Barack Obama did not choose Ghana at random for his first step in Africa: it is for him to pay tribute to the great seniors while officially sounding the death knell for fantasy, long maintained in the black American community, of a return to the native country.
The speech of Barack Obama during his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa a few weeks ago, marked by his firmness towards African complaints in matters of corruption, health irresponsibility, bellicism and third-world posture, was greeted for his ethics of responsibility. We were far from the hysteria which had accompanied the trip of President Clinton in 1998 ; dressed in Kente (traditional habit), the latter had praised the Ghanaian nation with lyricism, spearhead of a “ African Renaissance ». Commentators agree to see in this new tone towards Africa the freedom of speech allowed to a president of Kenyan origin who would speak “ to his family So and say things without frills, as we speak with family. Except that Obama is not really African, and that Ghana is not completely Africa.
First nation of black Africa to free itself from the British yoke in 1957, the former Gold Coast became a symbol of emancipation for blacks around the world and particularly for Africans-Americans. Kwame N’Krumah, father of independence and a Pan -African hero, indeed offered to a black America which began his struggle for the recognition of his rights a glimmer of hope and a justification of their commitment: the black people could undo their oppressors.
N’krumah, who studied Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, quickly understood the strength of a “ black »Beyond the Atlantic. He immediately received an echo in the United States: in his church in Montgomery, the young pastor Martin Luther King greeted the birth of this Ghanaian nation with emphasis, comparing N’krumah to Moise and identifying the American struggle for civil rights with that, anti-colonial and victorious, new emancipated. Obama also recalled this 1957 speech during his speech, to evoke the great hopes aroused then by Ghana. But if we understand that these hopes born at independence have remained unanswered, those who must draw the lessons are not, as suggested by Obama’s overwhelmed discourse, only Africans. With his usual practice of double voice and the implementation, Barack Obama says indeed without saying what each black American knows full well: that Ghana is a broken dream for the Africans-Americans themselves. Ghana represents since its birth a utopia for the blacks of America since its birth, which no doubt justifies that this country was chosen for this first official visit. Bout of black earth beyond the seas, it was also an African-American protectorate, like the cemeteries of Omaha Beach are an extraterritorial piece.
But precisely because he is African-American, the new president intends to destroy such a chimera for good. He is thus careful not to quote the end of Doctor King’s speech, when the latter called for his followers to leave for Ghana in order to bring the Brother country to the help of the development. If he visits the essential “ Return door », Place of memory of slavery, Obama hardly goes to the grave of Web Dubois, statue of the revered commander of the black cause which, out of disgust for America, decided in the early sixties to come and settle in Ghana and died there. They were also tens of thousands of African Americans who in turn left in this new promised land, from Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Muhammad Ali to Henry Louis Gates, Kwame Appiah or Sadiya Hartman, prestigious academics today. Some remained, many returned. Gates tells with a bitter laugh how the new pilgrims who had when they arrived threw their passport to the sea in a ceremony “ Back to Mother Earth », Were surprised a fortnight later flirting with the sand in order to restore the document essential to return to the United States. Because the pan -African mirage of return to the roots long fire: the socialist development model dear to wood gave way to the corruption and authoritarianism of N’krumah. The blacks of America were not welcomed as a brothers but in “ Obruni “(White foreigners) who came to teach the Ghanaians about what black identity was, made for them of Ashantis legends and the trauma of deportation. Their hosts dream of making the opposite way and, each year, they are cohorts to hurry in front of the American embassy to Accra to be able to emigrate to the United States. The desire to “ back From these distant cousins of the diaspora seems to them very incongruous.
However, Ghana and its Ministry of Tourism in the first place have been constantly constantly presenting their country as a new Israel for black Americans, selling turnkey of organized trips entitled “ return to roots Who are very successful in the streets of Chicago or Philadelphia. For wood, famous naturalized, all black from America has obtained its Ghanaian passport in a turmoil. In search of their stolen memory, tourists are entitled in addition to the organized visit to the traffic places, restored and arranged for them (to the chagrin of those who cry out disneyification these places of death), at ceremonies “ ancestral Before going through the souvenir shop.
In recent years, this “return journey” has been returning to a success never found since Marcus Garvey, African-American nationalist militant had called in the 1920s to “ to return In Africa and created its own line of transatlantic ships for this. Indeed, thanks to a democratization of tests DNA promising to genetically identify the African line whose black Americans are the descendants (who responds opportunely to the quest for memory of many of them) tens of thousands of African-Americans “ re-discover Africans. Although the scientific validity of such tests -Lucratives for these media laboratories – are discussed, many think of recovering their spoiled identity. The genetic illusion therefore confirms the political myth.
The Americans who have lived there since the sixties or those who have tried the experience of expatriation can only recognize the illusion which was theirs: they are not or more Africans and there is much more than the Atlantic between “ Mother Earth And the native land. It is therefore a taste of bitterness that Ghana left the blacks of America. This perhaps explains the enigmatic sentence of Barack Obama who welcomes herself to show his daughters the slave ports in the same way as he did it European concentration camps.
Martin Luther King understood this and warned Africans-Americans. “” We are not African He said and the promised land, OUR Earth is here. The illusion has had its time, and Obama calls black Americas like Africans to wake up from their dated dreams and, far from proposing like King the help of America, it sounds the death knell for Irenism and now Sums Africa to take control of its destiny.
Photo: capture of the speech video. Source: http: //www.whitehouse.gov/…