03 November 2008 Posted on BlackState 03 November 2008
Oh what curious logic the cosmos bring. Near the end of his life Dr. Martin Luther King gave to the world a theological arrow to launch from global bows when he said: “the arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
When one watches the morphing relationships between the colonizers and the formerly colonized, justice often takes the form of treating the representatives of the former ruling class with the same dismissive contempt that frequently was heaped on the “inferior peoples” which Rudyard Kipling, among others, saw as subjects to be forever guided, pets and beasts to be corralled, a mission inherited as “the white man’s burden.”
In a strange moral retribution for the oppressive treatment heaped by the United States and Great Britain upon freedom fighters Paul Robeson and Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), the east African nation of Kenya saw fit on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 saw fit to deport the author of a derogatory book about Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama.
Obama is tremendously popular in Kenya, not only because his late father was a Kenyan who emigrated to the U.S. in 1959 to pursue an education, but also has earned respect from his father’s country folk because he has actually tried to mediate opposing electoral forces in current Kenya.
The Kenyan government immigration official in charge of investigations stated that Jerome Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D. who wrote The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, was picked up on the day he was to begin his book tour in Kenya. The immigration department detained Corsi at its headquarters, held his U.S. passport, and brought him to Jomo Kenyatta Airport for deportation.
The ostensible reason for this eviction—he did not have a work permit.
This rationale is rife with irony since the British government used the labor of Kenyans with little reimbursement since the area which was called Kenya was formed by carving the boundaries of what would become the nation of Kenya had been drawn by colonial powers during the "scramble for Africa" in the 1880s. Colonial lines brought together different tribes, cultures, and languages into what would become one nation, and these lines also divided particular tribal lands between what would become one country and another Drawn by the access to almost free labor, the white population of Kenya grew from 3175 in 1911 to 9650 in 1921 and to 12,529 in 1926.
Kenya’s nationalist leader, Jomo Kenyatta fought for independence from the 1920’s until the county became a republic in 1964. Kenyatta described his Kikuyu consciousness as derivative of looking towards the sky topped mountains which sloped toward the many various tribes which he had to organize.” They looked up at heaven and could see it was far away, sloping gradually down until it rested upon some hills or mountains, and to them that was the end of the world. As to their mode of government, they managed their affairs on a tribal basis. Each tribe had its chiefs or its councils of elders, and its seers and diviners to conduct the affairs of peace and war.”
Kenyatta’s victory was hard won. Although most Kenyans now view him as the father of their county hence the name of the airport for him, which saw Corsi off to the U.S., most whites in Kenya feared him. He served several years in prison for allegedly leading the Mau Mau, a revolutionary fighting group, which used brutal force to free their land. A year before Kenyatta’s release from prison in 1961, one of the last white Kenya Governors called Kenyatta, a “leader of darkness and death.”
Yet strangely enough, when Kenya was freed from colonialism, Kenyatta did not seek to make himself a despot—unlike many leaders, which the United States has supported.
Howard Zinn elaborates on many examples of this tendency of this republic which is supposedly committed to “liberty and justice for all” in his best-selling A People’s History of the United States. Zinn notes that Ferdinand Marcos, head of the Phillipines imprisoned ten of the twenty-one losing opposition candidates after the 1978 National Assembly elections. Yet then President Carter supported granting 300 million dollars in military aid after these unjust jailings.
Zinn also notes that the Shah of Iran who was supported for years by the United States massacred hundreds of demonstrators in September of 1978 who resented the Shah’s dictatorship. When the Shah fled to the U.S. and Iranian militants demanded that the Shah be sent back to stand trial, the militants escalated their tactics to hold fifty-two U.S. embassy employees hostage.
Rather than attempt to mediate the crisis, President Carter decided to punish innocent Iranian students in the U.S. who may have not had the opportunity to upgrade their immigration status—they were processed quickly for deportation.
No slight irony here since Obama’s own father was able to come here on a student visa, hence his son’s celebratory status around the world. Perhaps a future Iranian leader was kicked out in the purge—a man or woman who might serve as a mediator today in the current crisis in Iran! Cut off your nose to spite your face.
In another quirk of scholastic fate, Jomo Kenyatta as a student shared an apartment in the 1930’s with Paul Robeson, the world famous actor, singer and activist who had come to London, where he "felt at home," and began to take an interest in Africa and its own problems. He, like other progressives became increasingly depressed by the Western attitude of "gradualism." George Delf wrote in Jomo Kenyatta: Towards Truth about "The Light of Kenya” that “ the colonial powers estimated that, as they themselves had spent about a thousand years becoming civilized, it would require about the same time for the colonies to become ripe for independence.”
Kenyatta and Robeson weren’t having it. The American singer liked the struggle of American blacks to free themselves from Jim Crow to the efforts of Kenyan natives to farm their own lands. Delf notes that Robeson encouraged the militant approach that the Mau Mau took by quoting to Kenyatta a speech by Toussaint L'Ouverture to his Haitian rebels: "My children, France comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvest, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man the hell he comes to make!"
Robeson’s strident demands for colonial liberation continued with his mounting perception that the Soviet Union was not necessarily the evil force many perceived but a force trying to build a federation of equal peoples advancing together for a common goal.”
This was too much for J. Edgar Hoover, head of the F.B.I. In July of 1950, acting on orders from Hoover, F.B.I. agents went to Robeson’s home in New York to pick up his passport. Unlike Corsi, he didn’t get it back the next day. Robeson was unable to travel to Kenya or any of the other colonies he embraced to his heart until 1958 when the Supreme Court restored his passport.
A spiritual descendent of Robeson, Kwame Ture, who was known as Stokely Carmichael in his earlier years as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee, one of the main civil rights organizations active in the South in voter registration efforts in the ‘60s encountered similar brutal treatment by the British Government in 1967.
Ture spoke to an audience of African and Caribbean immigrants in July, 1967 as part of a conference on “The Dialectics of Liberation” The audience was fascinated, in some part, by his linkages of the American Southern experience with freedom fighters in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But true to his organizational focus, Ture met mostly with students, white, black, and Asian in London to encourage communities to attempt to speak with unified voice on some issues—as Barack Obama has attempted to do in Kenya and the United States.
A few days later, an order was delivered to Kwame Ture declaring him persona non grata, ordering him out the country. Kwame must be smiling now at the Kenyan government’s swift kick to the posterior of Corsi. He would probably enjoy the paradox of his ejection from Great Britain by the Labor government—the order was signed by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins—an avowed socialist. One of the chief claims Corsi makes in his book is that Barack Obama is a socialist.
When Ture left Great Britain, he decided to visit Cuba and Vietnam On his way to a stopover in Madrid, Spain the Cuban government got word to him that the U.S. government was waiting for him to seize his passport and escort him back to the U.S. in chains. Even Corsi had no chains on him when he left Kenya.
Corsi makes many untrue statements about Obama’s history and beliefs. Perhaps the most absurd is that Obama’s efforts in Kenyan politics has roots in his desire to continue as U.S. President to take sides in the recent Kenyan election which was preceded by violence between two tribes the Kikuyu and the Luo, the tribe of Obama’s late father.
But this does not jive with Corsi’s declaration that Obama is a secret Muslim since the Luo are overwhelmingly Christian. Obama’s renown with the ruling Kikuyu tribe is attested to by the fact that the government, which expelled Corsi, is led by a Kikuyu, President Mwai Kibaki who signed into law in March 2008 two constitutional amendments, which mandated shared power with opposition leader Raila Odinga.
It is pathetic that in a year in which the Nobel Peace Prize was granted to former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari who was cited for his work in negotiating peace between sworn enemies and resolving disputes involving matters of ethnicity, religion and race that similar diplomatic efforts by Obama must meet with such contempt by a “learned” political scientist like Corsi.
Perhaps Paul Robeson and Kwame Ture watched Corsi’s expulsion from Kenya with smiles beaming above the “heavens which spread over the sky topped mountains which sloped toward the many various tribes which Kenyatta had to organize.” No passport needed.
Pay For What You're Reading! Support the creators, support the artist by
giving to BlackState. Give Us 5! Give 5 to BlackState and BlackState will
keep delivering to you the good stuff that no one else can, not BET, not BlackPlanet,
not BlackVoices. For About The Cost of a Magazine You Can Keep BlackState Alive!
Become a Citizen of Blackstate.com
Get Email Updates, Exclusive and Controversial BlackState Content, and more...
Also Citizen's can submit articles, poetry or research for publication.
advertisement
