The Nile Basin and America’s Barack Obama

At the end of 2009, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) held its tenth anniversary in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to ‘celebrate the decade of cooperation and progress.’ Members of this initiative consist of Burundi, DRC, Egypt, Eritrea (observer), Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

In the discussions, there was much talk about the people of the Nile Basin, their place in the history and culture of the Nile Basin. We of the Nile Basin have had our share of trials and tribulations, but also great moments of genuine triumphs.

Clearly, our most spectacular impact in the first decade of the 21st century was the election of Barack Hussein Obama to the Presidency of the United States.

Barack Obama’s father was a Kenyan Luo. The Luo of Kenya were related to the Nilotic tribes of Uganda, all linked to the Chari-Nile branch of the Nilo-Saharan family.

The Nilotes of Uganda did succeed in producing one successful Nilo President, Milton Obote, and the Nilotes of Kenya produced two: Oginga Odinga and the current Prime Minister, Raila Odinga. But no body could have predicted in the early 1960s that a baby was about to be born in Hawaii who would one day become the first Black President of the United States.

The older Barack Hussein Obama, the father, was born along the shores of Victoria Nyanza, and was ethnically of Nilotic origins. The present President of the United States is therefore a grandson of the River Nile and of Victoria Nyanza.

Obama chose to give his first special presidential address to the Muslim world standing on Egyptian soil in June 2009. He was in fact extending his hand of friendship to the Muslim ummah across the world. He did so on the shores of River Nile.

Some have called Barack Obama the Black Mamluk Emperor; others think of him as the benign Black Pharaoh of the Atlantic. Whatever title we invent for him, Obama is the most powerful Black person in the history of civilization.

He is de facto more powerful than such Nile Basin heroic rulers as Ramses II of Egypt, or Menelik II of Ethiopia, or our more recent hero, Julius K. Nyerere of Tanzania, who consolidated the sense of nationhood in Tanzania, and fought politically and diplomatically for the final liberation of Southern Africa from white minority rule.

Barack Obama as a grandson of both the Nile and Victoria Nyanza is also more powerful a thousand to one than Shaka Zulu of South Africa.
We do not know yet if Barack Obama as president will be greater than any of those mentioned or become great at all. All we know now is that he is currently entrusted with the enormous power as the custodian of the United States.

The Nile Basin is producing sons and daughters who are changing the world. This is all the more reason why the Nile Basin should transform itself. ‘Doctor, heal thine self?’

The Nile Basin has been changing both Planet Earth and human history for centuries. Barack Obama is the latest of our contributions to global change. Let us now turn our skills and resources more energetically on our own reconstruction.

We hear a cry for change along the shores of the Nile. We hear a cry for unity along the lakes which feed the Nile. We have begun to respond to those cries, but the struggle needs to continue and intensify. Let us pull together when the Nile is turbulent and when it is calm. Let us learn to share when the waters are deep, and learn to conserve when the waters are shallow.

Mazrui teaches political science and African studies at State University, New York
amazrui@binghamton.edu