OPINION:If America can make space for a black man called Barack Hussein Obama, hopefully the world can make space for me, and people like me, somewhere other than on the bottom rungs of society, writes Bryan Mukandi.
I HAVE BEEN watching the United States Democratic Party presidential campaign closely since Barack Obama announced his candidacy last year. It was not too long ago that I resigned myself to Hillary Clinton's inevitable nomination. But somewhere along the way, things changed. Obama took the lead. And now, he is his party's presumptive nominee for the presidency of the Unites States.
Not bad for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. His victory is nothing short of historic. I remember listening to George Hook on his radio show last February and hearing him say words to the effect of ". . . but is America ready to elect a black man as president?" Hard as he tried, he did not seem to be able to conjure the picture in his mind. He was not alone. At the time, Clinton had more support in the African-American community than Obama. Part of the reason was that a lot of black people did not think he had a real chance of winning his party's nomination, let alone the presidency.
That background just makes Obama's victory even sweeter. I can only imagine the jubilation, especially among black people in America. It is easy to understand why his victory means so much to them. It also means a lot to black Africans - people like me.
The first real time I got to interact with white people was at my junior school. We lived in a predominantly black neighbourhood. Zimbabwe in the 1980s had a weird form of de facto segregation. People of different races generally did not interact unless it was absolutely unavoidable. I got to go to a school in which only three of the 25 pupils in a class were black. I was a minority at school in a country in which over 95 per cent of the country looked like me.
Over my school career, I was taught to lay down my culture in favour of a supposedly superior one. I was taught that the language we spoke at home was irrelevant and that I had to master English. I was corrected when I pronounced words with a Shona (my native language) accent. At home we ate with our hands while at school that was a punishable offence.
I started seeing "European" culture as something to be aspired to and mine as something to distance oneself from. And these ideas were reinforced every time I turned on the TV. From what I could tell, the people who were best at just about everything did not look or sound like I did. By the time I was ready to start high school, I was, at some level, of the opinion that the ideal, the goal, was "whiteness".
Fortunately, that idea was always challenged. For one thing, my father is a strong, proud man. Like most children, I wanted to be like my dad. So much so, I almost wanted to be him. He was always very comfortable in his skin.
And there were people like John Barnes, Ian Wright and Paul Ince who were skilled, black football players. We watched a lot of English football growing up and it was predominantly white in the late 80s. When black footballers started to come up and do well, that challenged the idea of black inferiority. No matter how small, I personally needed, and maybe even clung on to, any example of black people doing well. I needed to see those examples to validate me and to give me a sense of hope for my own destiny.
I do not think it was just me. At the next football world cup, watch the Africans. It is one of the few times we do not mind being thought of as all being from one country. Everyone rallies behind the African teams and prays that we win the tournament. I think it is because we are hungry for proof that we are as good as anyone else. Whatever small victories we can claim as a race serve as both evidence of our worth, as well as a sign of better days to come.
What Obama has done is more important for people of African descent, and others I am sure, than some may realise. He has implicitly said that barriers that may have existed are either gone or can be overcome. He has cast aside the idea that you need to look a certain way to get to the very top. So much so, I suspect that his nomination will have the same effect as Roger Bannister's four-minute mile in 1954. Prior to this, it was believed that a mile could not be run by a person in under four minutes. Now, running a mile in under four minutes is what is expected of a professional middle-distance athlete.
Giving the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, Obama called on those at the convention to embrace a politics of hope. He invoked the hope of slaves singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting off for distant shores; hope of a naval officer patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds. Most powerfully, Obama, speaking about himself, invoked "the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too".
If America can make space for a man called Barack Hussein Obama, whose father was a Kenyan . . . if he can become the president . . . well, that hopefully means the world can make space for me and people like me somewhere other than on the bottom rungs of society. And if 40 years after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King jnr, America has a very real chance of electing a black man as its president . . . who knows? Africa could well yet have a very bright future.
