Response | Onyekachi Wambu

ReComing to America

The new world in the Americas has largely been formed by the collision of three great cultures - native American, European and African. The third African leg of this tripod has to date been like the proverbial iceberg, mostly hidden and subterranean. Cloaked in invisibility as Ralph Ellison noted, nevertheless the narrative and culture of the African in America has been the anvil on which the new civilisation was hammered out and largely defined.

The African arrived in humiliation, shackled to the hold of a ship, before disappearing under a series of shadow names - Negro, Coloured, Omni-American, and Black. Towards the end of the 20th century, two attempts (one cultural, the other political) would be made to publicly reassert the African, both would only partially succeed. Alex Haley's reimagination of the arrival of the African would end in law suits and a little disgrace, whilst Jesse Jackson would relaunch the African in America as part of a failed Rainbow nation.

Now at the beginning of the 21^st century, the African in the Americas is back in a most interesting and audacious way with the emergence of Barack Obama - the political and cultural synthesised in one remarkable person. And as a result all of us (black and white, African, European and Asian) will need to flip and ponder anew Countee Cullen's famous line - what does Africa/Obama mean to me?

Before Obama there was already underway a revived reassessment of the African in the Americas, with growing movements in Venezuela, Brazil and Peru. But Pius Adesanmi is right - Obama is both subject and sign - ‘arguably' as Pius understands, ‘the single most important inflatus for the transcendence of this split [between the diaspora and Africa] and the resurgence of a new kind of black globality'.

But rather than black globality, I would argue, African globality as a sign. Let me elaborate. On the cultural level, Obama completes Haley's failed psychic project of reimagining the arrival, not as humiliation, but as the coming of a prince in dignity.

Yes, we can for the first time trace the African in America to a village and to a nation - as evidenced by the vast crowds of Luo and other Kenyans who came out to welcome home the prodigal son in 2006. Barack Obama - the American with an African/Arab name, with deep roots in the country, was remade and reinvented on a crucial earlier visit to Kenya in 1988. As Steve Sharra noted in an important extract from ‘Dreams of my Father', Obama would himself discover the power and resonance of his name after a stranger recognised him:

‘That had never happened before, I realized; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in L.A., or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life, I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name might provide, how it could carry an entire history in other people's memories, so that they might nod and say knowingly, ‘Oh, you are so and so's son.' No one here in Kenya would ask how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar tongue. My name belonged and so I belonged, drawn into a web of relationships, alliances and grudges that I did not yet understand (p. 305).

But I think he was beginning to understand how he could carry an entire history in other peoples memory. When he returned to Kenya, after his star turn at the Democratic convention in 2004, Obama would not have been surprised by the huge crowds and interest, even in other parts of Africa, beyond his ancestral home of Kenya. It was as if the waves upon wave of Africans were coming to witness the coronation of an exiled Prince. The African crowds and his Luo nation would legitimise him - in an extraordinary manner. A Prince, not to rule over them, but perhaps to reintroduce them to the world anew in the 21^st century.

Like Prince Hakeem in ‘Coming to America', Obama had already married his African American queen. However, unlike Prince Hakeem he would not be taking her back and returning to Africa to rule over a benign and sumptuous kingdom. The Prince returned to America with a new determination and his audacious bid for the Presidency.

In symbolic terms, this narrative of re-arrival and bid for the Presidency offers a new dawn for the recognition of Africa in Americas. But there are, of course, limits to this kind of symbolism. The horrors of slavery did happen and that real narrative of the pain and dispossession of the African in the Americas, and the tradition and culture of resistance that it spawned is still there (see Rev Wright) and will not go away.

If he wins in November, as the 44^th President, Obama will find it difficult avoiding the historic necessity of apologising for the enslavement of the African in America and offering the possibility of a fresh start. As in a feedback loop, the skill with which he handles this reintegration of Africa as an equal and critical partner in the making of the modern world, will either hinder or accelerate the awareness of a growing African globality. If he is successful, it will be his most stunning achievement.