Walter ‘OMOWALE’ Carrington: African-American who found his destiny in Nigeria and the world left behind

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By Chris Otaigbe

One of the dreams of African-Americans is to trace their ancestry to Africa and many discovered it in a remote, symbolic sense. But Walter ‘Omowale’ Carrington, came to Africa, also, in search of his African identity, hoping to find it in his official assignments to the continent of his ancestors and ended up meeting his destiny in Nigeria. His death on August 11, 2020, less than two months after his friend and co-Rights Activist, John Lewis, passed on, signalled the depletion of heroes who laid the foundation for the emancipation of Black America from institutionalized racism. Unlike Martin Luther King Jnr., Carrington and Lewis lived to reap the fruits of that great effort and unlike Lewis, he lived to enjoy both worlds.

And so, while he lived to see an America that manifested the impact of the war he fought against racism, he died hoping Nigeria and indeed Africa, (through the leadership of Nigeria) would be truly independent and exhibit the visionary strength of great nations.

Wherever the narrative of Nigeria’s return to civilian rule is told, Carrington’s fight to see the world’s biggest Black nation embrace full democracy will always be appreciated and celebrated in the history books and in the minds of generations to come.

Specifically, his stance against late Abacha’s regime human rights violations and anti-democratic tendencies showed him off as a son of the soil, who had returned to challenge the status quo. Although his tenure ended in 1997, Carrington showed interest in the affairs of Nigeria till his last days on earth.

Mounting vigorous campaigns for a return to democracy in Nigeria, Carrington criticized Abacha’s regime so much that he rallied the diplomatic corps against the regime’s abuse of human rights and brutalization of Nigerians, especially critics and pro-democracy activists.

He went beyond diplomatic responsibilities in engaging the Abacha regime, the struggle for military disengagement and enthronement of democratic government.
After years of military rule, agitations and advocacy of great men such as Carrington paid off as Nigeria finally resumed democratic governance in 1999.

His commitment to seeing generations of Black Americans live in a peacefully and prosperously desegregated United States (US), could be said to be virtue of his birth, while his commitment to seeing Nigeria return to democracy was further consolidated by marriage.

In other words, he fought, in his country of birth, for a desegregated America so his children and their children would live in this time when it would no longer be a crime to attend/share the same housing, enter same buses with Whites in the country. While, he agitated in Nigeria, to ensure Temisan Oyowe and Thomas, his Nigerian children, and their generations to come, grow up in an economically liberated and democratically governed Nigeria.

His marriage to Arese, who is an Edo indigene and a Medical Doctor, was the event that gave a nuptial seal to his return to the land of his ancestors, which prompted former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, to once rename Carrington as Omowale (a Yoruba name meaning ‘the child who has returned’).

Great-great-grand daughter of Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi and Public health consultant, Dr. Arese Ukpoma Carrington, was born on July 16, 1958, in Lagos, Nigeria to Dora and Elisha Ukponmwan.
Carrington’s marriage to the third-generation daughter of a ruler of Benin Kingdom from 1888 to 1897, speaks to the depth of his quest to reach and relate with his ancestral roots.

He once wrote, “the land of my fathers has intrigued me ever since, as a boy, I pondered the poet Countee Cullen’s question, ‘What is Africa to me?’”

As if his question was directed at the metaphysical realm, divine providence responded through the love he found in Arese after two divorces back in America.

Born on July 24, 1930, in New York City to an immigrant father from Barbados and brought up in a predominately Italian-Irish community, Carrington was vice president of his class throughout his four years at the predominantly white Parlin Junior High and Everett High School.

One of four black students at Harvard University, who founded the first Harvard chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), after his graduation in 1948, Carrington was the first student elected to the National Board of Directors.

At age 27, he had become the youngest person to be appointed a commissioner in the state’s history while he served on the three-member Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, where he practised law.

While there, he was in charge of the case, which led to the Boston Red Sox, the remaining all-white Major League Baseball Team, hiring its first black player.

Carrington’s opportunity to visit Africa came in 1952 when he was elected NAACP’s Youth Council delegate to Senegal. Nine years later, in 1962, that opportunity would be enlarged with his visit to Africa as one of the first overseas Directors of Peace Corps, one year after he organized for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Carrington’s Benin connection must have been when he eventually became Peace Corps’ director for Africa through his responsibility to evacuate young Americans as Biafran troops advanced towards Benin City in 1961.

From 1971 to 1979, he served as Executive Vice President of African-American Institute and was also a member of Africare, while a year later in 1980, Carrington would serve President Jimmy Carter as Ambassador to Senegal. In 1981, he was named Director of Department of International Affairs at Howard University.

Acting as a consultant at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Carrington also taught at Marquette University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Washington College from 1990 to 1991.

Arriving Lagos a few months after the annulment of the June 12 election, his heroic effort during the Biafra war must have inspired President Bill Clinton to appoint him US Ambassador to Nigeria in 1993. From that date of his arrival in Nigeria, his opposition to the abuses of Nigerian Head of State, General Sani Abacha never ceased.

As Prof. Wole Soyinka said, Nigeria owes Carrington for all the African-American (and now, Nigerian by marriage) did to see the country return to democratic rule.

And so, a grateful Nigeria showed him, love, as many of those who found cover under his protective wings as Ambassador of the most powerful country in the world, the only force that could caution Abacha’s relentless onslaught against the enemy of his government.

President, Women Arise & Centre for Change, Dr. Joe Okei-Odumakin, said there are so many things Nigerians would forever remember Carrington for.

“The first was his skin: He was black as black could be, being a Black American or African-American, as Jesse Jackson, another notable American of African descent, taught us to call it. Carrington was perhaps the first black skin to be America’s ambassador in Africa’s most populous Black country. He was an ambassador, who did not act ambassadorial but mixed with the hoi polloi. He had no airs, but moved in both low and high circles, taking in the whole essence of the Nigerian society.” She said.

Between the struggle to end military dictatorship and return the country to democratic governance, Odumakin said Carrington arrived in Nigeria at the most critical period of its country’s political history.

“He minced no words in speaking out for civil liberties. He left no one in doubt that he was making his stand with the people. In this, he stepped on powerful toes; he drew the ire of military goons and was at the receiving end of their viciousness. We will not forget how soldiers, armed to the teeth, stormed the venue in Lagos where National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) and Campaign for Democracy (CD) had gathered to hold a send-forth party for him,” she said.

Now, many now understand the secret behind the underground media movement and the escape of certain pro-democracy/anti-Abacha personalities, who fought against the Sani Abacha regime. They obviously had a pillar of support from the US embassy because of the Ambassador, who, incidentally, was Carrington.

In his eulogy of Carrington, national leader of All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, recounted the envoy’s contributions to the growth of democracy in the country. Expressing gratitude to God for giving Nigeria Walter Carrington during the Abacha period, the former Lagos State Governor said Carrington came to Nigeria on a diplomatic assignment, but his true mission was even more sublime.

“Carrington openly and unconditionally championed the advent of democratic freedom and constitutional governance in the country. Walter was both an African and an American. This identity he knew full well, for it shaped who he was and guided what he did. The best of both worlds was evident in him. This man may have been the citizen of one country but he was surely the brave and passionate son of two nations. Last month, I penned a tribute to Ambassador Carrington as Nigeria joined him in celebrating his 90th birthday. Little did any of us know that we would so soon have to say farewell to this outstanding example of courage amidst humility, of intellect teamed with compassion,” said Tinubu.

Recalling how the country found herself in the clutches of an epic battle between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and oppression, between enlightened progress and authoritarian reaction, Tinubu said Carrington could have maintained a diplomatic distance.

“He could have acted cosily with the Abacha regime. His life would have been less difficult and safer. But he eschewed personal comfort for the higher price of a greater mission. He lent himself to the fight against the repressive government. He openly and unconditionally championed the advent of democratic freedom and constitutional governance,” he said.

He noted that without the courage and contributions of Carrington, perhaps democracy might not have come when and as it did.

“Certainly, more of our democracy activists would have suffered and perhaps lost their lives but for his extraordinary intervention.” He concluded.

Carrington had also been a senior adviser on the transition team when Clinton was elected president and had taught at schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Simmons University, Marquette University, and Howard University, where he directed the international affairs department.
In matters concerning June 12 and anti-Abacha pro-democracy agitations, Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, should know the Carrington role better.

“Even after he returned to the United States from Nigeria, Walter has remained both comrade and friend, Mr. Carrington was of that breed that provokes the time-honoured, nostalgic sentiment, a cliché that is, however, grounded in unvarnished truth: “They don’t make them like that anymore.” Soyinka wrote in an e-mailed tribute.

Though his work on behalf of civil rights and human rights was global, Mr. Carrington’s beliefs were forged in an Everett childhood and at Harvard University, where he was one of four Black students in his class. In those years, he became friends with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; as an undergraduate, he once debated Malcolm X.

Clearly, Carrington’s human rights activism and his passion to see a world free of bigotry had been in his veins all along, even when he met individuals, such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X whose legends rings through the ages, he had carved his niche and captured pro-democracy consciousness of the world’s largest black nation.

At a meeting with the two, somewhere in some street in Heaven, he will be flaunting his Nigerian credentials before Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, that he got to see the Africa they never saw or met in he did.

He went to Africa, saw and conquered, applying the resistance concept the two applied to achieve human rights victory away from the US, in Africa of all places.

Amid such accomplishments, assistant secretary, Bureau of African Affairs for the US State Department, Tibor P. Nagy Jr., said Mr. Carrington was one of the most distinguished, yet genuinely humble, persons he had ever known.

“I’ve never known anyone to represent America — most especially the America which should be — better than Walter,” assistant secretary, Bureau of African Affairs for the US State Department, Tibor P. Nagy Jr., wrote in an e-mail.

Long before Mr. Carrington was a diplomat who risked his safety advocating for human rights, he had confronted difficult odds in his own life.

“When Walter attended Harvard College, gaining admission for a Black person was something of a statistical miracle, signifying — in a word — brilliance. And the commitment to leadership within the Black community, a commitment that Walter filled with grace, elegance, and aplomb.” A Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., who, like Soyinka, was a long-time friend of Mr. Carrington, noted.

Chancellor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts Boston, J. Keith Motley, called Mr. Carrington “a scholar-activist, humanitarian, and world-class human being,” someone whom Motley often invited to speak at the university about Africa and other subjects.

“With a twinkle in his eye, he would gently ease into the conversations as if it was a fireside chat, talking politics, human rights, culture, and issues that slowly emerged into a master class that could go on for hours beyond the appointed time because of his uncanny ability to connect with the audience through storytelling,” Motley recalled.

In the final analysis, Carrington lived a life that can be said to be fulfilled for his ability to entrench, successfully, his passion for the freedom of the underdog from an oppressor.

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