Testimonal

Why Barack Obama? My Reasons for Creating the “Unofficial Barack Obama Advisory Council” of Africans (and non Africans) for Obama?

I will go straight to the point. I am a naturalized black African who came to America from the country of Gabon in pursuit of the American dream. This dream, I did find and achieve not only when I became an Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, but also when I became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America. After twelve good years spent in this country, I feel as American as any other American, and I stand ready to defend this country that gave me everything against all of its enemies.

I did not decide to support Barack Obama because he has African (Kenyan) blood in him or because our American racial ethos decided to arbitrarily define him as a black man even though he also has white Irish blood flowing in his veins. I decided to support him because he is indeed the only candidate who, at this defining moment of America’s history, embodies the type of change that I believe in.

What is this change about? Rather, how do I envision this change? I see the change Obama is promising as a change that is as much about America as it is about the world, especially as far as America’s standing and image in the world goes.

As an African of Gabonese origin who came to live in the United States, I embody those thousands of Africans who have had to leave their lands of origin because of the plights imposed upon their nations by ruthless dictators. Gabon, my native country, for instance, is the victim of a dictator who has been in power for 40 years. He is now the longest-serving head of state in the world, and was second only to Fidel Castro of Cuba, until Castro stepped down this year. Despite great wealth from oil and other natural resources that make Gabon one of the wealthiest nations in Africa, the country’s situation has deteriorated over the years due to dictatorship, mismanagement, misappropriation, rigged elections, and corruption. Close to 70% of Gabonese now live under the poverty line while Omar Bongo, the dictator, continues to enjoy a billionaire’s standard of living, buying himself 20-million-dollar villas in France and siphoning out the nation’s wealth to personal bank accounts abroad. In the past 7 years, Gabon’s wealth has tripled thanks to the inflation in oil prices, but none of this wealth has translated into an improvement in the lives of Gabonese. The US Senate once found out that Omar Bongo had been diverting close to 10% of the nation’s budget to foreign banks for personal use, including several suspect transactions through Citibank, and this trend has continued to worsen.

Although America has been talking about promoting democracy around the world, various administrations, from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, have paid only lip service to the issue of democracy in Africa. In many cases, the oil interests of the United States have relegated the human imperative of democracy to secondary place, and dictators in countries with oil such as Gabon have often benefited from such economic alliances, to the detriment of their citizens. At a time when Africans are more than ever looking to American leadership in issues of democracy and human rights, and are seeking the type of American help that would lead to the toppling of dictators such as Omar Bongo in Gabon, the message of change that is being championed by Barack Obama finds tremendous resonance.

In this sense, like so many Africans, I am hopeful and looking to Obama as a candidate who can help to change American foreign policy in a way that would help African nations get rid of their dictators and engage on the path of democracy and human rights. The fight against dictatorship at home that many naturalized and non naturalized Africans living in the United States are engaged in is a lost battle unless America takes a firm stance towards suppressing dictatorship and promoting human rights in Africa. When, in 1998, I created a political group called “Bongo Doit Partir” (Bongo Must Go) whose aim was to promote an end to the Bongo regime in Gabon, I was hopeful that the Clinton administration would be active seeking to liberate Gabon from the plight of its 40-year-old dictatorship. The Clinton administration only paid lip service to the idea of democracy in Africa and ignored the sufferings of so many Africans who had been calling for American interventionism in the continent. When George Bush came to power and invaded Iraq with the mission of creating in there a democratic environment conducive to human rights, Africans were hopeful again, and looked to Bush as someone who might also tackle the issue of democracy in Africa. The Bush administration never came through for Africa, and instead, made of Iraq its sole and exclusive object of “world” democratization.

Obama therefore brings new hope for Africa because he understands these issues better than any of the candidates in the running in the US 2008 presidential elections. Having family ties to Africa and having a vision of America in the world which is at once domestic and international, economic and human, influential yet collaborative, I trust Barack Obama will help people like me, who are struggling to bring about democracy in African countries such as Gabon, achieve the goal of democracy and human rights in Africa.

When I had the opportunity to vote for the first time as a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2004, I proudly voted for John Kerry. I did so because I thought he was the most competent person in the pool of candidates running for president.

But why is this time different? Many reasons come to mind.

Obama is a fresh mind with fresh ideas on how to deal with American domestic woes while at the same time paying good heed to the issues that pose themselves to other nations around the world.

But first and foremost, being a naturalized citizen of African origin means that I have a vested interest in promoting a strong America and American interests around the world, and at the same time, do so in a way that creates the best possible collaborative environment between the United States and Africa. In a world that is becoming more and more globalized, it is important for the United States to understand that Africa is the next untapped economic frontier, and that now is the time to seek to prepare the continent for proper economic and human relations in a context that is both democratic and respectful of human rights. It is, in sum, in America’s best short and long-term interest to invest in Africa at a time when China is active rapidly occupying the continent and dominating it with very attractive deals that are bound to not only consolidate African dictatorships, but also create a Chinese axis that will be hard to sever if left unchallenged for the next 5 to 10 years.

It is important to note that I am just like the so many other black men and women in this country who have often demonstrated very little affinity with their race when it came to voting for a presidential candidate. Blacks in America are, in fact, and contrary to received notions, the group that is the least likely to vote for a black candidate simply because he is black. The rationale that black people have often used for deciding who to vote for in this country is generally quite complex and ambivalent, but can be summarized as follows:

In addition to those two principles, which they apply to all candidates, be they black or white, black voters have, consciously and/or unconsciously, built additional yardsticks by which to measure specifically black candidates. They have appeared to ask themselves the following questions:

Blacks are voting in overwhelming droves for Barack Obama in 2008 not because he is black, but rather because, for the very first time in American history, a candidate who happens to be black has passed the first two test questions with flying colors, and, as far as the last two questions are concerned, seems to have opened their eyes to the real possibility of America being, at last, ready for a black president.

A poll conducted Jan. 14-17, 2008 by CNN/Opinion Research found that blacks and whites were pretty much in agreement — 84% whites, 78% blacks — that a lot or moderate progress has been made toward the civil rights leader’s dream of equality in American society, and that 72% of whites and 61% of blacks believe the country is ready for a black president. The poll found that this was up from 65% and 54%, respectively, two years ago.

It is Barack Obama who, because of who he is, what he stands for, and what he believes in, allowed, at this very defining moment of American history, for the bridging of a racial gap that, until now, had prevented America from realizing that it had, in fact, changed way beyond its wildest dreams. While the various ethnic and racial factions of this country remained prisoners of the past as well as slaves to antiquated beliefs, the American youth and all those who, in the past 25 years, had been party to the hip-hop generation had, before our own eyes, already moved beyond the old schemes of the past, and we did not even notice the change!

As far as black Americans are concerned, the last two test questions represented above have traditionally related to fears that have to do with historical racism in America, as well as a very deeply-ingrained culture of mistrust that blacks had developed against their white counterparts over the years. Black voters have often simply concluded that a black candidate could not win a presidential election in a white country perceived as fundamentally racist, and so it was useless to waste one’s vote on a black candidate. As a result, past black presidential candidates such as Al Sharpton and Alan Keyes were rejected by black voters not only because they were perceived as not credible, but also because they could not just win such an election in a white country known for its racism against black people.  

Black fears and mistrust of white America are therefore quite real and still very present in today’s America, and there is a reason for that. A 2003 Human Rights Watch report found that although blacks accounted for only 12% of the U.S. population, 44% of all prisoners in the United States were black. This percentage was still at 41.6% according to a 2006 Department of Justice Bulletin. In a country in which the rate of black crime and black prison population is disproportionately larger compared with the overall percentage of black people in America, grudges emanating from what blacks continue to perceive as racial injustice persist, especially among inner-city youth. It suffices to hear the comments made by 50 Cent in a FoxNews interview in February 2008 in which he was asked whether he supported Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. 50 Cent’s response was as ambiguous as it gets. At first, he responded very bluntly by unapologetically declaring that he supported and would vote for Hillary Clinton. But when pressed by the journalist, he added: “I’m not sure America’s ready to have a black president. I think they might kill him.”

50 Cent is, in some way, echoing the types of ambivalences that most of us black people have often felt about America. We have, at times, and more often than not, fallen victim to a fatalistic thinking that made us conclude by default that America’s racial justice discourse was all hype and not real. As a result, nothing could be done to change this paradigm. In the case of 50 Cent, one perceives an almost instinctive desire to protect Barack Obama from assassination by voting for Hillary Clinton. His purported support for Hillary Clinton does not appear to be truly genuine or heartfelt, and his only concern seems to really be stemming from his desire to vote for a white candidate if such a vote can keep Barack Obama out of the White House. In some way, 50 cent is already anticipating the devastating effect that such an assassination would have on race relations in America.

50 Cent’s comments are a reminder that a lot still needs to be done by way of reassuring blacks about the capacity of this country to truly move beyond its traditional antagonisms and construct for itself a message of hope that would heal the racial wounds of the past. This is because, in the underground that the black mind has become in America, various forms of fences have been erected that have caused black people to become introverted. A lot of them have simply stopped believing. In schools all over America, the lack of black role models has led black kids such as my own son to rationalize the fact of being smart at school as something that is not cool, and therefore a “behavior” that must be left to white kids. For a lot of black kids, to black and cool has become synonymous with being dumb and disruptive at school. Many of them have known as sole role models only the representatives of the “bling bling” generation with its almost-naked, butt-shaking music video females. And when they finally grew up, they left the world of political and economic power to white people, not because white people were actually systematically preventing them from becoming lawyers, doctors and politicians, but because they had convinced themselves that the path to such a world had been permanently blocked for them by the evil white man. They had stopped believing in the American dream.

But then, along came a black man called “Hope”. Barack Obama has now proven all of us wrong for the most part. Thanks to Obama, a lot of us black people woke up in total disbelief the morning after the Iowa primaries. We woke up to a white America that had suddenly become human and almost reassuring to black people, suggesting perhaps for the first time that racial harmony was still possible in America. And as the election progressed, and Obama kept winning in white country, we black people suddenly awoke to the possibility of white America having, at last, moved beyond the color of our skins while, interestingly, we remained prisoners of our own skin. In total disbelief, we started, perhaps for the first time in American history, to believe that everything is indeed possible in this country for those who are willing to jump over the fence of their own beliefs, mistrusts and ambivalences. We saw, for the first time, that it was still possible for black America to work with Whites, Hispanics, Asians and all others to imagine a new form of partnership, a new compact for America wherein the understandable grudges of the past could be, not forgotten, but forgiven, so that we can all, at last, move on as full citizens of the United States of America.

Big changes never come suddenly. They take time to come by and tend to assert themselves only in retrospect. But big changes do come by suddenly from time to time, and it often takes only one person, the courageous one with a vision who, because he was the right person at the right time, is able to mobilize his nation towards new goals and new accomplishments. Just as Martin Luther King became the symbol of the new America that followed the Civil Rights movement, a movement that helped to shape the national agenda for change, justice and progress, not just for blacks, but for all Americans no matter what the color of their skin was, Barack Obama has become the symbol for the new America of today, an America that stands ready to break open the prisons of the past and usher in a new era of hope, an era when Martin Luther King’s dream could, at last, become a reality. Martin Luther King, contrary to what most people think, did not free black people from the slavery of racism and segregation. What he did was to free blacks from the prison of their own minds. He taught them the important lesson that when you want change to happen, you must become the instrument of your own change. You must realize that no one else can change your world for you. You must resolutely work to change it yourself; you must be the change you are looking for. This is the lesson that Barrack Obama is teaching, not only to black people, but to white people as well. This is the lesson Barack Obama is teaching America.

To this call for change by Barack Obama, I responded. I decided to support Barack Obama with this Unofficial Advisory Council, not because he is black, but because, after running the four test questions above in my mind as many Black men and women would do, I concluded that, among all candidates running for president today, Barack Obama stands the best chance of not only winning the 2008 presidential election, but also of reconciling America with itself.

Are 50 Cent’s fears of seeing Barack Obama assassinated founded? Sure. However, if he is killed, he will not have been killed because he is black. He will have been killed because he would have stood as a true agent of chance, as were the other American heroes who, before him, perished at the hands of extremists who were too afraid of change: MLK, JFK and RFK. Should this fear stop Americans from supporting the only candidate who, today, represents the best chance for reconciliation in America? Nope.

Whether he is elected or not, Barack Obama has already won. What he won was the honor and the privilege of showing all Americans, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians and others, that it was about time we began the dialogue of reconciliation that will teach us to hope and dream again, the dialogue that will galvanize us into looking forward to an America of open opportunities and justice for all, the America that this nation has always aspired to be and that, at this defining moment in history, is close to becoming so real, so present, for the very first time.

I know of voices that will combat my elation and reject it as too naïve and, perhaps, too premature. To those cynics, I will say: allow those of us who want to hope the privilege of hoping; do not kill our dreams simply because you have stopped dreaming yours. We have a new America to dream for our children. As Barack Obama has said, “nothing worthwhile has ever happened except someone somewhere was willing to hope.” This is our time, this is our moment. This is the time for America.

For Africans, an Obama presidency will, at last, hold the real promise for the advent of real democracy and respect for human rights on the African continent. And this, in turn, will lead to economic stability that will be beneficial to both the United States and Africa.

For Gabon, I harbor great hope that an Obama presidency may finally help the Gabonese nation topple its 40-year-old dictatorship.

And for us black people in America who have gotten used to sitting around waiting for someone else to come from somewhere to free us from the prison of our own minds, the time of apathy has long passed. This is also our country, not just the country of white people. Our ancestors built America as much as theirs did. And because it is our common property and our common land, all of us need to take a new look at what we really want for all of us. If we want change in America, we must no longer isolate ourselves in the dark prisons of our ingrained prejudices. We must now embrace our new America fully so that, through our own engagement, we can start to determine its destiny alongside our other fellow Americans, and change the world according to a vision of America that we would all contribute to shaping. As Senator Obama put it, we (blacks, whites, Hispanics, etc.) are the change we seek; we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Let’s get to work, America!

Dr. Daniel Mengara
Associae Professor, Montclair State University
Leader of Bongo Doit Partir (Bongo Must Go), a movement of expatriated Gabonese citizens opposed to the 40-year-old regime of Omar Bongo in Gabon.