KAMALA HARRIS AT ROOTS
Okello Oculi expressed mixed feelings over Kamala’s visit to Africa
The African-American presidential candidate, who settled for the post of Vice President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris, came visiting one of her ancestral gene pool on her father’s side, Africa. Her father is a Jamaican professor of Chemistry. As a critic of America’s war in Vietnam, he met a female protester from India on the street of revolution in Berkeley, California.
She joins General Colin Powel in travelling along an ancentral journey which started from the African Diaspora in Jamaica and climb to topmost spheres of American public service. It would have been fitting if her father had travelled in the tourist wing of her delegation.
She also followed in the footsteps of Barack Obama, an earlier African Diaspora tossed by a historical hurricane on to the presidency of that land of immigrants. In following Obama’s road, her first call was Ghana, the country of Kwame Nkrumah who, in 1957, proclaimed the militant historical law that Ghana’s independence would not be complete if any part of Africa is still under colonial domination.
There was speculation that Obama shared that vision of a united and free Africa. It came as a sobering shock when Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, invaded Libya during which Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was assassinated.
Worse still, for Africa, the vast military arsenal accumulated by Gaddafi was thrown open and his enemies, AL QAEDA and ISIS, surged with them across the Sahara Desert and harm West Africa with mass slaughter and block the region’s development.
Gaddafi had been vigorously angling for becoming the first president of a Unites States of Africa. He pushed President Olusegun Obasanjo in Nigeria, and President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, to resist his political energy and settle for a evolution of African diplomacy from the limited vision of an Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to the symbolically bolder cap of ‘’African Union (AU)’’.
With vast earnings from a bottomless oil pot, Gaddafi was buying diplomatic support by paying salaries for civil servants in several member states of ECOWAS; building mosques as far south as Uganda; pushing Idi Amin to break his alliance with Israel; buying a leading hotel in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, and suspected of urging Arabs to regain power in Zanzibar. The Obama presidency saw him to be as competitive as CHINA.
Kamala Harris met a chorus of demands for choosing the security of Sahelian Africa to America’s obsession with Ukraine as a cobra for pouring venom into Russia’s body politic. Ugandans expected her to apologise for a Black American ambassador colluding in Idi Amin’s 1971 military coup which slaughtered over 300,000 civilians. That blunted her call for ‘’Democracy Americana’’.
Her push for women’s participation in governance as leaders; and creativity by women and Africa’s youth in the digital economic sphere, was welcomed enthusiastically.
Her celebrating Ghana’s push for attracting the African Diaspora to return to hug their roots was timid. At a time when President Biden is drawing Australia into a Nuclear War Democracy alliance, she was silent over Genocide against Afro-Australians by immigrants from Europe. The current government in Australia is backing public call for acknowledging Afro-Australians in the country’s constitution.
She also failed to acknowledge the first Afro-Colombian woman being elected as Vice President on her merit as a fighter for liberation for her people and women in general. Cuba has actively promoted such change across South America: from Peru on the Pacific Ocean coast to Brazil on the Atlantic Ocean coast. History waits for Kamala Harris’ contribution to the liberation of her African Diaspora kith and kin.
She avoided Nigeria and Democratic Republic of Congo where Islamic terrorists armed by NATO’ with Gaddafi’s weapons, continue to slaughter African peoples. A United Nation’s report accused 300 Euro-America’s multinational companies of financing terrorism in DRC.
Her visit to Tanzania and Zambia had echoes of Chinaphobia. When Boers in apartheid South Africa closed road and railway routes for Zambia to export its copper and import consumer goods, both Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia turned to China to build the TAZARA railway line to find an alternative exit for Zambia’s economy. This was at a time when the United States was supporting a ‘’crime against humanity’’ inside South Africa and Namibia.
This is the diplomatic equivalent of irate supporters of Donald Trump invading and desecrating America’s parliament building. Coming like a woman hawking cup-fuls of friend groundnuts on grounds where Africa’s most exceptional leaders confronted an international cabal of parasites on Africa’s natural resources and de-humanisers of Africa’s peoples.
Obama shook Raul Castro’s hand at Mandela’s funeral. It was a tribute to Fidel Castro’s support for the war against Boers. It is yet dawn for her relating with Africa.
Prof Oculi writes from Abuja
