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A great advance – and a return to basics

Thursday, July 16, 2009

AN IMAGE FOR THE CENTURIES occurs today.  One of Africa’s millions of scattered sons, one who now leads this “nation of immigrants”, will address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s one-hundredth-year convention.

And President Barack Obama’s appearance follows fast on his solemn visit to Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle, with its grim “Door of No Return” overlooking the Atlantic. This was the dispatch-point in the seventeenth century and long afterward for enslaved human exports to “The New World” – a point from where, as he said himself, “the African-American journey began”. 

 

The Obama daughters (descendants themselves of transported slaves, of course) stepped through that doorway and, in a moment saturated with symbolism, walked back through it just as easily.

 

The President spoke of that symbolism just before leaving, and voiced his conviction that despite humankind’s capacity for such evil as the Castle once represented, “the winds always blow in the direction of human progress”.

 

In New York’s midtown Hilton Hotel (a far cry from the Cooper Union building downtown, where the first NAACP meeting was held in 1909) Obama will be speaking, his hosts have been assuring us, of just how far Americans of African descent have come. Gerald Stansbury, NAACP president in Maryland says Obama has shown “what African-Americans can do, and that it pays off to stay forthright in the struggle”.

 

It’s certainly worth pausing an hour, even for hardened and cynical media operatives, just to take in and fully register this extraordinary social and political advance. Today’s scene will be a profound expression in itself of that unavoidable “arc of history” to which Obama himself repeatedly alludes, borrowing from speeches and sermons by Martin Luther King Jr.

 

As ever, though, we can be wary of getting carried away.  Helpfully enough, Eric Holder, already an Attorney General who’s proving appropriately independent of the chief executive who appointed him (on issues like torture, as well as what he called our national “cowardice” on racial matters) told the same convention earlier this week: "We must resist the temptation to conclude that our nation has fulfilled its promise of equality based on one moment or on one election". And of course he meant the triumph of November 4th, 2008.

   

 

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TWO OF OBAMA’S FELLOW-PRESIDENTS from Ghana’s neighbors, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia (the continent’s first elected female head of state) addressed the convention yesterday - he in person, she via video. Not, of course, that you’d know that from America’s mainstream media and their very parochial coverage.

 

The African leaders were in part responding to the message Obama delivered in their region last week. Their words were generally warm, but they didn’t completely hide some bristling over what many of Africa’s own progressive commentators have called Obama’s “tough love” attack on corruption across the continent, and on “those who use coups or change constitutions to stay in power”.

 

Unreservedly welcome, though, was the emphatic tilting that Obama proclaimed in US aid for African development, toward using a newly-increased  $3.5 billion package to encourage (quite literally) home-grown solutions to poverty.

 

For far too long agriculture, as a mode for African development, has been allotted a decidedly secondary place (in spite much fashionable talk about promoting indigenous answers) to industrialization and “free market” commerce, which have long seemed more exciting to many technocrats.

 

In a quite startling return to basics, using phraseology indeed that harkened right back to the optimistic 1970s, Obama said: “There is no reason why Africa cannot be self-sufficient when it comes to food”.

 

As someone who’s written about, and repeatedly filmed projects (sometimes hopeful, sometimes pathetically doomed) that were aiming to boost development in many of Africa’s fifty-three countries, I cannot voice strongly enough my own welcome for a fresh emphasis on mostly small-scale agriculture. I welcome it most of all - to run into an almost inescapable turn of phrase - for its down-to-earthedness.

 

I know someone else who will be glad for the simple human realism evident in America’s newly-enunciated policy. Ghana’s most globally famous son, Kofi Annan, when he was Secretary General of the United Nations, responded with gratifying enthusiasm to a messaging effort that I had been been working on for a long time, along with Annan’s main speechwriter, Edward Mortimer. We wanted the West’s efforts at helping Africa to be centered on forming partnerships with (in our words) “the African farmer, and her husband”.

 

When Annan first started to employ that previously uncommon terminology, it was striking and heartening to see his international audiences react, as they took in - perhaps not instantly, but with growing understanding - this clear, ground-level picture of Africa’s reality.
 

 

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