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. The writer Wole Soyinka called them the ?Renaissance Generation.? There?s a quality of character they wear, whose origins I have come to understand. They carry, alongside a worldly ease, a sense of duty, of obligation and responsibility, that imbues all they say and do. I try to imagine an Africa if they had never been, and I cannot.