The mind is a terrible thing to waste. I remember those notices on billboards on major streets in the Watts and South Central areas of Los Angeles on my way to college in the early 1970s, as a student from Ghana. On one of those billboards I remember a most touching picture of the great civil rights leader, the late Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, with a little child nestling in his arms to stress the point that the mind is a terrible thing to waste. But such positive notices were few and scattered.

They were mostly drowned among many competing billboards that sported, in larger and more colourful and expensive formats, the virtues or “hipness” in drinking trendy sorts of booze, smoking particular brands of cigarette, or driving flashy cars for social acceptance. It was not difficult to see which ads caught the vanity of the impressionable youngsters on those streets.


One recent Easter day, at the La beach in Accra, cigarettes were being doled around, free of charge by one manufacturing firm, to the unsuspecting youth to engage in the habit, and be hooked on nicotine.


Wherever you look, education is key, so when opinion leaders and conscious personalities as Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey or Tyler Perry donate resources to advance important causes as education, be it in the U.S. or elsewhere, the rippling effect is affirmative in that they boost morale at many levels, both locally and internationally.


Such uses of good money contrasted sharply with resources wasted on drugs, expensive toys, the “bling, bling” medallions of assorted sizes dangling, decorating, and bedecking the necks, ears, noses and hands that characterize the mindset of many who have made new money in show business. The consciousness is all. It was impressive (in the movie “Madea’s Family Reunion”) listening to the literary laureate Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson making those very points to the younger generation: Seize the moment; it’s your day; make good use of it; it’s not about your “booty”!


It was impressive reading that the Obama administration had approved an increase in Federal Pell Grants to cover up to $5,500 for each year of college education for the American youth. The grants are supposed to allow up to 7 million people to return to school for a college degree. Equally inspiring is the financial encouragement for mothers to pursue courses to complete their college education. If a nation’s future does not lie in good education, where else could it possibly lie? “It is evident that we can be improved and elevated, only just so fast and far as we shall improve and elevate ourselves,” said the great abolitionist, Frederick Douglass.


In a July 2nd 2009 interview by AllAfrica, before his historic to Ghana, Obama indicated the keenness to spotlight Ghana as a successful model, and an effective partner. But the key to “democratic commitments that ensure stability [and] a direct correlation between governance and prosperity” depend on whether people “educate their children”. We cannot see “progress in democracy and transparency and rule of law, in the protection of property right, in anti-corruption efforts” without mass education of the citizens.


He said, “I’m a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa [and] for many years we’ve made excuses about corruption or poor governance; that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism ... I’m not a believer in excuses ... I can give you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that were uneven emerging out of colonialism ... the fact is we’re in 2009 [and] the United States has not been responsible for what’s happened to Zimbabwe’s economy over the past 15 or 20 years. It hasn’t been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we’ve seen elsewhere in Africa.”


Tough love for tough times. These are some of the key messages to expect on this visit to Africa: that redemption comes from within, and not without; and the means to support visionary components of development are not complicated new wheels; there are “models out there” already.


Both Barack and Michelle Obama come from an American culture where historically the black man or woman has to be twice as educated, and work twice as hard to compete and succeed in a white world. Additionally, Obama’s own father whom he loved dearly left him and died too soon. When he noted in his autobiography that, “Respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was,” he meant it to the bone. He is the nerve center of that very predicament.


That “Respect” thing is possibly also a hint to those who expect to feed on daddy’s silver spoons. President George Herbert Bush senior, for example, aided Bush junior, for the U.S. presidency; but now in office success eluded the son. Dan Quayle is another protégé who found it hard to hang in. History is packed full with “big daddies” and abysmal results.


It is revealing that Obama chose Abraham Lincoln as a mentor: Talk about tough love, and rising up from your own bootstraps! It was no accident that on his inauguration as 44th U.S. president – January 20, 2009 - Obama swore on the same bible “Honest Abe” himself used – March 4, 1861 - as the 16th president of the U.S., declaring the Union perpetual. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” of 1863, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is key to understanding this unique African-American president. Obama re-affirmed Lincoln’s beliefs, ideals, and identity for himself.


In their endorsement of Obama in 2008, the Rolling Stone magazine (New York) wrote: “There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline. It’s not just that he is eloquent – with that ability to speak both to you and speak for you – it’s that he has a quality of thinking and intellectual and emotional honesty that is extraordinary.” The Rolling Stone could just as well be describing Abraham Lincoln.


Another Obama mentor is America’s resilient 32nd president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Though crippled by polio, “Paralyzed legs locked in heavy braces”, F.D.R led his country into an unprecedented 4th term as president in 1944.


[ “F.D.R.: An intimate history”, by Nathan Miller, is a riveting 563 page biography about the life and struggle of an unusual leader, who made a difference despite the great depression, a challenge similar to one facing Barack Obama today. It is highly recommended for Africa’s leaders, and the youth everywhere aspiring for leadership.]


Once he noticed that people had begun to listen to his opinions, it made him “hungry for words. Not words to hide behind but words that could carry a message, support an idea.” Authors whom he cited, in this search for literary excellence, included Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Franz Fanon, Leon Trotsky, and of course, Mahatma Gandhi.


His other mentors included Dr Martin Luther King, Harry Belafonte (the best-looking man on the planet), Thurgood Marshall, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Fannie Lou Hamer, Marcus Garvey, Jesse Jackson, Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael), Joe Louis, Louis Farrakhan, Booker T. Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Nat Turner, and Magic Johnson.


The Africans included Nelson Mandela, Patrice Lumumba, Gamel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta (the Burning Spear), Tom Mboya, and Odinga Odinga.


The Artists category included Jimi Hendrix, Nat King Cole, Mahalia Jackson, Dave Brubeck, Marvin Gaye, Richard Pryor, Stevie Wonder, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and others.


To say good education is too important to this new first family is an understatement. Education has been the cornerstone of each successive achievement of theirs, all the way to the top. They are the very embodiment of how education can lift a life with meaning, and grace it with self-actualization. In our Africa, it is sad to see children learning in roofless schools, and under the shades of tree. Where many leaders themselves stop learning, and glue themselves to petty, grandiose projects and exuberant lifestyles - what chance will the newer generation ever have?


Of course, Obama’s speech to Africa is going to be very positive. He loves Africa with his heart; but in supporting his heart with his head, he may shock Africa’s leaders out of their complacency. Hear him gain, from the July interview: “I think that when my father left Kenya and traveled to the United States back in the early ‘60s, the GDP of Kenya and South Korea weren’t equivalent – Kenya’s was actually higher. What’s happened over the 50-year period?” South Korea put “great emphasis on education for a skilled work”.


Under circumstances popularized by many western media as Africa’s “hopelessness”, it is appropriate to take the larger historical view, to appreciate the lives, times, the works of the early pioneers who saw Africa’s positive future in, through and beyond education with prophetic acumen, and accordingly championed the cause for Africa in general: J. Africanus Horton, Edward W. Blyden, J.E. Casely-Hayford, John Mensah Sarbah, Kwegyir Aggrey, J.B. Danquah, Kwame Nkrumah, George Padmore, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Francis L. Bartels, and others: Can we ever thank these bold souls enough for the enlightenment?


Like Obama response to his legacy question, on his stamp on Africa, we all hope to see “that a young person growing up in Johannesburg or Lagos or Nairobi or Djibouti can say to themselves: I can stay here in Africa, I can stay in my country and succeed, and through my success, my country and my people will get stronger.” We need the United States as a critical partner in that process. Akwaaba.


Anis Haffar is the Founder / Instructor of Gate Institute, consulting in Teacher Education for English Language Skills, and Methodologies for Leadership Centred Teaching. Email: gateinstitute@yahoo.com. Website: www.gateinstitute.org.