As the first polls closed (11pm GMT) the excitement began to build as Obama’s electoral votes grew from strength to strength. What struck me as CNN footage shifted from closed polls on the West Coast to massive queues of voters on the East Coast; was that these people were free to exercise their democratic right to vote. Whichever way they voted, their voice would count by right enshrined in the American Constitution. I wondered about my own country; Zimbabwe. The people have the constitutional right to vote but that right is not respected; in the last eight years hundreds of thousands of voters have been intimidated, raped, abducted and killed. When millions participated in the March 2008 General and Presidential elections for days they were kept in suspense supposedly because verifications were being made and the result was yet more suspense in a Presidential run-off. Beatings, abductions and unimaginable economic plight characterised the days to the June 25 election which resulted in another twist in this suspense thriller. Fast forward to September 2008 a power-sharing deal was brokered in the hope of building a new nation, but today, two months since The Agreement; the suspense-thriller continues; we still do not have a multi-party cabinet as promised, we still depend on the Old Guard whose governance pronounces Alutta Continua to the detrimental rhetoric of sovereignty and death to all possibility of Change.
But before my very eyes, I bore witness to Change in America when Barack Obama was announced winner of the US elections. As Obama delivered an eloquent, heartfelt victory speech; tears welled up in my eyes. This was the moment I could exhale and celebrate after a year of following this race; I could exhale because the optimist they said could not do it’, had done it. America had democratically chosen someone whose intellect and charisma had shown he had the ability to lead, whose policies were geared at making life better for American families across the board and changing the workings of power in a global context. It’s too simplistic to claim Obama was elected because he’s Black, (many factors were at play); but on a symbolic level it matters for African-heritage peoples in America and for this reason I exhaled. I exhaled because for centuries history’s dominant discourses had forced me to hold air in because of my skin colour; forced like many millions before me who had been stolen or sold then violently shipped and used to build Amerikkka; suffocated because of their melanin hue, which also denied them the right to vote; stifled from success because poverty, drugs and guns make a mean ghetto cocktail to keep us-people down for generations. But against these centuries of historic asphyxiation people have risen up in defiance; risen against intimidation to say, Yes we can. And this was the response of the massive crowd addressed by Obama in Grant Park, Chicago, among them Oprah Winfrey and Rev Jesse Jackson whose tears ignited my own; I could no longer hold back the swelling river. I cried for my African-American peoples and for my own African history imagining this is how it might have felt in 1957 when Ghana became the first African country to attain independence, or how my parents might have felt in 1980 when Prince Charles took the Union Jack home and Robert Mugabe raised up the Zimbabwe flag, or had my emotions and intellect been mature enough to know this is how ecstatic I might have felt in 1992 when, visiting my brothers in boarding school, we heard on the radio Nelson Mandela had been released and this fulfilled the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Back to my present reality; sleepless yet energised by the euphoria of victory, I prepared to go to my student-job. Stepping out into the drizzle and grey skies of November, I wondered could Britain dare to dream of a leader of African-heritage or Asian descent? Could this candidate for Prime Minister break through the colour and class lines in the higher echelons of Westminster that are invisibly marked: Toffs Only, No Blacks? Can this country, the ancestral homeland of Celtics and Anglo-Saxons, elect an Ethnic Minority whose roots are here too, but are marked by an unpleasant racialized history? Could this leader shoulder the burden of representing everyone’s competing interests and not only those of minority Britain which are in themselves complex enough? Giving an Obama-inspired response, the answer is Yes we can but, the who, how and when are all blanks waiting to be filled by the future. But for now, I could exhale a prayer into the misty morning skies of London knowing that change soon-come like a knock-on effect from across the Atlantic pond. And when it happens I will cry those joyous tears all over again, but before the Thames-in-me gushes forth; the Zambezi River must flow. I want to know when will these years of hunger and hardship come to an end in Zimbabwe. When will the Fathers of our nation realise they have become Grandfathers too old to rule and pass on the torch of leadership to a younger generation whose dreams of freedom and democracy are currently stifled as the country operates in political suspend-mode? We as a nation desperately wait to reap the fruit of the 15 September Deal. And as the events of November 5 in the US allowed me to exhale, they also enabled me to inhale, breathe long and deep to renew my hope in a brighter not-so-distant future. Thus, I inhale and hold my breath in the deepest cavity of my lungs only to release it when the commitment to a new political and economic order finally materializes in Zimbabwe.