SINS OF OUR FATHERS

The world should have taken notice when Barack Obama penned a fabulous autobiographical account of a journey in search of a father he knew little about. In Kenya, he discovered his Old Man through the varied recollections of siblings, aunties and uncles. These tales exposed to him an African variant of the great American dream, that oft-cited spur for grandiose achievement by citizens of the US.

It seems likely that young Obama placed one vision alongside the other and asked himself the engaging question: What happens to a dream deferred?

The title of his book called to mind, therefore, an inheritance yet unclaimed. Though his Kenyan odyssey revealed to him a raisin roasting in the sun, the soreness of his father’s failings was the spring board for Barack Obama’s engagement with America, Little wonder he took to public service: to give- unlike his free spending father- not money that he did not have, but empathy for the down trodden and organisational skills for the alleviation of their common poverty. And so he triumphed, and brought a modern African tang to a stale American ethic.

What a challenge his story poses then for the youths of our continent as MacMillan’s “wind of change” coasts to a fateful tryst with the history books. Since the year 2010 came into reckoning, the din of festive cheers has been sweeping through Africa like one huge carnival dance. Still, one hears through the revelry and all, not boastful shouts of victory alone but sighs of wistful loss and grunts of despair. Soft applause reaching the ears salutes not the agile progress of Africa but the wiry faith of its suffering peoples.

This explains the spate of blatant cynicism that welcomed the golden jubilee celebrations of independence here in Nigeria. From Tunis to Lusaka, Nouakchott to Mogadishu, this attitude was replicated all over as the children of Africa scoffed at the paltry gains of national independence. The harvest was lean but the elements were not entirely to blame. Rather, the farm managers had sown their thieving hands and left the barns bereft of crops.

While the sour mood lasted, it was somewhat interesting to see private individuals celebrate their birthdays and other anniversaries with great jubilation and perverse sense of accomplishment. Balanced against their vociferous opposition to the federal government’s independence jamboree, the evident relish with which a particular media house reported the 50^th birthday bash of the wife of their proprietor, a former governor of Lagos, could only be described as farcical. With a typical penchant for enthroning ostentation over propriety, nobody bothered to ask the obvious questions about the probity of this extreme show of affluence. But that is really by the way. 

“Wind of change” aptly described the tide of nationalist agitation that swept through Africa by the end of the Second World War.  The triumph of the Allied Powers had proved conclusively that no race could lord it over another without question anymore. Decolonisation seemed the right price therefore for the contribution of the colonies to Allied victory. Yet, the new helmsmen to steer the ships of nationhood did not quite grasp the nuances of their task. They had flag independence like many a chartered vessel plying the high seas and nothing more besides. The destination of the ship and its motley cargo was much beyond their control.

Under their watch then, the continent regressed to a new era of rabid ethnic rivalries which colonialism had helped put at bay, though the colonists were not averse to exploiting these cleavages to advantage. Consequently, Africa suffered a second storm of oppression by internal colonists and home grown slave masters from which it is yet to be fully liberated. The post independence history of Africa bears out this fact. Nearly every nation south of the Sahara has tasted of the bitter gall of civil strife and quite a number are still enmeshed in war.

All over Africa, the great dream of independence was fostered on ambition alone: to take the place of the colonial overlord and become the new masters of the land- or “white man in black skin” as Augustus Adebayo puts it in a soul searching autobiography of the same title. Obama fights shy of reaching a similar conclusion, but the dreams of his father suffer a similar tragedy. The Old Man sought redemption in a painful refusal to sell his soul to the demons of compromise. But his defeat was the more damning when he succumbed to shallow pessimism.  

Thus, the sins of the independence struggle have left Africa nations gasping hard on the marathon trail of growth and development. The transgressions of our fathers constitute the dubious legacy of the present generation of African leaders. The challenges are enormous; to vacate the errors of the past and march to a new era of people oriented policies, transparency and accountability in government.

The old mind set remains and will not disappear soon as evidenced by squabbles in our country over the rotation of the presidency among the different zones of the country. The worship of false values, the mindless exhibition of ill-gotten wealth, the frivolous flaunting of social and political connections for its own sake, these persist as indicators of a continuing lack of focus and disconnect by the elite. But the question will not go away and will be ever relevant, perhaps till the end of time.

Shall we abandon the dreams of nationhood because of the sins of our fathers?