On Nov. 4, 2008, the world was shaken as Barack Obama became the President-Elect of the most powerful nation on Earth. Immediately following the election, I called my home in Cameroon to speak to my brother, whose voice was swallowed by the jubilant crowd celebrating the victory.
In Kenya, home to Obama’s father, a carnival atmosphere erupted. Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki declared a public holiday in honor of Obama’s victory.
Africans certainly know that Obama is a product of the United States, and in their guts they understand that African nations have never been a high priority of American foreign policy.
They must also know that there is no hope for a surge of American generosity, given the state of the U.S. economy. Yet the celebration went on in the cities and the hinterlands of Africa. Why?
For many observers, the answer is simple: Obama is the son of an African man. In fact, that answer is not so simple, given Obama’s complex identity. I think there is a simpler insight to the rhapsodic joy that Africans are feeling.
In electing Obama, a Black man, to the highest office of their land, the people of the United States of America touched something immense yet elusive that lies within the soul of every human being.
That elusive something is what has attracted millions of immigrants to the United States in search of freedom and opportunity.
It is what propelled Obama’s father to leave his home of Kenya for a strange and distant land. It is the thing in the human soul that defies fate.
We see it in the story of Nelson Mandela, who languished in jail for a quarter century while holding his head up, knowing in his soul that one day his people would be free because of the very courage and determination that defined Mandela himself.
That elusive “something” sounded in the penetrating words of Mandela’s reaction to the election of Obama: “Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.”
It is that elusive indwelling spirit that has given life to revolution and reform, mass movements and countless individual acts of courage, defiance, and conscience.
Americans have an expression for this elusive something: “the American dream.” It is what motivates new immigrants to work. It is the heartbeat of free enterprise, the promise of human effort, determination and work.
It is this beautiful song of songs that the practice of apartheid in South Africa, slavery in the United States, the caste system in India, Nazism in Germany, and communism in the Soviet Union strove to destroy.
Obama’s election is a triumph over the forces that would clip the wings of the human soul. In electing Obama as their 44th President, the people of the United States sounded a chord that reverberated with the rest of the world.
Millions of Africans, dreaming of a government that shares their hopes and works to make life better for them, saw that possibility reflected through America’s latest exercise in the art of reinventing and redefining life.
Barack Obama does not merely represent a hero who appears from nowhere to relieve the privileged of the world from their burden of history.
He is a symbol of redemption, of the triumph of the human spirit over fear and fate. He represents the human spirit of liberty, of renewal and rebirth, without which human beings would be little more than animals in the wild. Obama stands for the triumph of freedom, but also of individual and collective effort.
Like a phoenix, the spirit of freedom and self-determination has once again, after an eight-year hiatus, gathered strength in the action of the American people to rise again from the ashes of bigotry, hatred, and intolerance.
Africans celebrate the same triumph of the human spirit that people in places as far-flung as Rome, Sidney, Beijing, Vancouver, Lagos, London, Istanbul, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires are celebrating.
But Africans see a more specific symbolism as well—an Obama capable of cleansing the well of memory poisoned by five hundred years of suffering on a continental scale, which began with slavery and colonialism and continues today with the oppression imposed by African despots who have left young people yearning for something better with only a faded past with nothing uplifting in it for them.
When young Africans look into their past, they see themselves as subjects to one external force after another. Obama has now joined the pantheon of heroes who, like Nelson Mandela, are helping to disinfect the well of memory for future generations of African people.
The African saying that “he is pinned down who pins down another” means that this celebration is equally significant to the ancestors of oppressed Africans as it is to the ancestors of the oppressors.
When no one is pinned down, all are free to soar in the open skies. That is why the election of Barack Obama is a triumph, both for those who have much and for those who have very little.
For the many Africans suffering from corrupt and tyrannical governments, Obama symbolizes a vastly expanded view of what their future may hold.
Dr. Ajume Wingo, a native of Cameroon, is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and an associate of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
