Barrack Obama’s Dreams
for my Father mirrors not only the issues of race and inheritance, but a
deeper search for the essence of one’s life: one’s aspirations – no matter how
large and unattainable they may seem – and the honest strides one lifts just to
see these aspirations materialize. In reading this book, so many questions
which had put my heart adrift were answered. But yet again, so many questions
were opened up – so many whys, whats, whens, wheres and hows.
Dreams
for my Father is my book; it is my own personal
fears, my own aspirations which now appear unattainable in a vast lawless land
where to dream well is to be labelled as abnormal. Mr Obama’s story somehow
answers the puzzle eating up my heart – a disturbing puzzle regarding why I always
feel I have failed a generation even before I was born.
There is this
similarity between Mr Obama’s experiences and mine. For instance, when he
described Djakarta, I thought it was Lagos or the unkempt streets of Ibadan where
beggars stick out their hands to importune for alms. Djakarta held all the
disorderliness like Lagos: the chaos, the traffic gams, a congested
municipality where peasants from rural settlements travelled to, burdened by
dreams which very often die off. These dreamers caught in the web between
dreams and confusion, between aspiration and perspiration, are lost in tougher
lives where they seldom find rescue. They pick up menial jobs as gatemen,
gardeners, cooks, salesman, while they hope for better lives which are never
within reach. Barrack Obama’s Dreams for
me Father documented these clearly of Djakarta and I thought I saw Lagos on
the pages full of aimless people walking to nowhere, sleeping under bridges,
pickpocketing, hawking different wares in still traffics. And when he mentioned
power failure and the lacklustre of public facilities like the hospitals, I
drew a strong connection between Djakarta of the 70s and my climes in recent
times.
But I can pardon
Indonesia for the poverty, for the abandonment of public facilities, for the power
failure. They had fought against the Dutch for their own freedom about three
decades before then which had left them politically and economically unstable. As
for Nigeria, we had no war with the British. Their exit was a peaceful one, and
power transition was smooth enough to have ushered us into a better future. But
the greed chained us, tribalism polarized us and the corruption hid under this
polarization, and then there was a free fall to unemployment, to crimes, to
deception and cyber criminality among our youths which have put a dent on our
national pride as viewed by the international community.
It is not only the
description of Djakarta or of Nairobi or of Altgeld, which had a striking
familiarity with my own corner of the world; actions and dialogues well
detailed in Mr Obama’s book also bred inside my heart so many questions and
thoughts. For instance, when the author’s mother worried about the lack of
values in a falling society like Djakarta and how it might affect the young Obama.
Then the next few lines that followed relaxed my pounding heart. In a
frustrated society, there are no values, no honesty. Between values and
survival, a people would most likely choose survival and throw values away to
be swallowed in the dark.
Then there was the time
Lolo – Obama’s stepfather in Indonesia – had told Obama not give out money to every
beggar on the street. They were too many to be helped and if he should continue
in his generosity, a time would come when he too would have to join the beggars
on the streets. Again, this brought me back to the dirty streets of Ibadan,
lined with thousands of beggars, palms outstretched. But it wasn’t just the
similarity between the streets of Djakarta and Ibadan that had struck me, the
dialogue between step father and son had reminded me of a similar talk I had with
my mother in our little beautiful village a few years back.
I was home for the
sessional break from the University. The primary and secondary schools were
still on session then, but I noticed a neighbour’s grandchild didn’t go to
school. A gentle girl in her first year in Secondary School, she was. I had
once heard of her refined dream of becoming a medical doctor. Why wasn’t she
attending school? I wondered. One morning, I called her, this girl of about
thirteen.
“Why are you not in
school?” I asked her.
“I was sent away
because I couldn’t pay my school fees.” She replied, her head bowed and her right
toes making a rainbow curve to and fro on the dry sand.
She told me the amount
eventually, an amount I could afford, and I gave it to her. But a big hole
opened up in my heart. I knew I couldn’t help her always, and that one day, she
would come to be a school dropout and her sweet dream of becoming a medical
practitioner would have burnt out, leaving a scar in her that would torment her
entire life. That evening, while my mother and I sat in our verandah and our
faces lifted above our fence, I told my mother about the girl and the pain which encrusted
in the deep wall of my heart. I wasn’t able to help her enough.
“I’ll set up a
scholarship for many poor children someday when I have money.” I said.
And then my mother,
expressionless in her gaze, said, “There are a lot of poor people everywhere.
You can’t help all of them in a lifetime. If you dare it, you become poor
yourself. Think of a boatman who happens to paddle his boat to a wide space
where thousands of people are drowning, waving their hands for help. If he
tries to help all of them all at once, they’ll pull him into the river and his
boat will capsize. So also is poverty in the world we now live in. You have to
help a few, and if they have good hearts like yours, they’ll help other. That is
how help spreads.”
Those words of my
mother were true, but I was heartbroken that I could not help every person on
the street singlehandedly. Thus, I began to see being in government as a
solution. Putting few laws in place and enforcing them can heal so many wounds
poverty has created, I said. I dreamt of politics and being in the helm of
affairs. But politics, as I soon noticed, has the capability of forging great
men who really want to help into failures who later become embezzlers. The
system moulds them in some ways, I thought. I ponder over Oshiomhole, how he
came into power with an obvious clean conscious, but had to rig the local
government elections under his watch because he wanted to cede power from the
opposition party who could impeach him at no cost. His action was undemocratic
but he was only guiding his government against the bullying of the pre-existing
system. I didn’t want to be him. I didn’t want to change like him, from being a
good man to being a failure because politics was dirty. Thus I began to resent
politics. It even became worse when I heard young people talk about entering
politics, not for causing a change, but for embezzling to become wealthier or
for just making their biography attractive. And they weren’t even ashamed to
say it in public that it was normal to steal public funds when you had the
opportunity to. One day I and a young
man of about my age were talking, and then we swerved into politics.
“The country is dead
already.” He said. “The thing is this, once you have the opportunity to get
into government, embezzle as much as you can for you and your generations.” He
said laughing wildly, as though it were a normal thing to say out, or as though
I had no choice but to support his view,
“Embezzling the money
of future generation, right?” I said, suffocated with anger. I felt my heart
being pulled out of my chest. “Our fathers embezzled our money that is why
there is no headway in this country right now. Do you want to make such a mistake
too?”
“See, if the next
generation comes, they should embezzle the funds of their next generation.” He
said and laughed wildly, for he was a fun-loving fellow.
I was starting to say
something, to convince him how wrong his ideology was, but I gave up. He would
never understand, I sensed. Rather he would take me as a hypocrite.
With these little
revelations unearthing themselves about Nigerian politics, I decided to stay
away from it. I didn’t want to be dented. I didn’t want to be like Oshiomhole.
I would just be a writer, I said, and criticize. I thought of what my mother
had said, about a wide river and people drowning, but instead of picturing poor
faces in that water, I imagined powerful men swimming in the river which had
become dirty. I was the only one in a boat. When I made an attempt to help them
out, I was dragged into the river. The river was no longer poverty; it was corruption,
and the men in it were those who had taken pride in being corrupt, those who
had foiled any attempt to be salvaged – who would pull you into the filthiness of
corruption when you try to lift them up to salvation.
But I was sad. Even
with so many criticisms, changes will be non-existent, suffering will persist
and life will become nastier. I knew that a direct participation in government
would create drastic changes, but I was scared that entering politics would
change the peaceful nature buried deep inside me.
Reading Barrack Obama’s
Dreams for my Father, indicted me as
a coward, for shying away from a future, from a responsibility because of fear
of falling. The book charged me to stand up to challenges to salvage the
remains of an already dead country. The book told me to embrace destiny even
though this appears dark and uncertain. But still my hands are tied. Many
questions have been answered, yet so many have been opened up; so many whys,
whens, whats and hows.
