papRika

In the Chicago Tribune an entry about the newly-elected president of the United States reads:

“Barack Obama was elected president on Nov. 4, 2008, becoming the first African-American to claim the highest office in the land, an improbable candidate fulfilling a once-impossible dream.”

Since the hullabaloo about the inauguration of America’s first ‘black’ president, something started gnawing at me: Not once did I hear anyone ask: “Would this fanfare about a non-white president in the White House not be more convincing if it was a Native American occupying the oval office?”

A president named Wallace Red Elk would surely have been a truly “improbable candidate” worthy of such excessive celebrations.

For years, I have been wondering, “What happened to the Native American Indians? Why do I not hear anything about them in the news?” Now and then I have to Google them just to make sure they still exist.

We are so quick, especially here in Africa, to mount a soap box while singing for our machine guns in order to berate and confront and intimidate all the racists and all those who dare criticize our leadership and our non-, er, African-democratic ways. We applaud the fact that Barack Obama visited his ‘ancestral home’ in Kenya, but we do not question his neglect to visit his forefathers’ home in England, and we don’t make too much about his white maternal heritage. Let us not open a book we do not want to read: subtext is the enemy of cocks populi, especially here in South Africa.

If we follow footnotes leading us to other marginalized indigenous people who stand as slim a chance of sitting in the highest office in South Africa,  we realise that we would probably never read in the news that “Magdalena Kruiper-Vaalbooi was elected president on April 22, 2009, becoming the first woman, and the first person from the San community, to claim the highest office in South Africa.”

Sara Dias

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