Three distinguished panelists, Samuel Muene, Carina Ray and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza answer your questions and debate with you the role of the US in Africa.
The Seminar was sponsored by the Norwegian Council for Africa and held Ocotber 21, 9:00-12:00 US Eastern Standard Time
Samuel Munene is a poet and a fiction and non fiction writer. He is a freelancer and is currently a proud contributor and online editor of the Kenyan website "Kwani [1]?" run by the Kwani trust in Nairobi. He holds a BA degree in Economics from the University of Nairobi.
Samuel Munene's introduction to the Cyber Seminar: Obama becoming the president of the United States will certainly have a positive effect on Africa. However, this will be more psychological than material. The feel good factor resulting from having "one of our own" as the "leader of the free world" is significant for the people of Africa. There is a real optimism that is reflected in Obama's slogan "yes, we can". This optimism will drive African leaders to improve our countries and we as Africans will have a greater degree of faith in ourselves and our ability to change our societies for the better.
Africa should not classify the US either as a friend or a foe, but as a partner. As fashionable as it may be to talk about independence from the US, the reality is that the US is rich, powerful and influential. Hence, the aim for African governments should be to negotiating mutual benefits with the US rather than seeing the US as a saviour or a devil.
Carina Ray is Assistant Professor at the History Department, Fordham University in New York City, where she teaches African and Black Atlantic History. Ray is currently working on her book manuscript, Policing Sexual Boundaries: The Politics of Race in Colonial Ghana, which focuses on the creation and contestation of sexual boundaries between Africans and Europeans in the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana). She is also a columnist for New African magazine, the oldest Pan-African monthly magazine in print. As part of her efforts to make Africa's history accessible to a broad audience, each month her column, "Lest We Forget," reflects on various aspects of Africa's past in relationship to its present and future.
Carina E Ray's introduction to the Cyber Seminar: If we want to understand how an Obama presidency might reshape US foreign policy towards Africa we need to confront the thorny question of identity politics and take a closer look at his recent history where Africa is concerned. While I am inclined to believe that Obama has good intentions when it comes to Africa, it will take a lot more than good intentions to undo and reverse over a half-century of damaging US foreign policy towards Africa. A necessary step in this direction will be Obama's ability to listen to and work with Africans themselves, especially those who continue to fight for democratization, human rights, and control over their own natural resources, economic rights, and destinies. Most importantly he must ensure that he doesn't end up giving Africa the short end of the stick out of fear that he will be accused of disloyalty to the United States.
Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is a historian, literary critic, novelist and short-story writer. He is the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, Professor of African American Studies and History and Head, Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Cape, South Africa.He is the author of more than a hundred articles and essays and about two dozen books. He is the winner of the 1994 Noma Award for his book "A Modern Economic History of Africa" (1993) and the 1998 Special Commendation of the Noma Award for "Manufacturing African Studies and Crises"(1997). He is also the Editor of The Zeleza Post [1].
Professor Zeleza's introduction to the Cyber Seminar:
Senator Obama's victory would be symbolically important for Africa in so far as it would represent the ascendancy to America's most important political office of a Diaspora African. However, it is unlikely that this would be followed by substantive changes in U.S. policy towards Africa. Senator Obama's campaign largely sees Africa in humanitarian, not geostrategic, terms, as a global pawn rather than as a global player, notwithstanding the polite rhetoric about Africa's great potential, or the anxieties about Africa's susceptibility to economic incursions from China or as a security underbelly for terrorists. As important as the presidency is, it is only one centre of power in America's political economy dominated by various industrial complexes from the corporate to the military to the cultural.
Enter the Cyber Seminar Here [2]