I conclude this series with two istwa that some readers may consider controversial choices: the Cuban Revolution and Barack Obama’s election as president of the United States. Please do read my conclusion for the reasons I included these two historical events, especially my brief reflection on the “danger” of the extraordinary individual.
In Part 1, I explored how I define Black history and where I believe that history truly begins. Black history is often made to begin with Christopher Columbus and the European “discovery” of the Americas. I begin elsewhere: on the African coast, with the first known African man (and woman) taken by the Portuguese in 1441. Black history begins with an African man who resisted his capture, alone, against overwhelming force.
In Part 2, I examined four Black Atlantic freedom struggles: Palmares; the Haitian Revolution; the great British Caribbean rebellions of Bussa, Demerara, and Sam Sharpe; and the abolition of the Maafa in Brazil. Together, these istwa showed that Africans and their descendants fled, organized, fought, built independent communities, destroyed plantations, and helped make the system of captivity impossible to sustain.
In Part 3, I explored four further istwa of Black political consciousness: Pan-Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance, Garveyism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the Civil Rights Movement. Emancipation from captivity demanded more than legal freedom. It required the recovery of historical memory; a living connection to Africa; intellectual and artistic expression; racial dignity; political rights; economic strength; and institutions capable of enabling us to free ourselves from menticide.
The Cuban Revolution and Obama’s election bring these questions into the modern age. They ask us to think about revolution, internationalism, racial symbolism, individual achievement, and the difference between symbolic breakthroughs and lasting structural transformation. Neither story is uncomplicated. Yet both form part of the wider African istwa of rupture, resistance, movement, return, and the continuing struggle to shape our collective destiny.
The Cuban Revolution
“The Cuban Revolution was to the Caribbean of the twentieth century what the Haitian Revolution was to the nineteenth.” The revolution began on January 1, 1959, with Cuban President Fulgencio Batista’s hurried departure to the Dominican Republic and the entry of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary army. Castro came to power with considerable popular support, including within the United States. However, as he continued to consolidate his power, relations between Cuba and the United States quickly broke down.
Castro’s 1959 Agrarian Reform Law confiscated large landholdings and redistributed them. Between 1959 and 1961, Cuba nationalized several U.S.-owned businesses, including a telephone company, cattle ranches, hotels, and Coca-Cola. The United States would eventually break off diplomatic ties with Cuba in 1961, and on April 16, 1961, Castro declared the revolution socialist. The Communist Party became Cuba’s only official party. Just before midnight on April 16, 1961, the United States launched its most spectacular attack on the Cuban Revolution. This covert CIA operation had trained a force of Cuban exiles augmented by American advisers and pilots. They launched their attack at Playa Girón in the Bay of Pigs. Cuba’s well-organized local militia engaged the invaders almost immediately and contained them until regular troops arrived. Castro took personal control of the Cuban defense. Some invading ships were sunk, both by the tiny Cuban air force and by the treacherous coral rocks which the CIA maps had mistaken for seaweed. A few Americans fighting alongside the Cuban exiles were killed. Within seventy-two hours, the Cubans had won a historic victory. Some of the invading force were executed, including individuals wanted in Cuba for murder. Two years later, the Cubans exchanged a little under 1,200 prisoners for $53 million in food and medicine.
Pressured by Afro-Cuban activists, Castro’s government launched a state campaign to tackle racial discrimination, abolishing formal and de facto segregation in pools, beaches, and schools. Afro-Cubans, who were disproportionately poor before 1959, received many benefits from land reform, universal free education, the national literacy campaign, and free healthcare. For Castro, racism became one of the central battles of the revolution, and he moved toward creating a “raceless nation.” While there were real gains in life expectancy, education, and professional representation by the 1980s, many independent Black organizations were suppressed, and racial inequalities became institutionally invisible but remained unresolved.
Cuba’s Angola intervention (1975–1988) confirmed Cuba as a major player on the world political stage. Apartheid South Africa, with U.S. encouragement, had invaded Angola in October 1975 and was poised for a significant victory. On November 4, Castro decided to launch a full-scale military operation in support of the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola). Between 18,000 and 36,000 Cuban combat troops arrived within four months, reversing the military balance and securing the MPLA’s hold on the capital. The sustained Cuban presence in Angola eventually reached an estimated 50,000 troops between 1975 and 1989. The military mission was named in honor of Carlota Lucumí—often called La Negra Carlota—a captive Yoruba/Lucumí woman who led the 1843 Triunvirato plantation uprising in Matanzas, Cuba. The name intentionally connected Cuba’s intervention in Angola to the island’s own history of African captivity, resistance, and Black liberation.
Even before Operation Carlota, Cuba had embraced the spirit of revolutionary internationalism, carrying out something Toussaint Louverture had dreamed of. Cuba intervened militarily alongside Algeria’s National Liberation Front during its war against French colonial rule, and two years later sent troops and military equipment to help defend newly independent Algeria against Moroccan aggression in the Sand War. Beginning in 1966, Cuba aided the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau with doctors, military instructors, technicians, artillery specialists, and limited combat assistance in its war against Portuguese colonialism. The most legendary episode of Cuba’s revolutionary internationalism came in 1965, when Che Guevara led roughly 100 Black or mixed-race Cuban soldiers into eastern Congo to support Lumumbist Simba rebels. Cuba also intervened in Ethiopia, first supporting Eritrean liberation forces between 1967 and 1974; however, after the Ethiopian Revolution, Cuba backed the Derg government instead. Cuban troops were deployed in 1977 during the Ogaden War against Somalia, and in counteroffensives against Eritrean independence fighters.
Cuban forces in Angola eventually defeated the Afrikaners, preventing the establishment of a cordon sanitaire around South Africa. The crowning Cuban achievement in Angola was the 1987–1988 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, considered the largest military engagement on the continent since the North Africa campaigns of World War II. The defeated Afrikaners retreated and sued for peace.
Nelson Mandela was released from jail twenty months after the Afrikaner regime’s retreat from Cuito Cuanavale. He delivered the most widely cited assessment of Cuba’s role in Africa during his 1991 visit to Cuba, his first stop outside Africa after 27 years of imprisonment. He told Castro and the Cuban people that “the decisive defeat of the aggressive apartheid forces destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor,” and stated bluntly that “without the defeat of Cuito Cuanavale our organizations would not have been legalized. The defeat of the racist army in Cuito Cuanavale made it possible for me to be here with you today.” Mandela returned to Cuba in 1998 to reaffirm this debt, telling Castro that South Africans “enjoy the rights of democracy” partly “because of Cuba’s selfless support for the struggle to free all of South Africa’s people.”
Barack Obama’s Election as President
Barack Hussein Obama II’s election as the first African American president of the United States was momentous. Describing himself as “the unlikeliest” of candidates, Obama accomplished what many Black people believed was impossible. He was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham; they divorced in 1964. His father was African, a Kenyan of the Luo people, born on the shores of Lake Victoria, in a place called Alego. His grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, “had been a prominent farmer, an elder of his [people], and a medicine man with healing powers.” His mother remarried, and he lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, with her and his stepfather before resettling in Hawaii, where he lived with his grandparents and attended an elite college preparatory school.
In 1983, Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York City and then worked as a researcher. Two years later, he moved to Chicago and became a community organizer in several low-income neighborhoods. This grassroots experience profoundly shaped his political philosophy. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he became the first African American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review in 1990 and graduated magna cum laude in 1991. Returning to Chicago, he taught constitutional law, worked as a civil rights attorney, and married Michelle Robinson in 1992; the couple would have two daughters, Malia and Sasha. His 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, traced his search for identity through his father’s Kenyan roots.
Obama entered elected politics in 1996, winning a seat in the Illinois State Senate, before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004 as the nation’s fifth African American senator. On February 10, 2007, he formally announced his candidacy for president, launching what he called an improbable campaign. He became the first African American to win a major party’s presidential nomination, defeating Hillary Clinton in a hard-fought Democratic primary. Running alongside Delaware Senator Joe Biden, Obama faced Republican nominee John McCain and running mate Sarah Palin in the general election, campaigning on themes of hope, change, and unity amid the deepening 2008 financial crisis.
On November 4, 2008, Obama won decisively, capturing both the Electoral College and the popular vote by comfortable margins and flipping nine states that had voted Republican in 2004, including Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina. He was sworn in as the 44th president on January 20, 2009, and served two terms until January 2017. When he took office, Michelle Robinson Obama became the first Black First Lady of the United States.
Barack and Michelle Obama together enlarged the field of political possibility and carried profound emotional force for people whose ancestors had endured captivity, disfranchisement, and racism. Across the Black Atlantic, Barack Obama’s 2008 election was widely understood as a historic breach in that racial order, made possible by generations of African-American struggle for citizenship, voting rights, education, and political representation. At the same time, the moment encouraged what might be called a post-racial reading of the United States: the belief that Obama’s election proved the country had decisively moved beyond its racist past. Yet the idea that the election had dissolved structural racism was always more aspiration than reality. By 2016, the limits of the post-racial narrative had become far harder to ignore. The highly publicized killings of African Americans that catalyzed the Black Lives Matter movement brought questions of racialized state violence back to the center of U.S. public life.
In Africa, many welcomed Obama’s presidency as a source of continental pride and as evidence of an enduring African connection within the African diaspora. It also encouraged expectations that the United States might move toward a more equitable partnership with African countries—one grounded less in paternalistic aid, security priorities, and external intervention, and more in trade, investment, democratic cooperation, and African-led development. Yet African expectations often exceeded what any single U.S. president could deliver.
Nevertheless, Obama’s presidency connected the African American freedom struggle, the Black diaspora, and Africa’s postcolonial ambitions in a uniquely powerful moment in modern Black history. It may be more precise to say that Obama’s election was symbolically transformative. As the first African American elected president of the United States, Obama’s victory held meaning far beyond America’s borders. For many, his victory was both a personal achievement and a collective symbolic victory.
Conclusion
He fought, even when he was outnumbered. Ten against one. He still fought.
This is what has stayed with me: the beginning of Black history is not only a story of rupture, but also one of defense.
As I reflected on the ten major istwa that have shaped my understanding of Black history, I did not consciously intend to chart a chronology of Black resistance. Yet the first four istwa—from Palmares to Haiti, from Bussa, Demerara, and Sam Sharpe to the final abolition of the Maafa in Brazil—center on the struggle for physical freedom. Africans and their descendants took flight, defended themselves, organized, fought armies, destroyed plantations, created independent communities, and ultimately made their continued captivity increasingly unsustainable. Freedom was not granted by so-called enlightened governments or benevolent abolitionists. Time and again, they became the protagonists in dismantling the systems designed to imprison them.
I am reminded of Assata Shakur’s open letter: “My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th-century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism, and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color. I am an ex-political prisoner, and I have been living in exile in Cuba since 1984.”
Shakur was running for her life, just as the 40 people who started Palmares were running for theirs.
Shakur continued: “All I have is my voice, my spirit, and the will to tell the truth.”
Many of those who fought to emancipate themselves had only their voice, their spirit, and their will. They said: “tek force wid force.” One of the organizers of Bussa’s War was Nancy Grigg, who told her fellow fighters to stand up for their freedom, “otherwise they would not get it”; the only way to do so was “to set fire, as that was the way they did it in [Haiti].” Words such as these would have made Marcus Garvey proud. Here was a woman who had emancipated herself from mental slavery.
Many powerful moments of the Maafa stand out to me. However, historical memory is selective. We remember what resonates most with our experiences and identities. For me, the pie of memory is not cut into equal slices; some events are given greater weight in our collective consciousness than others. The official end of the Maafa in the Americas began with Haiti in 1804 and concluded with Brazil in 1888. These two years deserve significant recognition in our memory.
In my favorite photography book, Feeling the Spirit, Chester Higgins describes his visit to Cachoeira and the temple of the Sisterhood of the Good Death (Boa Morte)—the death of the Maafa. Every August, the sisterhood draws national attention with a three-day vigil honoring African freedom in Brazil. I remember being struck by the idea that the Maafa’s end was called a “good death.” How terrible a thing it was!
In Brazil, many societies connected both the unfree and the freed. When Higgins visited the Society for the Protection of the Destitute in Bahia—a brotherhood founded during the Maafa—he was shown a trunk with two locks, used to collect contributions before emancipation. Each year, the trunk was unlocked, the money counted, and the funds used to purchase the freedom of someone still in captivity.
However, emancipation raised a deeper question: what does a people do with freedom after centuries of displacement, racialization, and attempted cultural destruction? This is where Pan-Africanism, Garveyism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights movement stepped onto the stage of history.
Pan-Africanism reminded us, “No matter how long a log stays in the water, it does not become a crocodile.” African history was ruptured, carried across waters to distant shores, but it endured. Marcus Garvey transformed Pan-African consciousness into something truly global. He inspired millions, showing them that real freedom meant more than political liberation. It required economic strength, community institutions, racial pride, and, most importantly, a strong connection to Africa. The Civil Rights and Black Power movements didn’t just push back against America’s racial order; they sent waves of new ideas, powerful symbols, and bold activists rippling across the Atlantic, touching lives everywhere.
And Harlem? The Harlem Renaissance revealed centuries of suppressed creativity. Our ancestors’ intellect, artistry, and vibrancy were stifled in the fields, mines, and “big” houses. It was indeed a spiritual awakening. In Ben Okri’s words, it is “one of the wonders of the earth.” For me, Harlem represented the spectacular flowering of something always present. The Renaissance did not suddenly create Black creativity; it simply unveiled what centuries of oppression had tried to contain.
The inclusion of the Cuban Revolution among these ten istwa may be one of the more controversial choices. Cuba is not a Black state, and its revolution did not eradicate racism from Cuban society. In fact, the government at times suppressed independent Black political organizations. Yet Cuba’s involvement with Africa is simply impossible to ignore. On a personal note, I recall the impact Cuba had on Jamaica—particularly during Michael Manley’s government—and what that meant for me as a child. I am also influenced by the fact that my grandfather was a fisherman from Cuba, and that Santería/Lukumí, a spiritual tradition with deep African roots, comes from there.
Still, the story of the Cuban Revolution is a breathtaking istwa. Think about it: centuries after Africans were forced onto ships and carried westward across the Atlantic in chains, thousands of their descendants crossed those same waters in the other direction, not as captives, but as allies, standing shoulder to shoulder with Africans fighting against colonialism and oppression. Operation Carlota brought this full circle. People once “lost beyond the waters” found their way back, and in that return, something deep and powerful was healed—even if just for a moment. Events like these belong in novels, yet they are found in the pages of history.
And then, of course, there’s Barack Obama.
I get it—his election feels a bit out of place. No revolution here, right?
But let’s rewind to 1441.
Picture this: on the western coast of Africa, there’s an African man whose name we’ll never know. He is described as a “Moor.” Something about his complexion set him apart from the darker-complexioned Africans around him. We don’t know his nation, his family, what he called himself, or what happened to him after his capture. The chroniclers leave us with a sense of erasure, as if these details didn’t matter. But they did record one thing: he resisted. Armed with his assegais, alone against a gang of ten men, he fought until he was wounded by a javelin and finally overpowered.
Fast forward more than five and a half centuries, and another man of African descent is elected president of a country that had wounded his people for generations. By the time of his presidency, the javelin that repeatedly pierces African nations, African leadership, African peoples, African institutions. Barack Hussein Obama’s complexion is not richly melanated. Perhaps he had a similar complexion to the man captured in 1441. Perhaps not. We will never know. But we do know that Obama rose to become president, bearing an African name, which carries Arabic/Swahili and Luo-Kenyan elements: Barack is commonly understood as a form of the Arabic baraka, meaning “blessing” or “blessed.” Hussein is an Arabic masculine name, traditionally understood as a diminutive of Hasan, conveying meanings such as “good,” “handsome,” or “beautiful.” Obama, a surname associated with the Luo people of Kenya, is often connected to a Luo root suggesting “to lean” or “to bend.”
Here we have a powerful historical arc, from an unknown African man to a man born of the diaspora, with a name that visibly carried the African world into an office long imagined through a narrowly European, Anglo-Protestant national symbolism.
To me, Obama symbolizes Black history. His life embodied the “tidalectic” character of diasporic history: rooted in Africa, carried across oceans, reshaped by displacement and encounter, and continually returning—emotionally, politically, and imaginatively—to the continent. Black identity is formed through movement, encounter, separation, memory, and reconnection. Africa remains foundational, but not static. It is a source continually reinterpreted through diasporic experience.
I included Obama’s presidency because it offers powerful lessons. His election was an extraordinary precedent. Here was a Black man with an African father and a name that did not conform to the traditional symbolic grammar of the American presidency. While precedent demonstrates possibility, it also shows the danger of the extraordinary individual. When a structurally disadvantaged population must repeatedly produce extraordinary individuals simply to penetrate existing institutions, those individuals can become evidence of possibility without being evidence of structural transformation.
The enduring question, then, is not whether Black people can produce extraordinary leaders—we have done so repeatedly—but whether we can build the political, economic, educational, and cultural institutions that sustain and reproduce collective power across generations. Put another way: we have been producing exceptional leaders over the years without the institutional structures to create transformation across generations. Marcus Garvey attempted. Pan-Africanism deemed it necessary. Yet as a people we are nowhere near any kind of power that replicates itself across generations. Almost every generation has to start again. Learn Black history again. Create another movement against racism again.
This takes me into a deeper discussion. So I will pause here.
Sometimes I imagine that unknown man’s proud spirit running through the forests of Palmares, charging through the burning cane fields of Haiti, his eyes glowing with the fires of Barbados, Demerara, and Jamaica. I picture him witnessing in Brazil the ending of the nightmare that began with him in 1441. He listens in on the Pan-African congresses, Garveyism, and the Civil Rights movement. He writes his long song during the Harlem Renaissance. I see him side by side with Black soldiers in Angola, and for just a heartbeat, he sees the Black Atlantic world through the eyes of a president.
This is why I push back against the idea that Black history is just a missing chapter in American history, or simply the story of a people who arrived in the Americas and became something entirely new. Yes, Black History Month emerged through African-American organizational struggle, and Black educators in the United States built an infrastructure that changed the world. However, that success should not make the U.S. experience the default frame through which the diaspora is often read. The current historical map features the thirteen colonies, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration as universal reference points, while Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, Spanish America, and other places of the Caribbean are too often treated as peripheral rather than constitutive sites of the Black Atlantic. The Caribbean is the site of the major Black revolutions against oppression during the Maafa. South America has a long and powerful history of resistance. These istwa must be given their big slice of the pie in our collective memory.
Africa was carried across the waters. Black history is a living branch of a much older and ongoing African istwa, born from rupture and dispersal, transformed by resistance and creativity, and carried back and forth across the waters like a mighty log that refuses to sink.
That man in 1441 couldn’t have known that Black history was starting with him, right there on the shore, when strangers appeared out of the agitated waters. He never could’ve imagined that year after year, those strangers would keep coming back to take millions of men like him away from their homeland. He couldn’t see what was coming. But we can look back and see the beginning.
For me, that’s the thread tying these ten istwa together.
May we spit in the mouths of the newborn babies so that they will remember.
Ancestral Blessings,
Meserette Kentake
The following books from my personal library were indispensable to the research, reflection, and writing of this series. Together, they supplied historical evidence—from the earliest Portuguese incursions on the West African coast, through the Maafa and Caribbean resistance, to Pan-Africanism, Black cultural life, and the modern freedom struggle. Read alongside one another, they helped me trace Black history as a connected, contested, and enduring African istwa.
Books consulted
Adi, Hakim. Pan-Africanism: A History.
Carruthers, Jacob H. The Irritated Genie: An Essay on the Haitian Revolution.
Clarke, John Henrik. Who Betrayed the African World Revolution and Other Speeches.
Craton, Michael. Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies.
Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.
Dennis, Denise. Black History for Beginners.
Eltis, David, and David Richardson. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
Ford, Clyde W. The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa.
Higgins Jr., Chester. Feeling The Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa.
Klein, Herbert S., and Francisco Vidal Luna. Slavery in Brazil.
Martin, Tony. Caribbean History: From Precolonial Origins to the Present.
Obama, Barack. Dreams From My Father.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present.
Walker, Robin. When We Ruled, 2nd ed.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States.
Zurara, Gomes Eanes de. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. (I read this book at the British Library years ago. For the series, I read it again online at https://archive.org/details/chronicleofdisco01zura). This book is especially significant—and troubling—as an early Portuguese chronicle of voyages and raids along the West African coast, documenting the ideological world in which the Maafa began to take shape.