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How will we remember the Luo boy from Kogelo? As more than a mere symbol?

Wednesday January 18 2017

This week, Barack Hussein Obama will walk out of the White House after eight years playing the most powerful man in the world, head of the most powerful empire in the history of that world and the first black man ever to dwell in a residence whose very moniker celebrates whiteness.

He will most probably not ride into the proverbial sunset, because he is still a young man, and his last speech in Chicago suggested he is still full of beans and may cherish a fight or two over issues he may have felt too constrained about while in office but which are accessible to him now that he is unfettered, so to speak.

Of course he has made history, and whoever thinks his was just a colourless cameo appearance or comic relief in the long and uninterrupted power play dominated by white males has got another think coming.

The man shattered the mother of all glass ceilings, in many, many ways, and has established himself as a peerless pioneer (I will not go into the details, but you know where I’m coming from).

Obama’s legacy is already being debated, and it is likely to be debated for a long time. In Chicago the other day, the man really blew his trumpet, which is natural since he could not expect Donald Trump to blow it for him. The president-elect is so busy trashing his predecessor’s record that it is a wonder he does not accuse him of having ordered Pearl Harbour.

I have often said that the Trump crowd is a racist, fascist lot, informed by the racial hatreds of centuries, so that I would not be surprised if at the inauguration on January 20 Klansmen appeared carrying miniature burning crosses. At least, I’m not inventing this association between Trump and the Ku Klux Klan.

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But Obama’s legacy will get knocks from other, unrelated sources, not least among them his own brothers and sisters of colour who think he did precious little to tackle racism and exclusion, and others who think he was the very incarnation of the imperialist bully going around the world indiscriminately bombing and killing innocent children, women and old men in the prosecution of too many ill-defined, hardly attainable wild-goose chases.

Dr Cornel West of Princeton University has been one of the most scathing critics of Obama’s “sad legacy,” describing what he sees as a depressing decline in “the highest office of the most powerful empire in the history of the world.”

West looks in dismay at what he calls the “post-integrity and post-truth world” in which brands and symbols trump (sic) the public good, and where “we are witnessing the postmodern version of the full-scale gangsterisation of the world.”

The vocal academic is not taking prisoners in his tough-love dissection of Obama’s tenure as president and the way his fellow black people have been inclined to treat the first black president: “Mainstream media and academia failed (to see the failures) and most black spokespeople shamelessly defended Obama’s silences and crimes in the name of racial symbolism and their own careerism,” Dr West writes.

He wonders how these same black opinion leaders, who failed to condemn Obama’s silences could find the courage to “speak truth to white power when most went mute in the face of black power. Their moral authority is weak and their newfound militancy is shallow”.

Well. To suggest that Obama’s reign symbolised “black power” may come across as a bit rich, but the point is thereby made.

These view are, of course, a far cry from those which will be expressed by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé, but they should afford us space within which to take the true measure of the man.

The thing about being the first black president is going to be more than mere symbolism. Many more young blacks will feel inspired and emboldened by the Obama story, and they will see the sky as truly the limit to their ambitions.

And, because I know the Trump presidency will be an unmitigated disaster, the Luo boy from Kogelo could easily have his legacy improved by something he does not even do, by someone who hates his guts. Like – you never know, do you? – if Trump were to be impeached over his Russian connection?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]

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