Countee Cullen, a black American poet, once asked: What is Africa to me?
With the US elections just days away, and Africans holding their breath, fingers mostly crossed for Senator Barack Obama, I find I have to reverse the question and ask: What is America to me?
Why should the outcome of the US presidential elections matter to Africa?
What my heart feels and what my mind knows are at loggerheads. My heart, nationalistic and black, beats with the ups and downs of the Obama campaign. But my mind, at times cynical but always searching for the bottom line of things, knows an Empire is not run on good will, that there are no gentle giants and that history is not erased overnight.