Social Science Research Council

It will be difficult to discuss anything this week but the inauguration of the first black man to be elected President of the United States of America. It is an election that is resonating with historical symbolisms and promises of new beginnings and great expectations. A nation whose wealth was built on genocide of the [...]

The ideals of American democracy, and the spirit of African liberation, have been intimately linked for more than half a century. At pivotal historic moments the two have intersected. In the 1950s, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah was a proponent of non-violent “positive action” and he and his fellow African nationalists saw their cause as inextricably linked to the efforts for emancipation in the U.S.

Around the world, America’s presidential election caught the imagination of young people. Nowhere was that more true than here in Darfur. In the displaced camps, people huddled around transistor radios as the election results came in during the pre-dawn hours. Barack Obama’s victory speech, received here after daybreak on November 5, was one of those rare Mandela moments — a jubilant triumph over injustice, a day marked in history when the impossible seems suddenly possible.

Fifty years before Barack Obama’s historic election last November, a group of American intellectuals met in New York to begin thinking about what a new American policy toward Africa might look like at the beginning of a decade of profound global change. That informal gathering, led by Immanuel Wallerstein, David Apter, Wayne Fredericks and others—along with the “New American Policy Toward Africa” (PDF) they signed their names to—eventually became the blueprint for President John F. Kennedy’s Africa policy.

Today, January 20, 2009, Barack Obama, a man of both African and American ancestry, will become President of the United States. He has an abiding interest in Africa as well as African friends and relatives. President Obama will be assisted by a Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who herself has long been interested in Africa and in issues important to Africa, such as economic development and human rights. At the United Nations, the Administration will be represented by an Ambassador, Susan Rice, who was an Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Bill Clinton Administration. Learning from the failures of that Administration during the Rwanda genocide, Rice has become a leading proponent of humanitarian intervention to save lives and an advocate for the international protection of human rights.