The Emancipation of the World from Dubya!

by Henry Chuks

Can you believe it? As I am typing this images of Barack Obama and his wife and children waving triumphantly on a stage is on the TV screen. And suddenly it strikes me that he has won. The United States of America has voted for an African American to run the country...the world!

And make no mistake, Barack Obama is a true African American: his mother being white and from Kansas and his father being a Kenyan. I am fairly young (early thirties) yet I too thought like many black Americans who have commented in the press that I may not be alive when an ethnic person -never mind black a black man- would be US president.

It has been a historic week in which Lewis Hamilton became the first black Formula 1 champion amidst overt and unsettling racism from supposed F1 fans. I hark back to the days of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther had a dream. Would he have been surprised that a black man had now rose to the highest office in the land or would he have been thinking that it should have happened sooner. Race has obviously been a strong topic in this US election but Obama, like Lewis Hamilton has distanced himself from being a beacon of black-centric issues and has stood for professionalism, change and a better way.

There seems to be a feel-good factor with Obama's win, May he have as positive and as unifying an effect on the US as predecessors such as Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Obama does not start till January 2009 but let;s hope he is already plotting how to ease the growing pains of the US and it's economy.