Mini Read : "Ms Condoleeza Rice Kept Me Awake Last Night"

Title of a future country and western song by George Bush Jnr (Rtd)

Editor’s Note: I think I sent this piece to the Daily Observer from London back in 2004. Now in 2008, Condy is making belated overtures to the Black Community just incase Obama or Clinton get the top job. A book, reviewed in the Point last week and available at Timbooktoo, was released recently. Read the book by all means, but refresh your mind on what we published here 4 years ago.

From Dida Halake in London

It is thirty minutes past midnight and Condoleeza Rice is on my mind. No, it is not her smoldering "soul sister" beauty or her amazing self-confidence that I am thinking of; it is her incredible brain and frightening toughness that scares me. Yes, I am talking about the African-American female warrior who is currently waging war on Iraq. That old Anglophile-Dinosaur Donald Rumsfeld is indeed seen as the driving force behind the war on Iraq, but Donald would not have had his war if Condoleeza Rice had thought otherwise.

As my Gambian friends know, I can hang out with friends at the Calabash well into the early hours of the morning when I am in The Gambia but London always sends me to bed early.

The UK always exhausts me, emotionally and intellectually – emotionally because I am here alone whereas my two lovely women remain at home in The Gambia and intellectually because Europe is an intellectual desert for us Africans: the last time I recharged my intellectual capital was when I bought three books from Timbooktoo and went home to read them all at the same time! (Timbooktoo’s collection of African and Diaspora books is just amazing – visit it if you haven’t done so yet).

Anyway, as I was saying, devoid of emotional and intellectual stimulus in London I normally go to bed early, but today was different. The beautiful Condoleeza Rice kept me awake with false promises.

The BBC was running a profile of "America’s Most Powerful Woman" and I waited up for it. I was not disappointed although the programme left me more confused about the attractive soul sister: on an emotional level I am hopelessly attracted to her beauty and self-confident self-presentation; but on an intellectual level I am appalled by her world view. I write, therefore, to try and untangle my feelings about her.

Condoleeza was born in 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, two years before yours truly was born in a little camel-ridden dusty desert oasis somewhere on the Ethio-Kenyan border.

Birmingham USA was in the 1950s and 60s one of the most racist and appalling places on earth for Black people, and those of us who grew up with the story of the Civil Rights Movement will know that this was the city whose police chief had Dr. Martin Luther King assaulted, arrested and thrown into jail ("Letter from a Birmingham Jail").

Here Condoleeza grew up, determine to beat the racist white system by "excelling not rebelling" (her family did not join the Civil Rights Marches organised by Dr. King). Still, as a black person she could not escape and one of her childhood class-mates was burnt to death when the Klu Klux Klan bombed a black church killing four children. In the end even Connie’s genteel Reverend dad had to get his gun and join other blackmen in the neighbourhood at night to keep guard against Klu Klux Klan attacks.

Condoleeza worked hard at everything from early in her life ("unusually for Blacks", the documentary says, "she was Third Generation College graduate".

This desert nomad is First Generation Read & Right University Graduate - so I must have worked harder than her!). But work hard she did, and excel she did to become a top professor at one of America’s best universities, Stansford. She became an expert on the "Evil Communist Empire" and was there to advise President Bush Snr as the communist states of Eastern Europe collapsed.

This is where Condoleeza had my feelings about her all confused. Beautiful and attractive black sister towards whom I am irresistibly attracted, yet her views of the world are so right-wing and reactionary as to be shocking to me.

I can understand such fascist right-wing views coming from George Bush and the people around him, but coming from Condy it sounds as if one of God’s angels had turned into the Devil’s own messenger.

One of my all-time heroes is an African-American called Paul Robeson, like Condoleeza one of the finest brains from Rutgers University and a world re-known actor (a Gambian Momodou Kah is a Prof at Rutgers – a blood relative through my son no less!). Robeson turned into a political activist for the freedom of his people in America and the world.

The United States declared him a "communist" and took away his passport and erased all records of his achievements, declaring him a "None-Person". It was because of Paul Robeson’s sacrifice, Martin Luther King’s sacrifice, the bravery of those nine little girls at Little Rock High School, and those bombed and killed in an Alabama church while they prayed, that Ms. Condoleeza Rice enjoys the freedom to eat in a MacDonalds and sit in the front of a bus today.

That is why today she can walk safely around much of America without being called a "nigger" and being spat at – except in some dangerous red-necks towns in her boss George Bush’s home state of Texas where segregation is still unofficially practiced and bloodily enforced.

Listen to Oprah Winfrey, a woman who had to battle far bigger odds than Condy, a woman who is much more famous and richer, and yet appreciates and supports the community that nurtured her and enabled her to be where she is today:

"I am where I am because of the bridges that I crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge. Harriet Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells was a bridge. Madame C. J. Walker was a bridge. Fannie Lou Hamer was a bridge".

(These are all strong black women who fought for their people's freedom in the United States of America).

But Condy has no track with Civil Liberties, or African-American solidarity. It is said that at this very moment Condy is at war with the black ex-Jamaican US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the State Department over what to do with Iraq. Colin Powell wants the UN to take over the administration of Iraq as soon as possible. Ms. Rice and the Pentagon are arguing for an American military administration and we understand this view has prevailed (not surprising really since it is said that "Condoleeza is the last person Bush sees in the evening and the first he sees in the morning – besides his wife").

Condy’s family instilled in her that what matters is individual success and "each individual has to pull themselves up by their bootstraps". Again one of those statements that appear admirable, but seem quite dangerous on close inspection: what about those people who don’t have boots to begin with? Don’t they need help from somebody? What about Christian and Muslim teachings about helping your fellow men and women - "Am I my brother's keeper?"

"The nail supports the shoe, the shoe supports the horse, the horse supports the man, the man supports the world", say The Malinke. It is always those who have succeeded, and got help along the way, who think that the less well-off are so because they are lazy sods.

I may have been a poor boy who got an education, became a teacher and build my home in Kotu but I should not delude myself into thinking that it is just my hard work alone that did it for me (the people who paid for my schooling and food through Save the Children Fund have a lot to do with my "success" and I should not forget the children’s home motto:

"From those to whom much is given, much is required"). Ms. Rice’s family was middle-class and fairly well-off because of the Black community that her father served as a Reverend: the money to give her a good upbringing came from church collections every Sunday – much of it from Black people who were much poorer than her parents were.

Of course, we need to work hard for ourselves to succeed but it is not a sin to give others a hand. Other views attributed to Ms. Rice are equally dubious and even outright dangerous.

Take as an example her thesis on "The Communist Evil". We in Africa, especially in lands like South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya where the white people "settled", know that if it was not for "the enemies of the civilized world" we would never have got back our independence and our land. Even our childhood heroes named themselves after the "Communist Evils", the one who kept coming to my school's Friday Meeting

(Baraza/Bantaba) when I was a child being Kenyatta's great friend General China, the Mau Mau leader – and of course "Comrade" Mugabe’s right-hand man was called "Hitler" to instill fear into the Rhodesian Brits who had stolen African land. Ms. Rice is given credit for the changes in the former Soviet Union and the Communist World, but the end of the Soviet Super-power has not made the world a safer place – even for the United States! These 3000 or so American soldiers who have died in Iraq would not have died if the Soviet Union existed – quite simply because the US would not have invaded Iraq in the first place! Ditto Somalia. Ditto Beirut.

Ms. Rice is a "fellow" (as in "one of us") of the extremely right-wing Hoover Institute in America. In the 60s the Hoover Institute would have been the intellectual equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan. So what are the "enemies of America" that the Hoover Institute debates at its dinners for fellows and produces intellectual papers on? Communism is dead, so the Hoover Institute will almost certainly conclude that the only ideological enemy of America left is Islam. The beautiful, dazzling Ms. Rice will be sitting amongst these short-sighted balding dinosaurs from the "Redhills of Georgia" and the "Lockout Mountains" of Texas to give their racist world-view respectability.

Who knows, they might even decide to nominate her for the next President of the United States so that a black woman could be the Trojan Horse that conquers the world for these racist mainly male whites. Would it not be ironic if in 2008 the Republican Party had as a Presidential candidate a black woman (Rice) whom the black people would not vote for, and the Democratic Party had as a Presidential candidate a white woman (Clinton) whom black people love and would  vote for?

(Note: The Iraq War has gone disastrously for the USA since this piece was written and the reputations of George Bush and all his team, including Condy, have fallen. Mrs. Clinton may still win the Democratic nomination and win the White House – though there is a Kenyan-American called Senator Obama with a serious chance of spoiling it all for her).