I was probably the only journalist in Ghana who refused to be wowed by President’s Obama’s beautiful speech in Accra, during his July 10-11, 2009 trip to Ghana. In the article I wrote to welcome him, Welcome, Emperor Obama, I said: “It is true that things have changed, and that the United States now boasts a black president, but, given its history of violence against the non-white world, the onus is upon the U.S. to prove its sincerity. Africa has been treated very badly by the U.S., and this is a fact that must be strongly brought home to the visiting Emperor.
It remains both a mystery and an irritation why Western commentators always omit the role the West played (and continues to play) in the morass in which Africa presently finds herself. Our continent was just emerging from the serious dislocations of four centuries of slavery when European cartographers sat down in Berlin and sundered our societies into colonies. And just seven years after independence, the West (led by the U.S.) ganged up to remove all the progressive leaders in Africa – Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, et al. In their places, they placed reprobate Quislings who sold Africa down the drain. Today, they deride us as non-achievers.
Our leaders ought no longer be satisfied with smiles and sanctimonious and totally meaningless platitudes, even if offered by a US president who happens to be black.
It is true that President Obama is handsome, urbane, very articulate, and has a wholesome family, but does he truly represent a paradigm shift in US thinking vis-à-vis the non-white world? His record so far in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan does not suggest that there is going to be any radical shift in US imperial and arrogant dealings with the non-white world.
The truth is that the worst enemy of the U.S. is its foreign policy, and our leaders should demand a total reassessment of our neo-colonial relationship with that imperial power.
It is true that Brother Obama brought a whiff of inviting, cool and fresh air, necessary to purify the nauseating and very odious effluence of Bush and his nasty gang of neocons, but the only changes that Obama has wrought so far are cosmetic at best. Zimbabwe continues to be sanctioned, even after it has satisfied demands for an inclusive government. Afghans, Pakistanis and Yemenis continue to be needlessly massacred by American war machines. The rape of our resources by American corporations continues unabated.
Instead of dancing for joy because the US Emperor came to town, Ghanaian leaders should have presented the American leader with a long list of demands. These should have included demand for reparation for slavery, of which the U.S. remains the biggest benefactor. It should also have included demand for reparation for the February 24, 1966, coup that the Kennedy and Johnson regimes instigated and financed to topple Kwame Nkrumah’s government. It should have included demand for the return of Ghana’s Atomic Reactor that the Americans took away after the coup. Electricity blackout would have been a thing of the past in Ghana, were the ambitious atomic energy programmes of Nkrumah not truncated by agents of the US government. It should have included a threat to drag the U.S. before the International Criminal Court for the overthrow of a legitimately-elected government of Ghana, if adequate compensation is not paid. It should have included demand for the return of the oil rigs the Americans took away from Ghana – also after the 1966 coup. It should have included demand for compensations for families of the victims of the CIA-instigated coup. Our leaders should boldly demand that Emperor Obama apologize to us for the crimes of slavery his nation committed against us. Thy also should insist that reparations be paid to us the way it was paid to the Jews. They should demand from Emperor Obama pledges that his country will stop negatively impacting our lives through its selfish interventions and policies.” Continue reading
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