Paul Ocobock: Anticolonial Behavior
[Paul Ocobock has a PhD in history from Princeton University. He has worked in Kenya for several years and conducts research on anticolonial movements in Africa. Special thanks to Christine Stansell and Sebastian Karchar.]
THE LEGACY of colonialism still casts a long shadow over the world. In the United States, the right-wing Tea Party takes its name from an anticolonial revolt against British taxation on a chilly December day in Boston in 1773. Beginning in 2001, American soldiers occupied Afghanistan, and two years later Iraq, using “hearts and minds” and counterinsurgency strategies adapted from those tried by imperial powers in colonies like Kenya and Algeria. In Kenya, citizens went to the ballot box in August to demand a new constitution, rejecting a political system handed down by the British that strangled democracy and nurtured ethnic violence.
Nations like America and Kenya share the scars of colonialism. They also share a man named Barack Obama—president to one, distant kinsmen to the other. Since Obama became president, a lot of noise has been made regarding his global connections. We all know the story by now: born to a white American from Kansas and a black Luo from Kenya, raised in Hawaii, traveled to Indonesia for four years at the age of six, and schooled at Columbia and Harvard. It is an exceptional biography, but one used by critics to label him a secret Muslim, an unabashed socialist, and worst of all, a global citizen. But recently, it’s Obama’s heritage in Kenya, a place he has only visited three times, that has provided fodder for disgraceful distortions about his colonial past and present politics.
In September, Newt Gingrich wondered aloud to the National Review Online whether Obama might be “so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” His comments ignited a mini media firestorm. The Los Angeles Times op-ed staff described his comments as “factually insane.” Conservative David Frum was less subtle, calling it “a brazen outburst of race-baiting in the service of partisan politics.” The ensuing hullaballoo certainly gave Gingrich some street-cred among the far Right of the Republican Party and its appendage, the Tea Party. But his comments were part of a broader effort to paint the president as exotic, non-American, and Other. In fact, Gingrich’s comments were drawn from and in hearty support of an article written days earlier by Dinesh D’Souza for Forbes....
Read entire article at Dissent
THE LEGACY of colonialism still casts a long shadow over the world. In the United States, the right-wing Tea Party takes its name from an anticolonial revolt against British taxation on a chilly December day in Boston in 1773. Beginning in 2001, American soldiers occupied Afghanistan, and two years later Iraq, using “hearts and minds” and counterinsurgency strategies adapted from those tried by imperial powers in colonies like Kenya and Algeria. In Kenya, citizens went to the ballot box in August to demand a new constitution, rejecting a political system handed down by the British that strangled democracy and nurtured ethnic violence.
Nations like America and Kenya share the scars of colonialism. They also share a man named Barack Obama—president to one, distant kinsmen to the other. Since Obama became president, a lot of noise has been made regarding his global connections. We all know the story by now: born to a white American from Kansas and a black Luo from Kenya, raised in Hawaii, traveled to Indonesia for four years at the age of six, and schooled at Columbia and Harvard. It is an exceptional biography, but one used by critics to label him a secret Muslim, an unabashed socialist, and worst of all, a global citizen. But recently, it’s Obama’s heritage in Kenya, a place he has only visited three times, that has provided fodder for disgraceful distortions about his colonial past and present politics.
In September, Newt Gingrich wondered aloud to the National Review Online whether Obama might be “so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” His comments ignited a mini media firestorm. The Los Angeles Times op-ed staff described his comments as “factually insane.” Conservative David Frum was less subtle, calling it “a brazen outburst of race-baiting in the service of partisan politics.” The ensuing hullaballoo certainly gave Gingrich some street-cred among the far Right of the Republican Party and its appendage, the Tea Party. But his comments were part of a broader effort to paint the president as exotic, non-American, and Other. In fact, Gingrich’s comments were drawn from and in hearty support of an article written days earlier by Dinesh D’Souza for Forbes....