Prometheus 6

There's links to seven editorials posted at Pambazuka News on how Africans (and at least one American) sees Sen. Obama and the issues floating around him. Said links have sufficient text abstracted from the text on the other side to let you decide if the rest is of interest.

There's something for everyone. And it ought to keep you busy for a while.

Third world prospects in an Obama presidency
Steve Sharra (2008-08-11)

First, a word about my use of the terms “Pan-Africa” and “Pan-Africanism.” The Pan-Africa I am referring to here is the one that builds on the ideological consciousness of the global historical experiences and identities of people of African descent, and others who share that ideology for political and solidarity purposes. It is a Pan-Africanist consciousness that draws from DuBois’s hope, back in 1897, that if Africans were to be a factor in the history of the world, it would have to be through a Pan-African movement. Thus when Ghana became independent from Britain in 1957, Du Bois, unable to attend the epochal occasion due to his passport being impounded by the US government, handed over the mantle of the Pan-Africanist movement to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, through a letter that he wrote and had delivered to Nkrumah.

Obama and US foreign policy
Carina Ray (2008-08-11)

Let me begin by making a few disclaimers. First, I am a registered Democrat (for lack of a better alternative). Second, I support Barack Obama's candidacy for the presidency. Third, I believe that he will pursue a more enlightened foreign policy towards Africa than George Bush has and more importantly than John McCain would.

But let's not delude ourselves, Barack Obama is not Africa's prodigal son, he is an American politician running for the presidency of the United States of America. His family ties to Africa (Kenya to be exact) have, however, given him a greater personal connection to the continent and its people than any other American presidential candidate before him. ... While we certainly have cause for hope, we also need to be mindful of the very real constraints that Barack Obama is laboring under and how these limitations necessarily affect his ability to imagine and enact a foreign policy that departs from the past.

Obama and the continent of Africa
Achille Mbembe (2008-08-11)

Barack Obama might become the next United States president. Because of his African roots, this possibility has been met with euphoria and enthusiasm in the continent. In some instances, African expectations are the expression of racial pride. In others, they are simply irrational, unrealistic and misguided.

Barack Obama and the graveyard of hope
Wambui Mwangi (2008-08-11)

I am finding it very difficult to join in the jubilation about Senator Barack Obama. Not that I want to deny the man his victory, but my impulse to celebrate keeps deflating on the idea that the best thing that happened to little Barack was not growing up in Kenya.

I have been imagining alternative trajectories for him if he had come to know the world through the eyes of a Kenyan citizen, if his mother and grandparents had not rescued him from our chaos and contradictions and brought him up somewhere his intellect and talent could grow.

If he had grown up here, and had he somehow managed to retain most elements of his current self, he would have been another outstanding, intelligent and competent Luo man in our midst: and he would have been killed.

What about the black community, Obama?
Diop Olugbala (2008-08-13)

These issues include the targeting of African and Latino communities with predatory “sub-prime” mortgages – a scheme that has made millions for people like Obama’s chief financial advisor Penny Pritzker, while stripping black families of billions of dollars, the greatest loss of wealth our community has suffered since being brought in chains to this country. We also challenged Obama to take a stand against the police shootings of unarmed African people, and explain why he has publicly defended the judge’s acquittal of the NYC police who murdered Sean Bell.

He has said that he cannot speak out on behalf of those who have been historically oppressed for fear of offending other people. Yet in Miami, he promised the Jewish community, which considers itself a historically oppressed community, that he supports turning all of Jerusalem over to Israeli control, despite the internationally enforced sharing of that city with the Palestinians. When Obama speaks to black audiences, he attacks us, attributing our community’s poverty, not to systemic oppression, but to bad culture and lack of work ethic.

Barack Obama has criticized African fathers for abandoning our children, although a recent study showed that black fathers stay more involved with their children after a split from the mother than white fathers. And Obama says nothing of the unjust imprisonment of 1 in 9 black men of child-bearing age, the overwhelming majority of whom are locked up on minor drug or other non-violent economic violations stemming from conditions of desperate poverty. He has failed to achieve any meaningful program of economic development for the African community. In speaking to a group of black legislators, Obama said “a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars.”

Barack Obama, black agency, and the burden of history
Pius Adesanmi (2008-08-11)

The timeline of black agency has been determined to a great extent in the last six centuries by the need to overcome man-made historical impediments, notably slavery, racism, colonialism, neocolonialism – and their new forms in the present – on the one hand, and the necessity to validate the black world's contributions to what black luminaries like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor have described as the "civilization de l'universel" on the other hand. This imperative of rehabilitating the black subject and relocating her within what Sylvia Wynter calls the sign of "Man" has taken such diverse routes as Indigénisme, the Harlem Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, Négritude, the Civil Rights movement, decolonization, liberation struggles/wars, and the anti-apartheid struggle. While some of these routes of black agency were largely discursive, some were praxilic, and some others were a combination of discourse and praxis. What united them was their overarching force of interpellation across global black communities. They were all grands récits that transcended their own immediate contexts of articulation to become transnational sites of black self-fashioning through a strategy based largely on the creation of an imagined community of black memory.

Obama and Palestine
Sameh A. Habeeb (2008-08-11)

With the second Bush administration and his first speech at the White House, our aspirations smashed into a barrier of Zioamerican arrogance! The hope raised back momentously and excessively when the caucuses of American elections started in 2007. Followed by the appearance of Barack Husain Obama, our hope reached a peak once more. We reckoned that by this heroic Black-American we would be able to get our Independent State of Palestine....

Our desired change is completely inconsistent with Obama's one currently. The change for us makes us ask why he is turning his back against Palestinians in this race. He was a sincere friend to us once.