Obama’s Positive Use of the Idea of Africa.
By Professor Lyombe Eko,
Professor, Media Law and International Communication, College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University. Author of the international best seller and Gold Media Award Winner, Independent Book Publisher Awards: “New Media, Old Regimes: Case Studies in Comparative Communication Law and Policy,”
One of the most remarkable phenomena of the 21 st century was the unprecedented meteoric rise of a young man of mixed African and Caucasian American parentage from his birthplace in Hawaii – where his father, a university student from Kenya, had met his mother – to the dizzy heights of political power – the Presidency of the United States of America. The man in question is Barack Hussein Obama. His safari from Hawaii to the White House has taken a number of detours – editor of the prestigious “mother” of all law review journals, the Harvard Law Review, a stint as a community adviser in Chicago, Illinois, adjunct professor of Constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and United States Senator from the state of Illinois. The storied rise of Barack Hussein Obama confounded political scientists, pundits, historians and the chattering elite of the media. It has become the stuff of legend, collective memory and history.
Researchers of all political, cultural and national stripes are searching for explanations for Obama’s unprecedented political safari across the American landscape. Etse Sikanku’s well-researched book offers one explanation for this success– the political persona, superb image management, and skilful messaging of Barack Hussein Obama. Sikanku argues convincingly that one of the reasons for Obama’s success was his unabashed instrumentalization of his African ancestry – his Africanity – as a tool of political communication. Obama’s Africanity went beyond the facile “Out of Africa” narrative, according to which Africa is the exotic “Other”, with a capital O, of the Western world. Obama succeeded in getting the people of the United States and most of the Western world, to respect Africa’s otherness.
As Etse Sikanku’s academic adviser at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication, I was the “midwife” of sorts on this project. The idea of writing a dissertation on Obama’s instrumentalization of his Africanity as the vehicle for his American political safari emerged during a chance meeting and impromptu discussion that Etse and I had at the Main Library of the University of Iowa. This book is the result of early reflections that emerged from living and studying at the epicenter of American politics – Iowa. In effect, Dr. Sikanku was well suited to the task of writing about Obama’s Africanity because he was in the right place, Iowa, at the right time – the beginning of Obama’s Presidential campaign in 2007. As residents of the state of Iowa, we literally watched Barack Obama emerge before our very eyes. He first came to the campus of the University as an unknown Senator from the neighbouring state of Illinois, and preached a message of hope, change, and communal effort. The slogan “Yes we can!” echoes an African proverb: “a river that flows by itself flows crookedly and sluggishly; a river that has tributaries is a mighty, raging force.” That message resonated in Iowa and the United States and many parts of the world. The rest, as they say, is history.
Dr. Sikanku’s remarkable research adds a positive chapter to the tumultuous, centuries-long, unequal “relationships” between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The Obama story is a counterpoint to this monumental tale of sheer inhumanity. As a Ghanaian, Dr. Etse Sikanku is well placed to carry out the task of researching and piecing together Obama’s deployment of his African ancestry, his Africanity, as a trope in a narrative that made possible his successful safari to the apogee of American politics – the White House. In effect, Ghana is the cradle of Pan-Africanism, the twentieth century movement that emphasized the human dignity, universal brotherhood and potential of peoples of African descent who had been enslaved, colonized and discriminated against.
By marshalling his Africanity and transforming it into a positive attribute in a Western World that has, for centuries, framed Africa as the negative foil of Europe, Barack Hussein Obama followed in the footsteps of another illustrious person of African descent, Alexander Pushkin, a 19 th century descendant of African slaves who became the greatest Russian poet and founder of modern Russian literature. This book is about the positive political uses of “the idea of Africa”, as V.Y. Mudimbe puts it. At the end of the day, no matter what one thinks of Obama’s politics, one must recognize that he used a positive idea of Africa to change the history of the United States – and the world. That is the theme Dr. Sikanku’s book explores successfully. In the process, he adds to knowledge about American politics, African history, and the inseparable relationship between the United States and Africa.