Obama gave Africa its greatest gift: He fixed America

LAST week, Barack Obama gave his farewell speech in his home city of Chicago, home of Abraham Lincoln, and as he likes to say, crossroads of a nation.

It was in this city that Obama realised for the first time what it meant for black people, for black unity, for black pride, to have a black man elected into the highest office in the city.

The election of Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, just as Obama was arriving in Chicago to begin his work as an organiser in 1983, was sweeping in its magnificence for black people.

Washington was an embodiment of something much more; he was what black people wanted to be on their best days: refined, handsome, brilliant, measured and, inevitably, a symbol of black pride.

Obama may not directly accept it now, but watching what the election of Washington did to the black community of Chicago, to the broken women he worked with as an organiser, to barber shops and inner-city youth, for any gifted person with a burden to reassert black pride, Washington’s victory gave birth to Obama’s deep-seeded desire to want to restore black pride.

Twenty-five years later, he did it. In 2008, Obama gave black people in America the greatest gift of all. Yes We Can.

Like most people in the 2008 elections, I had originally been a Hillary Clinton fan, merely because of name recognition. I had grown up in the 90s when Bill Clinton was the embodiment of presidential class. A Rhodes Scholar, a brilliant mind, 20 million jobs under his belt, the fist surplus in government in years, a friend of our country, I did not mind him back at the White House, even as a first gentleman.

Unlike Americans, however, I had missed Obama’s monumental speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I had missed his election to the US Senate, and I had missed his improbably journey into America’s ruling class in the House of Representatives.

It is when Obama’s star started rising in those 2008 Democratic primaries that I bought his two books (Dreams from My Father and Audacity of Hope), and I poured myself into finding out about this brother of mine taking over the United States by storm.

Those two books took me on a journey that would help me judge every move this president would make late on in his life. I dare say that Barack Hussein Obama has been everything he said he’d be.

In Dreams from My Father, in trying to understand his own place in the black community, as a son of a white mother, he goes in too deep, trying to over compensate, and to prove his blackness, but soon realises that even something as noble as blackness can ultimately become undefined, degenerative and even eat its own children.

The young Obama seeing his college friends become black radicalised and eventually losing their minds had to unpack blackness and find out what lay underneath.

It is, however, in Obama’s other book, Audacity of Hope, written in 2006, that Obama truly framed his political ideology and what he understood ailed America at that time.

Obama understood that the administration that would follow the calamitous George W Bush years would have it very hard. And yet, he followed Bush, and to say the journey was tough would be an understatement.

Obama, of course, had two special qualities. His IQ and his ability to speak. Obama’s words, used to frame policy discussions, took him to Oslo, where he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. And yet, he knew that he was not Mandela, he was just beginning his journey on the world stage. But it was that comparison with Mandela and other inspirational leaders of African descent that has had many people asking What did Obama do for Africa?

I say Obama gave Africa its greatest gift: he fixed America.

A fixed America is not only a great gift to Africa, but also to the world. America is the consumer power of the world and that is not just a measure of the American wealth, but of American diversity.

A fixed America has reviewed its policies on Cuba and has set these two countries on a path to better days.

A fixed America reached an agreement with Iran to stop nuclear weapons manufacturing without firing a single bullet (unlike Bush, who went to war trying to accomplish the same thing).

A fixed America continues to have moral authority to speak against Assad, against Turkey, against Burundi, and continues to underwrite so much peace and stability the world over.

Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama. You have made us great. You have reignited the greatness of our heritage.

Diko is the media liaison officer of the Western Cape ANC