Nigerians with access to satellite television spent the night of November 2 following the twist and turns of the American presidential election. For Muslims this was a particular sacrifice because that was the beginning of the last ten days of Ramadan, when devotees look out for the special blessings of Lailatul Qadri (the Night of Power). But then hating George Bush has almost become a religious experience and many prayed hard for his opponent to win.
But it is St. Augustine, I think, who said that more tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones. I am vaguely pro-Kerry like most Nigerians, but I neither prayed for him nor stayed late that night. In fact I watched the football match between Barcelona and Milan (in which the African footballer of the year, E’too, as usual, found the back of the net) before going to bed. At dawn I flicked on the telly and discovered that Kerry was trailing Bush. Again after a snack and the morning prayers, I read and rested, only to wake up at mid-morning to find the drama going on at Ohio.
Many people around me desperately wanted Kerry to win. A friend of mine predicted a landslide, on the ground that most of the polls and pro-Bush commentary are right wing propaganda. I expected deadlock or a Bush win. I sense that the neo-conservative impulse in America is still running strong and that Bush and his strategists have successfully tapped into this “moral majority.” They still want to reorder the world a little more so that America and its values will rule the waves for ever.
But they should know better. It is up to the Americans to choose which ever leader they want. The three and a half million majority of Bush over Kerry, shows clearly that this choice has been made. The Democrats mobilised elements that did not bother to vote in the past, the young, blacks and ethnic minorities, but in the end the American mainstream carried the day. They did so because like all privileged groups they want to retain their advantages. The more the world outside clamoured for change the more these threatened people raised the barricades. In a sense the best campaign for Bush was that much of the rest of the world detested him for being so gung-ho American.
Even before Bush, Americans have always felt big and important enough to go against world opinion. A strong isolationist current has always been part of American history. Partly this is because of geography, because you need to cross two vast oceans on either side to reach it. But the immigrants from all over the world, who made it there and built a successful nation, are hyper patriotic and dismissive about their old countries. Abba Gana Shettima (Daily Trust, Friday October 29) told a delightful story of his encounter with a Nigerian taxi driver in North Carolina (who of course pretended he was not born in Eastern Nigeria) who sneered at him: “What have you been doing back in Nigeria, eh, eating yams, chewing kola-nuts and wasting your talents?”
This is the attitude of the multitudes from all corners of the globe who have found the great American dream. They may be Nigerians or Ukrainians or Iranians, but they soon begin to think and talk like the rednecks of Idaho! Hadiza Isa Wada, a Bauchi-born journalist, who has lived and worked in America for 20 years, before she was recently forced to resign from Voice of America (VOA), recently told Just Magazine that American attitude towards the world is informed by the sense that they don’t need others. “I don’t think it is the government that made them behave that way. I think over time, because they have advanced, they feel they don’t need others. Look at the football they play, they call it World Series, but it is not. Also the news that is broadcast in America is mainly for their consumption. So, it is like a closed society; they choose the information they want and normally they don’t see beyond it.”
So George Bush is not some lone ranger surrounded by a small cabal of neo-conservatives, supported by Jewish-owned media, leading the rest of America by the nose. Bush, with all his narrowness, approximates to the American ideal of leadership, where the concern of the mainstream, is roughly speaking, bread and butter at home and bombs and bullets abroad. The cosmopolitan Kerry on the other hand, with his doubts and double talk, his concern about the image of America in Europe, if not in the rest of the world, sounds more like a French philosopher than an American politician.
Now I have no problem with the American way of life, as long as it remains that, American. I thoroughly enjoyed my three encounters with it stretching back to December 1981. On the first I was a student in Canada, and simply crossed the border by bus and made stopovers wherever there were fellow Nigerian students on whose couch I could sleep. And there were many in the post-graduate schools of America in those days: Attahiru Jega in Evanston, Illinois, Adamu Kiyawa in Ohio, Ali Adamu in San-Francisco, Mustapha Adamu in Las Vegas and Ujudud Sheriff in New York. These friends and a few others offered me shelter, but I also slept in motels and on trains and buses, as I criss-crossed the country from Chicago to Los Angeles and then back to New York through the Nevada desert.
My two subsequent visits were tamer affairs. In 1985 I was on the International Visitors Programme and I was asked which places I wanted to visit. In addition to media houses, I said I wanted to see a Red Indian community and also visit Louis Farrakhan at Final Call, his organisation in Chicago. One old white lady tried to convince me not to visit the fiery black preacher, because she said Farrakhan did not represent the average black American. I said, fine, but I wanted to form my own impression. On the whole the Americans accommodated me. I saw Farrakhan and the Red Indians at Yokoma, outside Seattle in Washington State. The only place they could not put on my itinerary was Hawaii, which in my greed I also wanted to see. Someone said, “men, do you think you are on some kind of honeymoon!” My last trip to America was in September 2001 and I have written about the experience in this newspaper. Just to add that I shared with Americans the devastating impact of the September 11 attack on their cities. I was there when “the world changed” for them and I felt the fear and the pain. But because I come from a different milieu I cannot say that September 11 has affected me in the same way.
I thought the lesson for Americans is that the injustices being perpetrated with their tacit consent in many parts of the world, has created determined enemies, who are blindly and brutally fighting back. Surely a rational response is not all-out war, but a calculated and methodical strategy that will take out much of the poison in international relations. Alas, George Bush is not such a wise leader and the American voter not a more perceptive follower. So we are back to Us versus Them, the land of dreams doing its utmost to export nightmare. But America has made its choice; in the same spirit of God-given freedom, we too will make ours.
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