America is in need of desperate remedies. It has a bad image worldwide and a collapsing economy. Barack Obama seems to be the only one who can provide a message of change and transformation.


The new president-elect once told an audience: “The day I am inaugurated, the country will look at itself differently, but perhaps more important, the world will look at America differently.”


That’s what John McCain and his team tried hard to alter. Republicans waged an aggressive campaign against Obama, linking him to ‘terrorists’ and calling him a socialist. Republicans hoped that fear would make more people vote for them. This was particularly dangerous as it spread the idea that Obama was the ‘enemy within’. 


Martin Luther King and John Kennedy’s assassinations remind us that the clash between liberalism and conservatism can never be underestimated. South Africa provides an example of this. It has a very progressive constitution. Yet, this did not prevent xenophobic attacks from occurring a few months ago. Dozens of foreigners were killed and many homes and small businesses destroyed.


To what extent will Obama be able to reform America?


On the race issue, in spite of his bi-racial parentage, Obama seems to stick to the rule that is in effect in America. Anybody with a drop of black blood is considered black. He has not wanted to give the impression that he ‘abandons’ his black heritage, a move that could have cost him some black votes.


This of course casts some doubt on the whole post-racial celebration. Obama does not fit some people’s expectations of what it means to be black. The Reverend Jesse Jackson appears to think along these lines, as he was caught on television whispering that Obama was “talking down to black people”. Would he have uttered such a statement had Obama been a ‘real’ black man?


A portion of African-Americans must have felt frustrated when they realised that in spite – or because – of slavery and the civil rights movement, today’s presidential candidate did not come from their ranks.


If a post-racial era is to see the light of day in the US, the economic situation of the majority of African-Americans will have to improve considerably. At the moment, for each Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, millions are marginalised or in jail. 


Regrettably, Obama will have to pick up the pieces of the disastrous economic management of the Bush administration. Then, getting disentangled from the war in Iraq will of course be a risky enterprise. However, Obama’s campaign has captured the imagination of the world. By becoming president, he will have a prime place in history books and it will make him the most powerful black man on the planet

Véronique Tadjo is a writer from Côte d’Ivoire and a lecturer in French Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South AfricaBy Véronique Tadjo*