What Obama Means to the World: The Nation
Friday, January 23, 2009 at 9:49PM (text edit)
Marion Johns, wearing an Obama badge, walks by an American flag put up in central Kisumu, Kenya, Monday, Nov. 4, 2008. For most of the last century, progressives and the oppressed around the world have looked to black America as a beacon--the redemptive force that stood in permanent dissidence against racism at home and imperialism abroad. "No African came in freedom to the shores of the New World," wrote nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. "The Negro transmits to his descendants at birth the external mark of his ignominy. The law can abolish servitude, but only God can obliterate its traces." That "external mark" has acted like a passport to an outside world that ostensibly distinguishes black America from the rest of the country and its policies.
When Kwame Nkrumah came to power in a newly independent Ghana, he sent for black American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois to edit the Encyclopedia Africana and Paul Robeson to take up the chair of music and drama at Accra University. Even as colonial France massacred Algerians by the score, it opened its arms wide to the likes of Josephine Baker, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. For some time during the 1980s and '90s, Jesse Jackson acted as a rogue ambassador, parachuting into trouble spots and freeing hostages. more
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