Obama’s memoir out tomorrow 

By Osa Amadi

Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, due for release tomorrow, November 17, 2020, can be viewed as a continuation of the story that began in Alex Haley’s Roots (we all remember Kunta Kinte) where white vandals, in connivance with some black people as they still exist till today, broke into Africa, raped and carried away black people to the United States of America, planted them in the soil and continued the raping and killings until, like the biblical Joseph in Egypt, God led the black man into the White House. And then, the vandals, pushed to the fringes by a big coalition of blacks and white people of conscience, could not, and still cannot take it.

The 768-page memoir, published by Crown, is the first of a two volumes that Obama has written based on his tenure as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017.

Written and probably targeted to be released at a significant juncture in the political history of the United States, Obama, according to CNN, says in the anxiously awaited memoir that “Americans, spooked by black man in White House, led to Trump presidency.”

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The word ‘spooked’ means to be startled, surprised, shocked, alarmed or agitated. “Donald Trump promised an elixir for the racial anxiety of millions of Americans spooked by a black man in the White House…My very presence in the White House triggered a deep-seated panic,” Obama writes in the memoir.

For that reason, many Americans became victims of “the dark spirits that had long been lurking on the edges of the modern Republican party – xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”. In reality and in retrospect, those ‘dark spirits’ are not different from those that had possessed and driven the white slave raiders into the jungles of Africa.

That is quite understandable, and to understand it better, one only needs to return in memory to the middle of that forest in Juffure village, The Gambia, in West Africa (in Alex Haley’s Roots, p.143-144) where Kunta Kinte was kidnapped by the forefathers of those ‘Americans (who are now) spooked by black man in White House’ that Obama speaks about in this hilarious memoir

From that classic Roots by Alex Haley, we read how He (Kunta Kinte) was bending over a likely prospect (a choice of a tree he wanted to cut for wood to make a drum for himself) when he heard the sharp crackle of a twig, followed quickly by the squawk of a parrot overhead. It was probably the dog (his dog) returning, he thought in the back of his mind. But no grown dog ever cracked a twig, he flashed whirling in the same instant. In a blur, rushing at him, he saw a white face, a club upraised; heard heavy footfalls behind him. Toubob! White men!