The Journey of 8,000 Miles and 47 Years.....

I was asked to write an article for tomorrow's Daily Nation newspaper about what the American Presidential election means to me.

Here it is...

I have been asked to describe my 47-year journey from a small segregated Southern Illinois town to a conference room in Nairobi yesterday morning, where I stood transfixed before a big screen TV, tears streaming down my face during Barack Obama’s address as the first black American to be elected President of the United States.

In a way, my path from Cairo to Kenya mirrors the path that America has had to take from the tumultuous Civil Rights Movement to November 5th, 2008. You see, as the 9th of 10 children born to a black American laborer and a maid in 1961, there was very little reason to believe I would ever wind up doing what I’m doing today.

But the foundations for my journey echo the evolution of the new American consciousness that appears to have dawned with the 2008 US Presidential election. Though I was born poor and black in a racist society, my parents Lewis and Eloise Jones believed their children could lead better lives. They demanded that through hard work and diligence, we would one day reach heights they never could have achieved.

My father was born in Mississippi in 1917, and later moved to Southern Illinois with his mother and siblings. My mother took a parallel path from 1926 Georgia to Pennsylvania with her family. Their migration from the American South to the North mirrored that of millions of Africans moving from rural areas to larger cities in search of employment, education and a better life overall.

But the more time I spend living in Africa, the better equipped I am to interpret the different impacts of American racism versus African colonialism. There’s no question that colonialism left a deep scar on the African consciousness, one which gets played out every day in stories of political wrangling, tribal warfare and intractable poverty. Still, African societies flourished long before colonialists arrived, and seem to imbue Africans with a sense of bolstering identity. For many black Americans, the nearly 400 years of our existence have been circumscribed by slavery and its lingering remnants.

Centuries of African culture and language and identity survived colonialism’s impact. Many black Americans had to build, brick by brick, a consciousness based primarily on hope for a better day. Pernicious racism and inequities flourished for decades after slavery “ended” in the mid 1800’s, in education, in employment, in every sector of American society. My parents, and their parents, knew struggle and despair, but they always dreamed that one day, we would overcome.

I believed that same thing, as a young girl in Cairo, Illinois. As poor as we were, I always believed that one day I would see the world. One of my earliest childhood heroes was the character Dorothy Gale from “The Wizard of Oz,” because she never backed down from a challenge. Dorothy always believed she could reach her goals, no matter what fantastic ogres and witches blocked her path.

Besides poverty, I faced a few ogres myself growing up during Civil Rights rioting and marches and their aftermath. As a poor black girl, society pretty much wrote me off early. By the time the infamous Moynihan Report on the State of Black America was released in 1965, the prevailing image of the black American woman was one of out-of-wedlock babies, welfare and hopelessness.

But that started to change by the early 1970s, due to initiatives like Affirmative Action, which sought to give black Americans an equal chance at higher education and decent employment. Several of my older siblings benefitted from Affirmative Action programs—because of their superior academic achievement–and I closely studied their success. It made me realize that I could succeed, too, if I worked hard enough.

Which brings me to that conference room yesterday, where I sobbed while listening to Barack Obama implore Americans to work hard to heal divisions and help find solutions to pressing problems. Our paths are wildly divergent. President-elect Obama is two months older than me, born in Hawaii and with no ancestral history of American slavery. He had done more world-traveling by the time he was 12 than I had done by the time I was 40. He’s an Ivy-league educated lawyer who bypassed Wall Street wealth to opt for public service.

I’m a writer with 2 decades of journalism experience who sought to change the world through my words, by telling stories that make people think, and possibly reexamine what they think they know about issues.

That is what brought me to Kenya. After 4 previous years of doing journalism training in Africa, including an 8 month tour in Northern Uganda in 2007, the chance to work with Kenyan reporters covering health issues was too good to pass up. I fully expected it would fulfill me as much as it might benefit anyone I would work with.

Though I might have just laughed if you had told me 30 years ago that I would one day live in Nairobi, Kenya, deep down inside, I knew I would travel to Africa during my lifetime. I had been prepared. I believed in myself, and my abilities, and I knew that my forefathers and mothers had worked and bled and died for me to go wherever my mind could take me. The price for my ticket had already been paid.

I envision Barack Hussein Obama, Senior and Ann Dunham imbuing the same limitless possibilities on their son, born the same year as me. That’s where the journey of the past 40 years has led America, and now the rest of the world.