Obama’s Africa in Perspective

Among many of the controversies swirling around the rising star of the Democratic party, Barack Obama, there is the implication that, as an American of African descent, he knows nothing of the pain and tribulation experienced by the descendents of slave families, especially the survivors of the civil rights struggle of 20th Century USA. True, he and his parental generation were raised in social environments far removed from the ordinary life of the average African, but the heritage they came from was economically and socially not much different from slavery.

Although the focus of my new book, The Iron Snake is not on the politics of segregation—it is mostly fiction restricted to the early 19th Century—it does offer several insights into how injustice becomes part of everyday life. It began in this case with a railroad, the arrival of which, as you might expect, amazed and shocked Africans who had lived for so long in a rural, isolated, village-based society. Some of their seers and prophets had predicted the railroad would bring trouble, but they had no idea of how extensive that trouble would be. Drought, smallpox epidemics, rinderpest, famine, and deaths in numbers previously unheard of were all ascribed to what they called the Iron Snake. And their problems were just beginning, many subsequently lost their land and personal freedom by being saddled with plantation lives close to that of the American slave. Sadder still is the fact that in many cases the lives of their descendants have not changed much since then.

Economists rightly point to that period, 1896-1901, as the turning point in the structural development of the region. From a country with only one major city, Mombasa, a sleepy Indian Ocean port dominated by early Arab traders and Muslim traditions, a rail line driven right across the country through an exotic series of ecosystems, allowed the British to establish Nairobi, which became the largest city in Kenya and a center for Kikuyu economic development, and then Kisumu on Lake Victoria, the terminus of the railroad, and early center of Luo economic and political growth.

At what cost? The railroad intensified the clash between colonial government and African cultures. It also served to quickly bring the first people of that country, including Obama’s ancestors, under a civil rule that led to them becoming third-class citizens, a state from which they did not begin to recover until Independence Day, December 12, 1963, four years after the Mau Mau uprising and a loss of more than 11,000 African lives—and just several months after Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. During all those years Africans suffered the same fate as many oppressed black cultures throughout the world.

It struck me as I watched the Oprah Winfrey Special on the Leadership Academy in South Africa earlier this year that of the 680 million people in Africa no more than a quarter live in adequate housing. Which means that the one room shack Oprah found in Africa with an outhouse, and no running water or electricity, a shack that was so similar to her childhood home, would be luxury accommodation for a half billion Africans, if they could get it.

Several messages emerged from the colonial period and from my book. For example, often it’s not until Westerners come face to face with Africans that they appreciate the potential that exists there for change. Until then the overwhelming message is dismal; the future of Africa seems hopeless. Thus Oprah’s effort in South Africa, and the young girls she featured on her program, must have made an incredible impression on Americans. It’s true she selected the most articulate and intelligent girls to present their cases, but their stories of survival were amazing, and I’m certain they made people aware of what the future could be for South Africa, especially if these young people are examples of the potential leaders of tomorrow. They appeared as proud, strong young people who surmounted impossible problems often on nothing more than hope. In retrospect, Obama’s heritage is rooted in this same soil, a heritage that gave rise to generations of African freedom fighters, intellectuals, humanists, economists and builders.

This also works for the characters in The Iron Snake some of whom change as a result of what they see and experience in Kenya. In fact, describing that change turned out to be one of the major themes in my book.

As to how or why I wrote the book, I didn’t have time to think about writing when I first arrived in Africa, I was a tropical ecologist and I arrived in Uganda just as Idi Amin came to power. Now the subject of the award-winning movie, The Last King of Scotland, he terrified the country, and for the next few years I had my hands full. After that I moved on to Kenya where I heard about a train called the Lunatic Express. At first I was tempted to do a book about the natural systems through which such a railroad had to pass as it made its way from the coral beaches of the coast to the highlands of Nairobi and beyond to the forested mountains. I soon realized that in a novel of this kind the people and their plight were more important, and that’s why it took me nine years to write it! If I had stuck to science it would have been a lot quicker and an easier job, but in choosing to write about people, it turned out to be a much more rewarding exercise, and in the end I enjoyed it immensely—and I hope you do to.