It is disappointing, that by all accounts in his entire election campaign, Barack Obama failed to address, let alone empathise with, voters whose ancestors were forced to sacrifice their lives to build America.
Indeed and with respect, I have to point out that as a doctorate researcher in race relations at Oxford, I was exposed to the fact that there would never have been an America, as we know of it today, had it not been for the ‘manifest destiny’ of the early settlers to annihilate the indigenous Americans and to subject African slaves to what has been acknowledged in some circles as a ‘continuing holocaust’.
Obama as the very first black or ‘coloured’ US president, in fact, also represents these communities and with the massive hands-on an grassroots campaign he orchestrated with the support of the ‘liberal left’, he had the historical opportunity to get ‘real’ with the descendants of the ‘white’ settlers in acknowledging the blood, sweat and tears of these communities in the building of America.
This is all the more important because of the unprecedented circumstances under which these developments took place which are rarely mentioned and therefore unknown by most other Americans.
For instance, my erstwhile fellow St Antony’s College predecessor, Eric Williams (later a president in the West Indies) pointed out in his Oxford doctorate thesis that ‘Thanksgiving’, possibly the most important American festival observed, was, in fact, remembering and recognising that the indigenous ‘Indians’ shared their corn with the settlers when the latter’s harvest totally failed and without which the latter themselves would have perished.
Unfortunately, the settlers soon went on to demand the ‘Indians’ give up their lands to the former for large-scale agricultural development to which the latter in turn offered to share their lands. But his was totally rejected and the settlers decided it was their ‘manifest destiny’ to annihilate the ‘Indians’.
As for slavery, it is now well-established that American slavery was the worst the world had ever known. This is obviously not the place to attempt any detailed analysis, but suffice to broadly distinguish between the impact on the slaves themselves, and that of the institution of slavery.
To those captured, it was the pathetic scenario of being forced to enter the ‘door of no return’ from Africa to America and for men and women to be subject to extreme conditions of mental, psychological, and physical conditions under circumstances of dire and absolute economic and social deprivation. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, the plight of descendants especially still in US ghettos today can best be described as one of a continuing holocaust.
Finally Obama would have done well to explain that the much touted abolition of slavery for which a civil war was fought between the US Northern and Southern states was not simply to free the slaves themselves as individuals as such but rather to ‘free’ them so that they could provide the much demanded unskilled labour force to man the industrialisation of the Northern states.
It is still not too late for Obama to make provision, in the name of truth and reconciliation, to set up special institutions to dramatically try to reconstruct the neglect of the past in his assuming the presidency of the US.
