Opinions of Monday, 3 September 2007
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
Women's Century
Even as the debate on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) heats up in Ghana, elsewhere around the globe women continue to make history. Here in the United States, the smart money, as it were, is being bet on Mrs. Hilary Rodham Clinton to carry the national electoral mandate and, with the latter, of course, the White House, come Election 2008.
A year ago, I paid a working visit to Washington, D. C., and took a brief time off to see the White House. I did not visit that legendary and august edifice as such; I just stood behind its snow-white-coated walls and peeked across its forecourt lawns with other tourists. The place is a scene to behold at twilight during the summer.
Still, I did not care about it one bit. The White House looked to uncannily manicured, almost clinical to the nauseating point of sterility. Nonetheless, I ventured towards one of its giant front gates, tight security and all, beckoned some colleagues who were visiting with me, and took a “Bushian” posture, two thumbs up and beaming with that famous boyish smile (or is it a smirk?) boomed: “We are making good progress,” to which almost everybody close by exploded with laughter.
The façade also looked quizzically miniature and made me wonder if, indeed, that was the same locale that some forty-odd presidents had lived, across some two-and-a-third centuries and taken decisions that impacted the rest of the world in profound ways.
Well, strange as this may sound, every one of those “Presidents,” a remarkable number of career military generals among them, was a male and, even more tellingly, white or Caucasian. Which is why this year (2007), I have been very enthusiastic about the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama, from the major Mid-Western state of Illinois, whose largest city is the world-famous Chicago, with Springfield being the capital.
Interestingly, both archrivals in the Democratic Party’s race for the presidential nomination are from the State of Illinois; the “windy state,” as it is nicknamed. Actually, Illinois has been nicknamed “Abraham Lincoln’s State,” after President Abraham Lincoln, its most famous citizen and, arguably, the greatest American president of the nineteenth century. Mr. Lincoln is widely associated with the emancipation of enslaved Africans, though the intricate realities of Mr. Lincoln’s personality and temperament tell of quite a different story.
The foregoing notwithstanding, it comes as virtually no shock at all that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are widely reported to be blowing storms against each other(New York Times). This is not the very first time that an African-American male has clashed with a white-American female. Indeed, during the latter-half of the nineteenth century, the white suffragette movement denounced the fact that African-American males, largely in theory, had been accorded the franchise. For in reality, the black-American male remained a virtual legal nonentity until well into the twentieth century, in the wake of the putative Second Civil Rights Revolution and the phenomenal emergence of the immortalized Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the mainstream American political landscape.
Even so, the black man remains, at best, the surrogate of a benevolent patriarchal American society and, at the worst a veritable pariah, a pitiable excuse for manhood in “mainstream” society. And so, Mr. Obama’s yeoman’s decision to seek the proverbial Oval Office is an epic achievement in more ways than one.
For starters, while he is, indeed, not the first African-American to embark on a heroic, and near-quixotic, journey for the presidency – for there have been the likes of Revs. Jesse Jackson and Alford Sharpton; ex-Illinois Senator Carole Mosley Braun and Dr. Alan Keyes – Mr. Obama is putatively regarded as the most serious black candidate to have ever vied for the presidency yet in nearly two-and-half centuries of U. S. political history. No wonder, then that, to-date, Senator Barack Obama is the only one among the Democratic Party candidates for the presidency who has an elaborate detail of United States Secret Service agents.
Mr. Obama also stands head and shoulders above his black predecessors, both literally and figuratively, because he is the only one who is directly descended from a continental African father, from Kenya, and a white mother from the Mid-Western state of Kansas. And so in reality, Mr. Obama may be the very first “African-American” to vie for the U. S. presidency. And this may partly explain the visible unease on the part of a remarkable portion of the African-American populace towards the plausible possibility of the United States having a President Barack Obama in the “White House.”
Thus, an all-too-familiar section of the African-American community appears to have embarked on a caustic and mordant “identity campaign,” seeking to seriously impugn the personal credibility of the candidate, in hopes of derailing his noble and enviable political ambition. Call it “Colored-on-Black Racism,” dear reader, and you would not be wide of the mark. For these “Derail Obama” scam-artists, the fact that the Illinois senator is married to a bona fide – jigaboo – African-woman, and has actively represented inner-city blacks in court and in their communities, appears to be practically of no moment. Needless to say, beneath the surface of raw and shameless envy of his detractors, lurks a deep-seated inferiority complex; and it likely was the latter canker that prompted Dr. Alan Keyes to earlier on attempt to derail Mr. Obama’s run for the U. S. Senate, by Dr. Keyes temporarily vacating his permanent residency in the State of Maryland in order to challenge Mr. Obama “at the behest” of some cynical operatives of the Republican Party.
In the end, though, while he seems very likely to win a decent proportion of the votes in the Democratic Party primaries, due to begin early next year or sometime late this year, Mr. Obama is highly unlikely to clinch his party’s mandate or presidential candidacy. For the traditional narrative of mainstream American political accommodation of the ethnic minority is hierarchically pyramidal, with the white man at the apex, the white woman nearer still, the black man fuzzily positioned somewhere in the middle, and the “broad-necked” black woman bringing up the rear, or base, as it were.
Indeed, the presidential candidacy of Mrs. Hilary Clinton reminds one, in Ghana, of ex-President Rawlings’ alleged cavalier attempt to crown his wife a presidential candidate of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). The main distinction, and a significant one at that, though, is the fact that unlike Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, Mrs. Clinton was an accomplished civil rights attorney and a firebrand politician in her own right long before deciding to gun for the White House. Her very genetic makeup is out-and-out political, having been born the daughter of Mr. Hugh Rodham, an immortalized Democratic Party institution in the state of Illinois. And to be certain, legend has it that it was, indeed, Mr. Rodham who groomed his beloved son-in-law for local and gubernatorial politics, long before the celebrated Hope, Arkansas native became one of the greatest contemporary tenants of the White House.
This story, though, was originally intended to celebrate the first indigenous South African woman to qualify as an air force pilot. Ms. Phetogo Molawa, 21, a flight-lieutenant, recently completed her pilot-training course for the South African National Defense Force, perhaps the best institution of its kind on the African continent.
In an interview that Flt.-Lt. Molawa granted her country’s local media during a recent flight show, the South African Air Force pioneer quipped: “I wanted to show other young women that [we] can do what men can do” (BBC-World Service Website 8/16/07).
Interestingly, there are reportedly quite a remarkable number of women generals in the South African army, but none of the blacks among their ranks has piloting experience.
I stand to be corrected, but in Ghana yours truly knows not of a single woman air force pilot, let alone a Ghanaian woman commercial pilot. Then again, who said Ghanaians, perforce, ought to have an especial monopoly on pioneering, continental African achievements?
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
