Explosion of the Afro-American dream
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Like every other Afro-American, the convener of the dream was born to an African father. The father was an unknown African who made the slave ship to America, theory supports that he must have been on a plantation field sweating profusely without hopes of freedom until the emergence of the abolitionist who salvaged blacks from their white taskmasters. Priviledged to attend college, everything about him changed, for his skin colour; shades of black that suffered him guilt. He engaged a migrant lady and had a child with her. The child was an exact representation of him; dark skinned that reminded him of the burden of his heritage.
A burden of aspirations limited by the mockery of his humanity and mental incarceration of slavery. It was time to return home, but without his son. He didn’t just leave his son behind as he sojourned back to Africa. He left him indelible stories which mirrors their inheritance, this shaped the young child and inspired a potential explosion, that will someday rock the American nation.
The tragedy of Afro-Americans is beyond marginalization and profiling encountered from men of white skin, it stretches to the untold burdens of coloured men lost in a foreign land with yearnings for their provenance and tales that defines their heritage. Stories their ancestors didn’t tell them.
On the 11th of September 2001, a date Americans wished never existed. Afghanistan migrant, Osama bin Laden perpetrated the fiercest terrorist attack in American history. An explosion that has it’s shadow still marauding the American territory. Seven years forward, the Afro-American ticking bomb exploded, an electoral explosion awakened America to the reality of her shared humanity and equality. The offspring of a Kenyan slave and ‘man of colour’, Barack Obama was declared president of America. A race once muffled from electoral voices across America. On that day, there was a reverberation along the grave of Martin Luther king Jr, as his conceived dream had been birthed by a man who energized his aspirations from the folktales told by his father.
An explosion that didn’t claim lives, rather began to build the cracked fences of racial segregation. The American nation history would forever remember that the descendant of a slave presided over children of slave owners at the gathering of the most prestigious sovereign administrative edifice in the world, ‘the White House’. The emergence of this infernal machine was what the White Americans never predicted. By right , Obama became the most powerful man in the world and he was king over the princes of his people.
Beyond racial cracks, religious boundaries and social segregation, is an aspiration that emancipates us from mental ‘dark houses’:the audacity of hope.
