Aminatta Forna
Obama and Africa’s Renaissance Generation
It came to be a core belief held by the American public and media that Barack Obama was a self-creation who had stepped out of nowhere. But for me, Obama’s story is remarkably familiar and concrete. Our fathers both belonged to the postwar wave of Africans educated in the West who saw themselves as the architects of decolonization. Wole Soyinka called them the “Renaissance Generation.”
November 10, 2018