It is by now obvious that Barack Obama is not a passing fad or curiosity as some may have thought in February 2007 when he first announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the US Presidency, and stands the best chance of an Afro-American to be elected President. Some will remember the threat of Martin Luther King in the sixties and regret his slaying by an element that is still very active in today’s USA. Jessie Jackson looked good twenty years later but few saw him as a serious contender for the White House. Obama is different. Today he leads Hillary Clinton for the

Democratic nomination, with 1625 delegates, needing 2024 to win. Caution led the Government in summer 2007 to give him Secret Service protection. Most “coloured” Afro-Americans are descendants of pairings, mainly master-slave relationships, during two centuries of slavery. But Obama was forged in a different crucible. His origin is pure karma. In 1960 Tom Mboya of Kenya failed to get a US State department grant to airlift 230 Kenyans granted scholarships to study in America. Senator John Kennedy after meeting Mboya persuaded the Kennedy Foundation to grant the required $100,000. Thus was Barack Obama Sr., an economics graduate, enabled to travel to the University of Honolulu. There he met anthropology student Ann Dunham, originally from Kansas, who later earned a PhD. They married and on August 4th 1961 their son was born - Barack (Hebrew Baruch) Hussein (after his grandfather, a Muslim convert). Thus did the Kennedy connection produce not only a controversial inter-racial marriage, but a child that could rule America, as Kennedy had done. Obama’s parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage took him, aged 6, to Jakarta, Indonesia where he attended regular elementary school. At 10, Ann sent him back to her mother in Honolulu. At 18 he went to California’s Occidental College, then Columbia University, New York to study Political Science followed by Harvard Law School, graduating with high honours. He practised civil law in Chicago where he met and married lawyer Michelle Robinson; they have two children. He became a state legislator then a Senator, winning handsomely. Critics and the uninformed make much of his Muslim connection but he was always Christian and a member of the Christian Trinity church in Chicago’s south side, headed by the dynamic Dr Jeremiah Wright. In any event his religion should be irrelevant. The US Constitution says: "The senators and representatives ... shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."
More importantly we should look beyond the obfuscations of political in-fighting, condemn it in passing and focus on the positive substance of the man, his record and the platform on which he stands. His Senate record shows an ability to work with democrats and republicans and he has out-performed Hillary Clinton in co-sponsorships and legislative initiatives covering social justice, ethics, environment, government accountability, security legislation, soldiers’ rights and foreign affairs; he even has one bill co-sponsored with John McCain and another on Congo relief which Bush did sign into law. One bill on Child health Insurance amendment passed all stages but was vetoed by Bush. Obama called this a "callousness of priorities that is offensive to the ideals we hold as Americans.” He has consistently opposed the war against Iraq and the Bush administration’s use of military might instead of diplomacy - “I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.”
In his campaign he makes a strong case for Americans to reject rabble-rousing, name-calling and slur politics; Before announcing his candidacy he had told the Democratic National Committee, "This can't be about who digs up more skeletons on who, who makes the fewest slip-ups on the campaign trail.” His politics is all-inclusive and generous; it rises above race, class and dogma, and exposes the pettiness of bigots like George Bush. His vision of a strong, moral exemplary America is all-inclusive; no one is omitted, neither citizen nor foreigner, neither small nations or large. His direct, moral, inclusive non-partisan stance has energised jaded citizens, especially the young who see him as a chance for meaningful change. Were Americans colour-blind he would be a shoe-in for the Presidency; John Kennedy had a tougher time. Obama’s two books Dreams from my Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) are excellent accounts of his story and his philosophy.

I am told a common practice to make attractive a home that is on the real estate market is to be baking bread when a potential buyer visits. What is it with the smell of bread being baked that makes some of us a nuisance for neighbours, as I recall from my young days growing up in Trinidad? Even then I came to understand how some people can be led by the nose, the savoury smells of baking bread wafting over a backyard galvanize fence, through a breadfruit tree, past the fowl coop and over the bleaching stand into the house next door.

The smell of the bread rising through the softening light of evening would cause the husband next door to climb out of his hammock where he spent the entire afternoon sleeping with contented, post-drunken snoring. He would scratch a capacious belly, and then bellow to the wife slaving over a wash-tub in the backyard, her blouse bristling with clothes pins like an ammunition belt, her back breaking with fatigue and her hands corroded with bleach.
“Girl, is your oven smelling so nice?” the lazy, good-for-nothing husband would inquire of his hardworking wife. Back then, the clothing du jour for a lazy man would be just an underwear, the cross-hatching marks from the crocus bag used for the hammock clearly imprinted on his back and thighs.
“How you expect me to be baking bread when whole day I have to wash clothes, darn your pants, sweep the yard and full water by the standpipe, while you getting your afternoon beauty sleep in the hammock, you good-for-nothing drunkard,” the stressed-out wife would reply, her hands gnarled among the whites soaking in a bucket of Oxford blue.
“But the bread over smelling nice. I wonder who baking this hour of the evening,” the husband would say as he idly scratched his behind, leaving white nail marks on his skin. The wife, wrestling with a wet bedspread that was wrapped around her like an anaconda, would dourly gesture over the fence with a mouth full of clothes pins.
Opportunist that he was, he would walk to the back fence, careful to step over the puddles of soapy water from the wash, working his way through the clothing hanging heavily from the clothesline. Peeking over the rusted galvanize fence, he would address Miss Willimena, who was also our neighbour, in a voice dripping with honey.
“Ay, ay! Neighbour, I didn’t see you there. How? And how the grandchildren? They growing well nice,” he would say, showing a mouthful of teeth over similarly jagged edges of the dented galvanize.
“I so-so, thank you,” Miss Willimena would reply, lifting her head for a moment from the two narrow rolls of dough she was patiently plaiting together.
“Look like you baking bread,” the insincere neighbour would say, as if noticing the plaiting and baking for the first time. “I really smelling the bread in truth. In fact, I only just mention to my wife here that I thought she was baking. Fust it smelling nice - you don’t have an extra bread, a small one for me to try?”
And so, the wily coyote would reach over the fence and receive a loaf, hot from the mud oven, the crust appetising, even brown, the insides soft and steaming warm.
I cannot forget these evenings, with the sunlight withdrawing to make the shadows of the fences longer, the breadfruit trees with their broad leaves growing stolid in the dying light, and the wood under the mud oven hissing and crackling. And the smell of baking pervading the neighbourhood, causing the drunken to rise like the dead and the indolent to walk like the healed to beg a loaf.
There was always bread for me from Miss Willimena. She would give a loaf to my grandmother because of the friendship of many years of which I’m yet to arrive at as I continue to grow older. And she also gave to that lazy man next door, not because he was brazen to ask, but because his wife was a beautiful woman who worked twice as hard, and then some, in order to make ends meet.
As the evening grew quieter and the kerosene lamps were lit around me, I would sometimes make a quick trip to the shop down the road to get five cents worth of yellow and runny salted butter for the bread. The neighbour would have sent his wife on a similar errand, plus another, where she would have to go into the rumshop among drunks next door to buy him a petite quart of puncheon rum.
Years later I was surprised to see him as the owner of a bakery. His wife, older and even more worn and fatigued, was slaving in front the hot ovens. The memory of Miss Willimena’s bread drove me to patronise him. Until that day I saw him warming up stale bread and selling it as freshly baked, the smell of the new baking amply disguising his deceit.

Guyana >