africa countries, we will also have to remind ourselves of our long term vision to create a more humane society which is signaled not by black and white children holding hands, but by access to wholesome education - not just mere schooling -, decent healthcare and protection from capitalist greed and imperialist warfare. While slavery, racism and colonialism are important historical landmarks that we must not forget, we must also remember that they are simply a component of our larger struggle to regain our human dignity.

I hope African America avoids becoming irrelevant by hanging on to these historical landmarks when Obama's victory seriously undermines the imposition of these events on contemporary global politics. That way, it will avoid the pathetic state of Africa's intellectual and social fabric brought about by our lack of a vision and ideology that transcended colonialism and independence.

* Gordon, Lewis R. Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006, 8.