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I had a JFK moment while watching President Obama’s inauguration last month. Not that I was born when the man who carried the hopes of a nation, if not the world, was assassinated, but those who were say they will never forget where they were, and what they were doing.
A Westerner three months in from London, I was sitting with Ethiopian friends (a mixture of Jews, Christians and Muslims) in a Bur Dubai apartment, smoking Shisha, eating injera. I couldn’t not help but be aware of the time; the place; the moment; of history being made.
In the wider socio-political context, the world’s hopes and fears rest on this man’s shoulders.
The hopes of millions of displaced, warring, starving, marginalised, terrorised and diseased people in Zimbabwe, DR Congo, Israel/Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Guantanamo et al rest on the success of the administration’s foreign policy.
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The fear of failure though engenders in me a certain cynicism – ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ attitude – and disbelief that in a world riven by religious and racial bigotry and ignorance, a black man now holds the most powerful office in the world.
Yet more learned people than me are going with it; believing it.
African scholar Ali Mazrui notes that Obama, the son of a Kenyan man and a Kansan woman, would not have got to the White House without an ‘exceptional level of trust from white Americans’, and that he has ‘a remarkable capacity to transcend historical racial divides’, and is a ‘potential icon of a post-racial age which is unfolding before our eyes’.
Can one man change so many lives for the better? I’m going to hang on to Mazrui’s words of hope and belief, because he has to.
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