SOROOR AHMED digs out the background of US president-elect Obama and in the process brings out the heart rending details of the century-long sufferings of the Blacks in that so-called haven of democracy.
It would not be fully appropriate to call Barack Hussein Obama the first Black President of the tottering world power, the United States of America. At most he can be described as the first non-White to occupy White House 43 years after President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965 signed the Voting Rights Act into law, “permanently barring direct barriers to political participation by racial and ethnic minorities, prohibiting any election practice that denies the right to vote on account of race, and requiring jurisdictions with a history of discrimination in voting to get federal approval of changes in their election laws before they can take effect.”
The Negroes, till then, had not been enjoying full rights and there were separate educational institutions and even buses for them. They were victims of the worst type of racial discrimination which even the present generation of the US cannot imagine. The great hero of African-American community, Martin Luther King Junior was one of the products of such segregated institutions.
Obama, in fact, is a mulatto, that is, the offspring of White and Black parents. His father was by birth a Muslim from Kenya, who went to the United States to pursue his professional career. His mother was a White woman from the European English-Irish stock.
If only ‘b’ and ‘s’ differentiates between Obama and Osama, their ancestral homes are not too far off also. A few hundred kilometres of ocean water separates Kenya from Yemen. But apart from that they are poles apart.
Post-election Obama needs to be analysed differently and not the way the media wanted us to understand him. He is certainly not like ‘the man in tears’ Jessie Jackson or ‘the Greatest’ Mohammad Ali or hero of the African-American rights, Martin Luther King Junior. He simply does not belong to that generation of African-American as it is being made out by the so-called champions of freedom and equality in the US. Unlike the other Africans – living or brought and forced to live in the United States of America for the last four centuries – Obama has no history of slavery. True, the Americans have gone half way down – or have been forced to go by meltdown and other factors – the fact is that Obama lacks personal experience of humiliation and insults that others in the so-called biggest democracy of the world had to.
His forefathers were never slaves of the White Americans. In fact, Kenya, on the eastern coast of Africa, was not the country from where the Blacks were shipped like animals to the Americas by the European imperialists. In contrast it was from the countries of the western coast of Africa such as Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, etc. that the Blacks (never forget that they were human beings like us) were forcibly taken to the new land of opportunity for the Whites. Though Morocco and Mauritania were on the north-western coast of Africa and much closer to Europe yet the European imperialists did not dare to take people from that part of the continent because they were then under the strong Muslim control. Thus they sailed further south and chose to make the weaker lower half of western Africa their happy hunting ground for capture and transportation of Black slaves.
The role of Blacks in laying the foundation of the United States of America can and should never be ignored. Nor can their contributions in making the USA a super power be overlooked. During the last four centuries it is they who made the country, in fact, both the two continents on the western hemisphere, liveable. It is the Black slaves, who were made to work in the deep jungles, ravines, icy lands, lofty mountains, etc. of Americas for no return whatsoever. Just as we in India deny our labourers – both farm and urban – their social, economic and political dues, the Whites meted out the most brutal and barbaric treatment to them. It is the Blacks who were made to clear the forests and difficult terrains of the US to make the land cultivable. It is because of the efforts of the forefathers of Jessie Jackson, Mohammad Ali and Martin Luther King – and not Barack Obama – that the US became the largest producer of wheat by the end of the 19th century.
In this whole process thousands of them simply perished while the Whites cashed in on their hard labour and took undue credit for development. It is their efforts, which ultimately solved the problem of starvation in Europe, especially during the two World Wars. It is the 13 per cent strong Black population of the United States which ensured victory to it in the two World Wars. The casualty figure of the Black in all the wars fought by the Americans is disproportionately higher to their population. The American army was officered by the Whites, but had a fairly huge proportion of Black soldiers. The situation is not much different even now.
The African-Americans were the unsung heroes of the United States yet they were consciously made drug addicts and alcoholic so that they do not demand their just share and go on working for long hours without protest. They and Native Americans or the Red Indians were used as the guinea pigs for medical experiments. Many died of the reaction and others suffered chronic diseases. Today in the mechanised and computerised world when the importance of physical work has, to much extent, declined the Blacks have been rendered unemployed and have drifted towards crime. Now these Whites look down upon them as idle and useless burden.
As if that was not enough, some of these ‘freed’ Black slaves were later used to extend the American empire back in Africa. They were transported back to the western African countries in the late 19th and early 20th century to re-establish the ‘White’ supremacy. Charles Taylor, till recently President of Liberia, was from the family of those Blacks who returned and settled down in West Africa. He always enjoyed the backing of the United States and the West.
In contrast Obama’s ancestors never figured in the two master-pieces written on the tyranny of Whites on Blacks – Uncle Tom’s Cabin penned by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 and Roots by Alex Haley almost a century later. While the former was a White American lady, the author of Roots is an African American who traced his origin from Gambia, and that too from a Muslim who was enslaved centuries ago.
Unlike the Black slaves who were herded to make the huge part of land later called America a big empire for the Whites, Obama’s father travelled to that country to make his own personal fortune. And he made it so and later returned to his home country to succeed in life. Even in his personal life Obama was brought up after the enactment of Voting Rights Act of August 6, 1965. He was just four years and two days old then and not living in the US.
Obama is lucky that he had never faced any discrimination of that sort in that country. He did not have to live in Harlem, the huge Black ghetto of New York, though in the early days took to drugs. Unlike most Blacks of that country, he never went to jail which is euphemistically called correction centre.
Exactly 516 years after the discovery of the new world, the Anglo-Saxons have elected a man of mixed origin as their President. They were rather forced by the cruel turn of the circumstances to do so. George Bush has left the country in complete disarray. Poor John McCain had to pay for his follies. Though Bush and Obama come from two opposite ends of the USA – the former from Texas in the extreme south while the latter from Illinois in the extreme north – there is at least one similarity. The outgoing American President is in fact George Bush-II. His father is George Bush-I. In the same way the name of Barack Hussein Obama is the same as his father’s.
However, the Republican candidate, John McCain, deserves to be applauded for his generous and lavish praise of his victorious rival. In contrast in India we have likes of Lal Krishna Advani and Sushma Swaraj, who refused to accept the 2004 verdict. Swaraj later vowed to shave off her head if Sonia Gandhi became the Prime Minister. Sonia did not allow her this ignominy and instead offered Manmohan Singh the post.