Obama's Victory

I may have to start today’s post by making another apology. Two, actually. Firstly, I’d like to apologise for not making any post yesterday. Did I hear someone say, ‘no one noticed.’ Anyway, my second apology is for the fact that my post today is dedicated to Barack Obama’s victory at the end of the US Democratic Party nominations. To some of you, Obama’s victory is like, ‘wetin concern agbero with overload’. May your own no be laik Saddam Hussein. Amen. Wherever he is now he must have learnt in a hard way that you don’t play games with whoever sits at the Oval office.

The reason I couldn’t make any posts yesterday was because I got carried away watching news bulletins on his victory.

As black people there is a lot Nigerians have to learn from Obama’s victory. One of the most important lessons to be learnt from his victory is that black people can rise from our present difficulties and dominate the world someday. It’s interesting that Obama is being referred to as a black person. There is a rule in Western societies called ‘the one drop rule.’ What this means is that you are considered black as long as there is one drop of black blood in your veins. Regardless of the fact that Obama’s mother is white he is considered black because his father was black. If Obama had married a white woman their children would still be considered black because Obama, their father, is black even though they are more white than black. The black blood in them is considered a stain.

Talking about marrying a white woman, one of the very first things I admired about Obama was the fact that he married a ‘sistah’. A beautiful, elegant well educated black woman! Big up for the black woman. He is not like the arse brained, over-pampered, over-paid, over-rated black professional footballers in the Premier league here who think it’s some kind of status symbol to be seen hand-in-hand with a white chick. Now, if this white girl wasn’t some blonde bimbo picked up from some night club in a seedy part of town their actions would have been excusable but... A beg make we tok beta.

Obama’s nomination to lead the Democratic Party forty-five years after Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech is nothing short of remarkable. When Obama was born forty-six years ago inter-racial marriage was an offence in some parts of the United States; blacks and whites were not allowed to sit together on buses in some other states. Until the late sixties some schools in the United States would not admit blacks as students. That was how bad racial segregation was back in those days. Today however, a black-man is on his way to becoming the President of the United States of America, the most powerful public office in the Western world.

It has happened in the United States, when is it going to happen in Britain? One day, when the average Jamaican on the streets of Brixton stops living on marijuana and fathering babies like a rabbit; when the typical Nigerian in Peckham stops having that ultimate ambition of hitting a large sum of money in a shady deal in order to buy the latest Hummer jeep. One day, when our teenagers stop thinking it’s cool to carry knives and guns around on the streets of London and Birmingham, we just might have a black man leading one of the main Political Parties in Britain.