MARKETING GHANA: BETWEEN OBAMA, FACEBOOK DEBATES, STRAY COWS AND TOILET WARS!! (Part II)

Barack Obama
I am also one of those Ghanaians who believe that the Obama visit to Ghana has given us a rare opportunity to market this country. The mix of Cape Coast and Obama is unbeatable. On the eve of the Obama visit, Bono the musician said wrote in the New York Times that Ghana is the ‘Birthplace of Cool”. He was right generally; but wrong on specifics. “Cape Coast IS the Birthplace of Cool.” You see, I like Barack Hussein Obama, the most unlikely American president with the most ‘un-American name’ possible and who does not look like the rest of the Presidents on the dollar notes. This man makes it cool to be black, and has even stopped using the rather ridiculously anglicized version of his name “Barry,” which he bore when he played basketball in High School. If he had been from Cape Coast, he still would be “Barry”. Just check out the name my Fante dad gave to me…, and I say this with a smile. Good beads don’t bling… I like that.

I first read about Obama when he became the first black President of the Harvard Law Review. I knew then that this guy was in for big and great things, and probably would become the first black President of the United States. Years later when I watched clips of his ‘audacity of hope’ speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, I was moved to tears. I downloaded that speech from the internet, memorized substantial portions of it, unashamedly plagiarized other portions for my own speeches and writings to the unsuspecting public, and, of course, did not acknowledge my source! What is worse, I smuggled portions of the speech into those of a couple of Ghanaian CEOs who asked me to read over and edit some of their speeches. Guilty as charged. Copying Obama is cool. Cape Coast defines cool… whatever you do to Cape Coast, expect retaliation.

When Obama announced his candidacy for President, I had some doubts as to whether he could make it. It seemed a very long journey. For a while, and although I have no vote in the United States, I put my emotional ‘weight’ behind John Edwards. My friend and classmate, Kofi Dom, could not believe that I was backing Edwards when I was the first person he knew, who owned and had read all of Obama’s two books. My other friend, mate and self-proclaimed ‘son in law’ Abieku Neizer-Ashun in faraway Washington State also felt a tad betrayed because he had bought and brought to me, Obama’s ‘Audacity of Hope’. But my initial lack of confidence in Obama winning the race to the White House was a lack of confidence in my own mind, thus: how on earth would a predominantly white America, vote for a black person as President? After all, it was in North America that I discovered that I was black. For all of the one year that I lived and schooled there, their dogs would sometimes barked at me. I must have looked strange to the canines. When OJ Simpson was engaging in that live, slow car chase with the LAPD in the aftermath of his wife’s murder, drunk Caucasian boys and girls made silly noises and pointed at me, and two other black school mates (one from Barbados and the other from Tanzania), as we made our way to and from the eat-all-you-can-for-four-dollars Chinese food eatery, Buffet Uncle Tong, in downtown Kingston, Ontario.

So I thought I had sufficient basis to mask and cushion what I considered the impending, obvious disappointment of an Obama loss by supporting Edwards. But the watershed and defining moment was when Obama won the Iowa caucuses, because on that night, I swung my voteless, meaningless support behind him. If any black man could win a caucus in the almost lily-white land of corn, beans and steel, otherwise known as Iowa, that person was going to be the next President of America. I stayed up on every primary night to watch him whip Hillary Clinton silly, and then make that beeline for the White House, trampling on a hapless John McCain and a clueless, winking Sarah Palin in the process. I reckon McCain is still wondering what hit him. Palin has never recovered – she just announced a confused resignation as Governor of Alaska. To McCain’s credit, he pulled the highest number of votes for any losing candidate in American electoral history, I hear. But he was up, not against a person; he was up against a movement. Obama’s time had come, and history could not afford to wait for Obama a day longer.

I wept on the dawn when Obama was declared President. I was ashamed that in some way, I had allowed some of the not-too-pleasant aspects of my rather short stay in school in North America to define who I was and what I had become. But my resolve, after watching him deliver that speech in Chicago, was that the mere fact that God gave me more melanin than others, hence my darker skin colour, was no longer an excuse to carry a chip on my shoulder that was the size of Africa – with Madagascar added on for good measure. Not that I have ever sought to make that an excuse, but deep in the recesses of my mind, I still felt quite looked down upon and sometimes patronised by some Caucasians, even friends… sometimes. Often, when you are almost the only black face in a class, meeting, course, seminar or conference, you either shut up and hope to leave unnoticed or feel you have to work or think twice as hard to earn your place. To date, when I enter some shops in some countries, I still feel the eyes of the security personnel trained on me, with some actually following me to ensure that I don’t nick a pen from the shop. I appreciate that maybe some of this is more of my own perception than reality, but that was how I felt. But with Obama’s victory, I would be ashamed of myself to ever feel that way again. The Thousand could not defeat the Thirty… that is the spirit of Cape Coast.