Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Obama foreign policy through African eyes

I thought this was an interesting article from the Modern Ghana website
Obama is a Victim of His Own African Success Story

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Recently, President Barack H. Obama has come under a barrage of criticism for not focusing America's foreign policy well enough on the African continent. A Washington Post article titled “First Lady's African Trip Resurrects Criticism of President on African Issues” (6/18/11), for instance, claimed that since he became the first African-American to be elected president of the United States, Mr. Obama has added very little to policy guidelines established by the Clinton and the Bush II administrations

Whatever the shortcomings of his foreign policy vis-à-vis the African continent, what needs to be borne in mind is the fact that though he was almost totally raised by the white distaff side of his family, President Obama has never been forgiven by many a conservative white Republican Party hack for having had a Black-African father he even barely knew. Thus although he was born and bred in Hawaii, where his Kansas-native maternal grandparents had immigrated sometime during the 1950s, the first biologically half-African POTUS (i.e. President of the United States) continues to be viciously dogged by fabricated claims of a continental African birth which, in effect, implies that he is legally not qualified to be elected President of the United States of America. Such fabricated claims persist almost three years into the Obama presidency. The latter state of affairs is, of course, solely predicated on the close kinship ties that Mr. Obama has cultivated with members of his father's Kenyan family.




*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.

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